Memórias ancestrais: uso de práticas tradicionais em saúde na comunidade quilombola Tabuleiro da Vitória (Cachoeira-BA)

Abstract

Traditional health knowledge with the use of plants is disseminated through care practices in traditional quilombola communities. The care network is created in a daily life by professional mourners, midwives and healers that are recognized in their territory for their knowledge and this network takes part in self-managed health care practices and technologies. This work aimed to study the care practices and traditional and ancestral knowledge in health employed in the quilombola community of Tabuleiro da Vitória (Cachoeira-Ba). It describes, using an exploratory and qualitative approach, how and under what circumstances plants are used in the community. Data were obtained through dialogue with practitioners of traditional medicine who use plants for self-care. Thematic content analysis was used to obtain information that allowed the description of health care practices, context elements, as well as the meanings attributed to care. As a result, it was possible to map and reconstitute the network of care and caregivers, do an inventory of the herbs used, as well as the care techniques, such as prayers, leaf baths, syrups, incenses and beverages based on the traditional knowledge and practices. From the analysis of techniques and knowledge of plants, we started to dialogue under decolonial and intercultural perspectives in order to intensify the debate about self-generated community knowledge. It could be concluded that knowledge, via resources of oral tradition and collective memory, anchors the sacred in the community. Such knowledge, associated with African and indigenous ancestry, marks the feeling of belonging in the quilombola territory and subsidizes a wide and diversified set of techniques using plants cultivated in the common territory. The knowledge network of medicinal plants and their use, in circumstances of scarce economic resources, are the basis for sustaining and self-managing health care.