HEALING KNOWLEDGE – THE QUILOMBOLA PHARMACY AND THE USE OF MEDICINAL PLANTS IN CHILD CARE

Abstract

This article proposes a critical reflection on the traditional quilombola knowledge related to the use of medicinal plants in child care, understanding them as practices of resistance, healing and intergenerational transmission of knowledge. In the midst of a history marked by erasures, criminalizations, and delegitimization of traditional medical systems, quilombola communities keep alive ancestral forms of care that articulate body, territory, spirituality, and health. In this sense, the study has as its object of research the quilombola living pharmacy, focusing on the ways in which mothers, grandmothers, midwives and root women manage natural resources to treat diseases and strengthen children's health. The research starts from the following question: How are quilombola medicinal knowledge mobilized in childhood care and what tensions are established between this ancestral knowledge and hegemonic biomedical discourses? Theoretically, we made use of the works of Zhang (2002), Grmek (1991), Lima and Moura Junior (2024), Pessoa and Maton (2024), Melo (2021), Vanini (2010), Farmer (2003), Kleinman, Basilico, Kim and Farmer (2013), Scheper-Hughes (1993), Lévi-Strauss (1966; 1978; 2004), Fabian (1983; 2014), Turner (1991), Shiva (1999), Brito et al. (2024), Mendes and Cavas (2018), Rodrigues, Paneto and Severi (2018),  Sperry et al. (2018), Ravazoli et al. (2018), Oliveira et al. (2024), Almeida (2011), Cunha (2018), Wagner (1981), among others. The research is qualitative from Minayo (2007), descriptive and bibliographic according to Gil (2008) and the data analysis was carried out from the comprehensive perspective of Weber (1949). The findings of this research reveal that the quilombola medicinal knowledge mobilized in child care articulates physical and spiritual healing practices, sustained by intergenerational bonds and by a logic of collective and territorialized care. It was identified that the quilombola living pharmacy goes beyond the technical use of plants, incorporating prayers, affections and intentions, as forms of resistance to biomedical medicalization. The practices of the root women and midwives reaffirm the contemporaneity of this knowledge and denounce the epistemic erasure promoted by scientific colonialism. It was also observed that the use of plants is accompanied by symbolic and ethical criteria, such as the way of harvesting, preparing and transmitting knowledge. Finally, it was found that defending this knowledge is to claim not only health recognition, but also cultural, historical and political autonomy.