Researcher studies iboga tourism in Africa
Nadège Chabloz achieved her PhD in anthropology (EHESS, Paris) about the encounters (representations and practices) between French and African people through marginal practices of tourism in West and Central Africa.She is co-coordinator of the research seminary of EHESS "Tourisme, Recherche, Institutions, Pratiques". See more information here: http://ceaf.ehess.fr/index.php?127From three years, she studied initiations to bwiti and iboga between Gabon and France. She is co-editor of a special issue in 2009 : Cahiers d'Etudes africaines, ‘Tourismes. La quête de soi par la pratique des autres’, vol. XLIX (1-2), n° 193-194, 649 p., in which she published an article: «Tourisme et primitivisme. Initiations au bwiti et à l’iboga (Gabon)», Cahiers d’Etudes africaines, vol. XLIX (1-2), n° 193-194, pp. 391-428 (abstract : http://www.cairn.info/resume.php?ID_ARTICLE=CEA_193_0391).She directed two documentary films:Bwiti et iboga en VF. Une initiation à Libreville, 48. min., DVD Pal, French, self production, 2009.Bwiti et iboga en VF (2). Itinéraire d'un initié militant, 52 min., DVD Pal, French, self production, 2010.This is an abstract of the seccond documentary:This documentary, the second of a trilogy devoted to the experimentation, by French people of a plant (iboga) during a Gabonese rite (bwiti), follows the itinerary of Yann over several years between Gabon and France. This Parisian, 35 years old, senior officer in data processing, was initiated with the bwiti in France then in Gabon in 2007, and resides from now at Libreville. Regarded as a "go-between" the "African and Western cultures", he is considered as a defender, a mediator and a new guard of the bwitist tradition in the Gabonese media and on Internet, when this one is classified like sect in France by the interdepartmental Mission of vigilance and fight against the sects. He promotes moreover near the Gabonese government and of the Westerners a form of "ecotourism" in Gabon, which could thus become, according to him, the "Tibet of Africa".