Cultura preventiva: Preventive healing in the Northwestern Amazon, Brazil

Abstract

Indigenous anthropologists from the Upper Rio Negro call what their religious specialists do a “preventive culture” (cultura preventiva), referring to a specific temporality that structures their strategies of healing. Their form of healing reaches back to a mythical primordium, drawing on the transformative power of creation time to secure existence in the present. Preventive healing in Northwestern Amazonia is based on a cyclic understanding of time, tantamount to accompanying foreseeable, periodic moments of transformation at every cosmic level. Regular interventions through healing methods, or “applications”, provided by ritual specialists (kumuã) offer protection against the consequences of inherent conflicts within the temporal and spatial framework of the cosmos. Such “preventive healing” in Northwestern Amazonia can also be seen as healing of damage done during creation time.