Considerations on indigenous health in Brazil from some founding anthropological studies

Abstract

The article addresses a set of ethnographic research, carried out mainly in the 1980s situated within anthropological studies on health and illness among Brazilian indigenous peoples. Based on the theoretical constructs of indigenous ethnology, it departs from the category ‘doença de branco’ (white people’s illness) to argue that these studies displaced the crystallized debates around the logic of the ethnomedicines and their efficacy in favor of differences anchored in the Amerindian theories of substantiality. In this approach, the health policy debates involving indigenous politics and an interdisciplinary dialogue are initially already given in the anthropological production and converge upon the implicated character of the ethnographic practices themselves.