Marie Nathalie LeBlanc

Culture Brokers, Clinically Applied Ethnography, and Cultural Mediation

This chapter looks at the practice of cultural mediation and the role of culture broker in medical settings with a focus on the cultural consultation service (CCS) of the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal and ethnopsychiatric consultation clinics in France and Italy. We first provide an overview of the concept of culture broker and culture in anthropology and its introduction into the medical settings of underserved communities, especially Aboriginals and immigrants. We then explore the most recent cultural mediation models emerging in the last 20 years in Europe, focusing on a few examples of implementation and policies. The culture broker is a go-between who sensitizes clinical practitioners to patients’ belief systems and encourages patients to “trust” the institutional system. Definitions of culture brokers, their professional recognition, and the roles they play in mediation vary cross-nationally and depend on different ideologies of citizenship and power relations. In practice, culture brokers are usually situated between two approaches: one, aimed at assimilating the immigrant’s point of view to the healthcare system and larger society, and the other, a more inclusive two-way exchange that offers space for each participant to understand the other’s point of view through providing opportunities for negotiation and empowerment strategies. We illustrate the complex and challenging role of culture broker at the CCS service through significant vignettes. They aim to show how culture brokering practices are context-based, depending on the embodied ability to recognize, tolerate, and mediate between diverging regimes of interpretation.

Piety, Moral Agency, and Leadership: Dynamics Around the Feminization of Islamic Authority in Côte d'Ivoire

The existing literature has pointed out some of the ways in which Muslim women claim legitimacy and, in some cases, even authority within their communities, ranging from militancy within Islamic organizations to the mastery of religious knowledge. While militancy is at the core of the contemporary feminization of Islam in a number of sub-Saharan African societies, in some places authority over religious knowledge is also in a process of being feminized. This article examines how, in the context of Islamic revivalism in Côte d’Ivoire, the feminization of Islam has evolved in the settings of voluntary associations. In particular, this article addresses the articulation between Islamic concepts of womanhood, including practices of veiling and ideological formations around them, and the construction of alternative modes of sociability in the context of the transformation of local religious organizations. In the 1990s, women’s roles in the Ivorian Islamic revivalism were marked by instances of intensified activism, while the 2002 military conflict has encouraged the emergence of women-led NGOs. For some women, these NGOs have come to be the site of assertion of new forms of religious authority. Based on ethnographic data collected between 1992 to 2011 in the cities of Bouaké and Abidjan, the analysis focuses on the material and historical conditions of women’s religious mobilization and authority.