Abstract
This article discusses the health practices carried out in two houses recognized as alternatives, located in the Lower Amazon region, in Pará. Formed in cooperation with the Catholic Church in the 1990s and composed mostly of women since their creation, such houses offer highly diverse health care, directed at the physical, psychological and spiritual levels. Its repertoire includes treatments based on traditional knowledge associated with native plants, bioenergetic, floral and drug therapies, the latter developed in recent contacts with scientific institutions. Ethnographic observation of regular houses activities, including voluntary participation in sporadic work in one of them, as well as interviews with their collaborators, indicated that the tradition, strongly associated with herbal treatments in the regional context, has been reinterpreted under the notion of alternative and reconciled with successive innovations. The articulation between tradition and innovation, then, is allowed according to the concept of global health valued by the houses. Their traditional and alternative health practices are therefore capable of aggregating different knowledge systems according to a logic that values hybridity.
Keywords
Health; Traditional knowledge; Alternative therapies