Abstract

Public services in Cameroon are a collection of dilapidated units, dependent on the “precarious effect” and colonial tradition. The workers, using modern industrial mechanisms, are unable to adapt to them and are victims of recurrent pathologies. Each individual has a capacity for action independent of the group, which he uses rationally by mobilising the information at his disposal and trying to obtain the best possible results. The meaning and symbolism produced around pathologies and the dynamics based on the perceptual schemes developed by some and others around administrations and modernity betray the societal and cultural. The social and cultural representations that revolve around government reinforce the actions and at the same time contain the endogenous and cultural perceptions. The uses that individuals make of administrations and which can be linked to the representations they have of them consist essentially of concrete actions whose meaning is provided by these representations.  

Keywords

African societies, polygynous, pathologies, modernisation