ABSTRACT
The research project investigates the production of spatial stories in West African popular culture using the example of West African soaps. Building their narrations along the dichotomy between modernities and traditions, the soaps are staging everyday spaces of families and thematizing current social and political issues, sometimes controversial ones like the choice over health care. This paper analyzes how spaces of health care are orchestrated in three soap-operas, each produced in a different production context. The sociological film analysis shows conflictual spatialities of healthcare: (a) a hierarchical spatial juxtaposition of traditional African and Western medicine performing the idea of secularized medical pluralism; (b) a spatial segmentation between rural traditional African healing and urban Western medicine performing the idea of conservative medical syncretism; (c) a spatial uprooting of traditional African healing transposed into the megacity coexisting with Western medicine performing the idea of a refigured medical syncretism in the course of urbanization and family change. These fictional multiple spatialities reveal the virulence of moral conflicts staged in the soap-operas regarding the tensions between Western modernity, African modernities, and the re-invention of African traditions within the Senegalese society.
