A saint from home also works miracles

ethnographic walkthroughs with a popular therapist

Abstract

This conversation piece engages with an ethnographic research carried out between 2021 and 2023 in the Administrative Region of Sol Nascente (Federal District, Brazil), an urban-peripheral territory crossed by the Covid-19 syndemic. The research unfolded through a process of coexistence with the interlocutor, Mãe Batá, a popular therapist, ialorixá, and community leader, whose therapeutic practices are grounded in ancestral and popular technologies of care and healing, forged at the intersection of Afro-Brazilian religiosity, oral-ancestral memory, and sociability networks. The writing proposed here is situated and committed to the tensioning of the hegemonic biomedical model, claiming the legitimacy of counter-hegemonic knowledge and practices as insurgent forms of care. This is a text positioned within the method of the crossroads, which revisits the past to build the future, while questioning the research protocols of whiteness. The interlocutor’s House, in its symbolic and political dimension, is centered as a crossroads territory, a space for the production of health, memory, and resistance. By narrating Mãe Batá’s everyday inventiveness in care - prayers, blessings, welcoming, shared rituals - we propose a reflection on the Popular Therapeutic Health System, which operates outside the technical-normative logic and rejects institutional tutelage. Here, we advocate for an insurgent writing that embraces partiality as method and confluence as ethics, mobilizing ethnography as both a tool of denunciation and a practice of care. The text is built in the interstices of a situated and affected research-making, traversed by the interlocutors and by the territory itself, grounded in fieldnotes, shared silences, and the backstage of ethnographic wandering.