Cult Med Psychiatry. 1991 Mar; 15(1): 69-90.

Marketplace conversations in Cameroon: how and why popular medical knowledge comes into being.

Van der Geest S.

Anthropological-Sociological Centre, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

The author argues that buyers and sellers of Western pharmaceuticals at a local marketplace in Cameroon construct their ideas about illness and medicines in reaction to two kinds of situations in which they find themselves. The market situation induces people to adjust their medical beliefs to the economic transaction. Sellers are likely to inflate the efficacy of medicines and customers adjust their medical concepts to fit their limited financial means. In that way they rationalise their inability to buy all the drugs they would have liked to buy. The interview situation leads informants to produce rather specific and assured answers on topics about which they may know very little. Reasons include the inequality between interviewer and informant and the latter's wish to avoid making an ignorant impression on the interviewer. Three conversations held during fieldwork in 1983 are discussed.