This essay presents and analyses narratives of professionals who work with indigenous health in Brazil. These narratives discourse on intense and dramatic dilemmas concerning water and bodies. The questions that guided the research were: What happens to health professionals who are directly faced with different concepts of body, health and disease? What happens when health practices occur in the process of translating the very conceptualization of what health is? Are these professionals so subsumed in the world of biomedicine that nothing would modify them from the onset to the end of encounters in which the practices occur in unstable processes of translation? Are agreements established other than those of domination? Are there significant differences between the professionals closer to indigenous contexts and those who do not have this experience?
Body; health professionals; indigenous health; symmetrical anthropology