Work

Cultura preventiva: Preventive healing in the Northwestern Amazon, Brazil

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Indigenous anthropologists from the Upper Rio Negro call what their religious specialists do a “preventive culture” (cultura preventiva), referring to a specific temporality that structures their strategies of healing. Their form of healing reaches back to a mythical primordium, drawing on the transformative power of creation time to secure existence in the present. Preventive healing in Northwestern Amazonia is based on a cyclic understanding of time, tantamount to accompanying foreseeable, periodic moments of transformation at every cosmic level. Regular interventions through healing methods, or “applications”, provided by ritual specialists (kumuã) offer protection against the consequences of inherent conflicts within the temporal and spatial framework of the cosmos. Such “preventive healing” in Northwestern Amazonia can also be seen as healing of damage done during creation time.

Source: European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies | Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe

DOI: 10.32992/agn7bd36

Authors: João Paulo Lima Barreto, Silvio Sanches Barreto, Jaime Moura Fernandes, Rosijane Fernandes Moura, Wolfgang Kapfhammer, Eveline Dürr

Language: English

Topic: Indigenous Studies in Latin America

Subfield: Cultural Studies

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: diamond

Funders: Universidade Federal do Amazonas, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Award: Planetares Heilen als transformativer Prozess: ein dekolonialer Ansatz zum Umgang mit den Herausforderungen des Klimawandels