Vozes ancestrais: os saberes e crenças presentes nas narrativas das mulheres benzedeiras de Manacapuru-Am

Abstract

This work is an effort to promote a study of the traditional practices and knowledge of the benzedeiras of Mancapuru, who are women whose practices of prayers and benzeduras are part of the healing practices of popular medicine, Brazilian culture and religiosity, establishing relationships with the sacred and the profane. In the Amazon, the craft of the benzedeiras makes use of elements of Amazonian herbs and plants, smokes, prayers and prayers that bear traces of the hybridization of Catholic and Afro-indigenous religious culture, the result of interactions between different ethnic groups in the region. Various prayers and blessings are used to treat quebranto, the evil eye, massages and dislocations. Therefore, the main objective of this research was to investigate the knowledge and beliefs present in the narratives of the women benzedeiras of Manacapuru-AM, seeking to understand how they have been building multiple interactions with the community and how the trajectory of these benzedeiras in the exercise of their craft represents processes of social resistance based on practices which value traditional knowledge, highlighting aspects of faith, work, health and benzimento. In epistemological terms, the approach is interdisciplinary, combining contributions from sociology and anthropology to understand the complexity of the phenomenon being studied, so we opted for the assumptions of Boaventura de Sousa Santos' Ecology of Knowledge, anchored in the Epistemology of the South, which favors forms of knowledge that guarantee the greatest possible participation of the social groups involved. This is a bibliographical and field study, in which we used the research technique of participant observation with the intention of constructing an ethnography, dense with the repertoire of knowledge and beliefs present in the narratives of the women benzedeiras, based on the articulation between history and their collective and subjective representations. The research subjects were three benzedeiras who live and work in the municipality of Manacapuru. In the course of our research, we were able to observe that even in a context of modernity and technology, the practice of traditional healing using prayers, blessings, ointments, teas and prayers is still widely practiced in the countryside and, in Manacapuru, these women are relevant in the community where they live and their stories are intertwined with the history of the city and the people who live with them.