Desenvolvimento e medicina popular: os saberes e fazeres das benzedeiras, curandeiras e parteiras na produção da economia do cuidado

Abstract

Traditional therapies reproduced by midwives, and healers are recurrent in Brazilian history and territories and make up a list of possibilities for thinking, in a different way, about development with care as a central point. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, in order to carry out this research, a methodological approach was chosen, resulting from a comprehensive interview in the period between March 2020 and July 2021, with Dona Mariinha, healer and resident of São Lourenço-MG. The comprehensive methodology was applied both in relation to data collected in the field and in the treatment of historical material. A review of literature and ethnographies on the topic of traditional therapies contained in Brazilian Popular Medicine, specifically those permeated by the blessing, was also used. The interfaces between traditional therapies and development were established and discussed, verified in the investigations that make up the field of care economics, epistemology and public policies. The research showed that the centralization of traditional therapies, as a category of economic analysis, based on the paradigm of care, is capable of revealing a variety of alternatives to the hegemonic concept of development and technologies to be explored.