Paper short abstract:

As part of an interdisciplinary project aiming at bringing an Ebola vaccine to licensure, modelers and anthropologist were asked to work together. In this communication I want to question the possibilities and limits of interdisciplinary work through the notion of "household" in the Guinean context.

Paper long abstract:

Modeling is now central to epidemic management (Cauchemez et al., 2011; O. Faye et al., 2015; Gilbert et al., 2020; Temime et al., 2020; Y. T. Kouakep & Tchoumi, et al., 2021). In a world governed by numbers, it has the power to alert and guide public policies, particularly in the field of global health. Despite this, the reliability of those forecasts is questioned (Huc & Mangiarotti, 2016) particularly with regard to the lesser consideration given to the social logics underlying the practices of actors described by anthropology (Brives et al., 2016). In this context and as part of an interdisciplinary work around the implementation of a vaccine trial against Ebola, I wish to question the conditions of possibility and the limits of a collaboration between modelers and anthropologists. To do this, based on ethnographic work carried out in Conakry in the Ebola aftermath, I would like to consider the collaboration between the two disciplines through the example of the notion of "household". We suggest to consider this notion as a boundary-object (Star, 1988) that need to be improved and refined in terms of definition and contextualization on both sides in order to avoid working on the basis of a misunderstanding.