Bio-etnografias do cuidar: vozes, memórias e ambientes das artesãs do cuidado em universos multissituados da Amazônia paraense

Abstract

This thesis analyzes, from bioethnographic approaches, the practices of care, healing, and protection woven by women, the “artisans of care”, across multiple contexts in the Pará Amazon. The study investigates how these bodies of knowledge emerge from ancestral and traditional ways of life, deeply connected to environmental, symbolic, and sociocultural dimensions. Methodologically, the multi-sited research articulates biographical narratives, ethnographic techniques, and dialogue with collectives from the Sororó Indigenous Land, Combu Island, and Itapuá Island, based on the understanding that biographical practice is also collectively constructed. The findings indicate that the practices of these artisans constitute dynamic and living ecosystems of knowledge, marked by creativity, bricolage, and the incorporation of entities, in a process herein understood as an “anthropophagy of care.” Such practices reveal local health systems in which care, understood as an integrated set of actions of healing and protection, operates relationally, articulating body, territory, memory, beliefs, and religiosities. The research further demonstrates the tensions between these forms of knowledge and public health policies, particularly due to the difficulties of dialogue with state-promoted biomedicine in the face of local sociocultural specificities, which may result in processes of delegitimization and coloniality. Thus, this thesis presents the artisans of care as protagonists in health practices in the Amazon, highlighting the need for recognition, valorization, and the construction of dialogue between their knowledge systems and public policies, toward a more plural, sensitive, and intercultural approach to collective health.