Popular medicine and its traditional agents: miners, midwives and healers in urban areas

Abstract

The general objective of this article is to explain the importance of traditional popular medicine in urban contexts. Midwives, traditional healers, masseuses, and traditional health workers are leaders in the rescue and recuperation of ancestral knowledge, and apply their knowledge curing the inhabitants of the Santa Ana and San Cristobal neighborhoods of Managua. Ethnographic research has uncovered the following fundamental categories: cosmovisión, traditional health workers, diverse types of knowledge, illness and health, and traditional medicine. The methodology utilized a mixed paradigm, both qualitative and quantitative methods, that included three phases: one, the recognition and delimitation of the study area; two, the application and validation of the different techniques, tools and instruments of information collection originating from anthropology, as well as other useful techniques such as surveys; three, the processing and analysis of the collected information. Preliminary results show the importance of traditional medicine as well as traditional health workers, whose contributions are fundamental and perfectly combinable with conventional therapies. The processes also show that traditional health care is emerging from rural, peasant contexts and entering into contact with the different cultures of the urban environment and as such, becoming an intercultural medicine.

Raíces - Revista Nicaragüense de Antropología. Año 1 No. 1/2017: 49-63