| The research for this doctoral thesis took place in Nouna's health district, Burkina Faso and pertains to the population's capabilities to acquire sanitary proficiency to counter malaria. To be more specific, the research focuses primarily on the mother as she is known to be the primary care giver. To further understand the means by which one acquires knowledge and proficiency, we took into account each one of the four environments where this information was transferred; the medical, the educational, the traditherapeutic and the family environments.;The objective of our analysis was to describe the various components of the system that would transfer the proficiency of sanitary measures in the studied community. The combined use of medical anthropology and educational ethnology allowed us to further analyse the question concerning the capabilities to acquire sanitary knowledge and proficiency to counter malaria, and their articulations.;Based on the ethnographic survey results realised in four environments, our analysis was mainly centered on people's interactions with their surrounding environment and on the portrayal of mothers and community health knowledge and capabilities. Each environment allowed us to observe, through diverse lenses, this acquisition of knowledge progressing from the more biomedical environments to the more traditional environments. This acquisition has been analysed through a socio-constructivist frame using three analysis axis: the empiric-rationalist axis, the knowledge-competence axis and the socio-cultural axis.;Key words: medical anthropology, educational ethnology, Burkina Faso, socio-constructivism.;The traditional and biomedical paradigms in which are included sumaya and malaria separate those four educational environments in two main groups based on a dichotomy of capabilities to acquire sanitary knowledge and proficiency to counter malaria. Furthermore, the socia-cultural context which prescribes possibilities but most importantly the limits of the community's men and women, following the model of the paradigms, needs to be considered as a primary importance in the fight against malaria. |
