Ce congrès international est co-organisé par l’European Association of Social Anthropologists’ Medical Anthropology Network et l’American Association of Anthropologists’ Society for Medical Anthropology.

• Programme complet du Congrès.

Samuel Lézé et Emilia Sanabria sont tou-te-s les deux maîtres de conférences en anthropologie sociale à l’ENS de Lyon.

Résumés des interventions

• Samuel Lézé : Physical contention as psychical contenance : mental health treatment of difficults and violents adolescents in France
  "Physical contention is therapeutic". Most interventions for the management of violence and the prevention of dangerousness in the French field of mental health are based on these devices, from the psychiatric care units to the legal field. The management of "violent and difficult adolescents", specifically youth from the inner suburbs of Paris since the 2005 riots, in a postcolonial situation, has been a paradigmatic case : boundaries between punishment and therapy become unclear. From a genealogical and ethnographic perspective, my paper aims at understanding the formation and contemporary use of a clinical category "physical contention as psychical contenance" : How and when does the clinical meaning meet successfully the social control meaning ? How, as an anthropologist, can be critically engaged with a moral issue ? Indeed, how challenging a new cultural evidence emphasizes the need of authority of the "violent and difficult adolescents" in France today ?

• Emilia Sanabria : Health education without knowledge : ought-onomy and the neurosubject in the French obesity “epidemic”
  The “naïve informational model of health education has failed,” a senior health economist stated at a meeting of French policymakers gathered to identify new levers for change in nutrition. This paper traces the incursion of the neurosciences and economic models of health behaviour in French obesity policy circles. Analysing the ideas circulating in expert documents and French nutrition conferences I observed, I trace the emergence of a sensorially hyperstimulated obesity-prone subject in public health. In this context, “neuroprevention” or “nudging” are pitched as effective responses, where an individuals’ capacities to modify their behaviours based on nutritional information alone is seen to be strongly limited by the “obesogenic” environment. Approaches such as nudging through modifications in “choice architectures” that affect health outcomes, or “neuroprevention,” consider that health behaviours are not consciously made and cannot be modified through cognitive or informational approaches. They draw on scientific evidence regarding how contemporary foodscapes highjack the sensorial mechanisms regulating satiety, or distort portion-size perception. These approaches deem that educating eaters has limited impact considering that individuals’ rational decision-making capacities are strategically impaired by the marketing tactics of BigFood. As neuromarketing makes its entry into the field of French obesity prevention, the body/subject of public health is recast. What are the structural implications of contesting the efficacy of interventions that target the rational subject for the organisation of a public health response to obesity ? What happens when the sensorial and the unconscious domains are made the specific objects of public health interventions ?