Urbanidades indígenas: uma etnografia das medicinas no contexto urbano de Manaus

Abstract

This thesis attempts to analyze the indigenous medical resistance that is being organized in the city of Manaus, whether in urban occupations or in the city center with the action of the Center for Indigenous Medicine – Bahserikowi, focusing in particular on the response that was organized by indigenous associationism during the pandemic crisis of 2020 and 2021. My analysis aims to frame the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic as another epidemic in the long history of health crises brought in the Amazon area through the colonial and neocolonial dynamics that have characterized Manaus since the time of the gum economy. After this historical framework, I focused my attention on the indigenous response to the pandemic, which left native peoples alone in confronting the virus, in a political context characterized by a clear social Darwinism, where the poorest layers and the indigenous people were completely forgotten and had to organize a resistance. In this response, traditional medicine played a fundamental role and represents a reappropriation of the means of healing by the native peoples, which have been subordinated and depreciated by biomedicine over the last decades. The indigenous fight against COVID-19 in Parque das Tribos shows how the very widespread use of traditional medicines has not been in opposition to the use of biomedical medicines and therapies, but on the contrary has been a way of responding with their own means of healing to a very serious crisis, where the natives did not have any help from the state and the health service. Through traditional medicine, urban indigenous peoples have put patient care back at the center of medical practice, as opposed to the growing commercialism of biomedicine.