July 20, 2018

Governance, Knowledge and Innovation

João Arriscado Nunes

PhD with a joint-supervision from the Universidade de Coimbra

It is about understanding popular culture, Brazilian and Portuguese, based on popular healing practices and their healers. This work analyzed several works of intellectuals linked to folklore studies that, between the beginning of the 20th century and the decade of the 1960s, focused on the theme. From the dense description of the practices and the popular knowledge associated to the diseases and their healing processes, it seeks to identify elements that are approximating or distancing, but that mainly inform of the conceptions related to the care of the body and the spirit from a counter-hegemonic perspective. The main objective is, therefore, to reconstitute the perspective of popular curators and their experiences involving the search for the cure, thus presenting an attempt to overcome the discussion about the dichotomy between popular medicine and scientific medicine. Valuing the experiences that can be found in a fragmented way in folklore studies represents, indiciously, the record of old beliefs surrounding the confrontation with suffering that, even in constant transformation, presents an amplification of world understanding.

Key words: knowledge and healing practices; history of science and health; Popular Culture; Brazil; Portugal; twentieth century