Mestizo faces: a communication proposal for the study of ancestral therapeutic itineraries in Latin America

Abstract

In a context of medicalization of daily life and the disciplining of bodies, it becomes urgent to ask what happens with collective perceptions and practices in health, particularly in Latin American populations with ancestral health cultures. In this framework, here we propose the analysis of social representations about “local therapeutic itineraries”, from the disciplinary perspective of social communication, as a symbolic space where the processes of production and circulation of social meanings are generated. For this, we put three arguments into consideration. The first presents the subfield of Communication and Health, and the problems that converge there. Under this theoretical framework, we approach Intercultural Health and Communication for social change as possible intellectual tools to reflect on the different “ways of healing”. The second argument refers to the possibility of thinking about discourses around traditional knowledge and therapeutic resources, as part of the intangible cultural heritage of a population. Attending to the conflicts that involve the processes of patrimonialization, it is essential to seek to address the local heritage in all its complexity, far from essential looks that make diversity an exoticism. The third raises the need to investigate particular forms -convival, mixture, invisibility- that the articulation between ancestral local knowledge and knowledge linked to functional therapeutic practices to cultural globalization. Undoubtedly, the study of discourses, narratives and processes of social construction of health, can reveal one of the many mestizo faces that delineates the interaction between the local and the global.