Bodies under Pressure: Experiencing Waiting Time in Basic Healthcare Facilities (Morocco)

• In Event: Embodied Narratives of Health, Self, Care, and Knowledge

Abstract

I will address patients’ experience of waiting time in basic healthcare facilities in Morocco. I argue that in Moroccan basic healthcare facilities, waiting is far from being a passive experience or state, even when involving sitting. It is experienced with and through a mindful body (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987), as an active and dynamic process that usually happens in a waiting room, conceptualized as space—a sphere of coexisting heterogeneity, the product of interrelations constituted through interactions (Massey 2005). Waiting is a concatenation of movements involving the body, the senses and cognitive abilities to deal with the assemblage of heterogeneity and multiple trajectory characteristics of the waiting room space. In this perspective, waiting time is not time suspended or put in parentheses. Actually, this dynamic process is embodied and sometimes bursts out in the form of a rise in blood pressure, or tension, as suggested in this article. I of will rely on Massey’s characterization of space, Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987) proposal for the development of an epistemology and metaphysics of the mindful body.

Author

• Josiane Carine Tantchou G, Cnrs