La racialisation comme constitution de la difference: Une ethnographie documentaire de la sante publique aux Etats-Unis

At present one can note an intensification of the usage of race in public health in the United States, an idea that is sometimes rejected because of its association with controversial practices. Races are viewed, in this context, as the product of racism, a technology of power of the modern State that consisted of fragmenting humanity to permit colonisations. Thus, race has been established within the discourse to mark difference, discourse that consists of a heterogeneous ensemble of apparatuses, institutions, scientific statements, norms and rules. Racism developed concomitantly with the affirmation of power over life aimed at ruling out bodies and populations through public health practices among others. This thesis is based on an ethnographic study of a corpus of public health documents in the United States from federal Government offices and a major public health journal published between 2001 and 2009. This study analyzed the ways in which race is represented, produced as object of knowledge, and regulated by discursive practices in these documents.;Keywords: racialization, race, medicalization, ethnography, public health, discourse, power, representation, postcolonialism, United States.;The results confirm that the discourse on race varies throughout time. Hence, results indicate the relative permanence of a racialized regime of representation that consists of identifying, situating and opposing subjects and groups based on standardized labels. This regime constitutes an ensemble of representational practices which, together with disciplinary techniques and the use of culture as an idea, lead to the characterization and formation of racialized objects and stereotypes. Also, these operations that fabricate racialization, tend, together with medicalization and culturalization, to naturalize difference, reproduce the symbolic order, and constitute racial identities. On the other hand, racialization appears to be torn between a power over life and a power over death. Finally, this study suggests a post-racial alternative that envisages human group constitution as fluid and deterritorialized.