Doença de feitiço, ações terapêuticas e os percursos de cura nos terreiros de umbanda e candomblé em Macapá-AP

Abstract

This ethnography deals with a form of physical-psychic illness known as spell disease. Its purpose is to understand the dynamics of this way of getting sick from the narratives of people who are said to be affected by this evil and how the healers conceive and treat the disease from their spiritual experiences according to their own logic centered in the terreiros of Umbanda and candomblé in the city of Macapá-AP. I propose an analysis of the various forms of manifestation of this phenomenon taking as a key analytical reading the cosmological conception of the Amazonian universe its therapeutic itineraries and the types of healing rituals triggered during the treatment. The ethnographic material described and analyzed here was obtained during field research (in-depth interviews and participant observation) in the period between 2013 and 2015 in the city of Macapá-AP. It turns out that belief in the spell is at the core of a cosmological system that admits the performance of hidden forces in their different ways of acting in daily life individual or collective. My ethnographic data indicate that the spell is a regulating belief in Amazonian life and that even in the face of the demands of modern life impelled by medical-scientific rationality, its power of interference in daily life is governed by the belief in the existence of unnatural diseases not explained by medical science . Despite the intense flow of preventive information and the implementation of curative and health care models capable of responding to the various diseases present in modern life they were not enough to suppress the ideas and cultural values ​​of these individuals adopting the traditional.