Les causes du mal : ethnographie des représentations de l’émergence de la 9e épidémie d’Ebola en RDC (province de l’Équateur, 8 mai-24 juillet 2018)

The article focuses on describing the different causal models of misfortune and their social constructions in the context of the Ebola virus disease which emerged in Equateur Province, Democratic Republic of Congo, in May 2018. Based on a corpus of qualitative data collected during three weeks of fieldwork, this article details the explanatory models relating to the chains of contamination and their hybridization between biomedical models and sorcery and/or political logic. By also addressing the impacts of discourse on the animal origin of the virus, this article contributes to an analysis of the gap between the different understandings and responses to the epidemic phenomenon and the scale of the response.