Remédios da terra, amuletos e medicina popular : a etnofarmacobotânica nas artes de curar dos amazônidas entre Oriximiná (PA) à Nhamundá (AM), 1870-1940

Abstract

Since the seventeenth century, the Amazon and the region which comprises of the Brazilian Amazon have been suffering successive environmental and cultural impacts. Contacts between colonists, explorers, missionaries and traditional groups have brought different interpretations to the awareness of the world, forest, plants, stories, and of the therapeutic systems adopted, suppressed and adapted. The objective of this research is to address the healing technique in the lowland Amazon region (States of Pará and Amazonas) between the years of 1870 and 1940, and the association between the social imaginary of diseases in the area and to the curators who worked and their descendants, such as shamans, midwives, sacacas and healers. In this context, evidence of the family cultures, the plurality of the knowledge, the experience shared between traditional groups regarding fauna and flora, and the spiritual-religious rituals, all aiming at the care of the body and the return of health, are discussed. It is important to point out that the historical process of knowledge exchange between pre-Columbian natives, explorers, European settlers, riverine and quilombola communities, and later, with modern 19th-century medicine, transformed and influenced the behaviour of all these groups, in some way and rights adopted. Therefore, it is possible to perceive the adoption of new conceptions about diseases, of treatments and maintenance of bodies and behaviours, of attempts to "fit" the unhealthy environments and nature through hygienic discourses. Becoming evident especially in the progressive invigoration of demoralising figures discourses such as shamans and healers, as well as their explanatory universes about illness and therapeutics. Consequently, the process eventually generated biased documents and writings that reduced them to invisibility and the margins of writing history.