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

Abstract

This article addresses access to basic health care facilities in Morocco, by emphasizing the issue of accommodation (Penchansky & Thomas, 1981). This article is based on data collected over three years spent in Rabat, Morocco, for fieldwork. The first year focused on hypertension. Research authorization was required for this research, which was obtained from the Ministry of Health. Research tools consisted of observations, in-depth interviews, and focus group discussions. I argue that waiting is not a passive experience or state. It is experienced with and through a mindful body (Scheper-Hughes & Lock, 1987), as an active and dynamic process that happens in a waiting room. The waiting room is conceptualized as a sphere of coexisting heterogeneity (Massey, 2005), allowing the concomitant presence of the body-self, social body, and the body politic, equivalent to body-inside and body-outside, respectively. By relating multiplicity and heterogeneity to time—biomedicine’s time, different from patients’ time, but also from the body’s time or somatic time (Limor Meoded, 2018)—, I argue that the space of the waiting room brings these various temporalities together, commanding new configurations and processes (Massey, 2005). The dynamic process of waiting is embodied; it can burst out in the form of tension, when the concomitant presence of distinct trajectories, bodies, and temporalities inside the waiting room, sometimes generate violence (verbal and symbolic). Allowing this heterogeneity to coexist smoothly is the challenge of hospital architecture and its analysis from a phenomenological perspective will bring rich data to explore and extend the project of an anthropogeography of emotions and perception.