As representações sociais de saúde e doença para os adeptos do Omolokô

Abstract

Health and disease are parts of the same process, that of living and, therefore, knowing the meaning of this process becomes a tool to be used for the development of public and private actions and policies that meet the needs of the group involved.It was established, as a general objective, to analyze the social representations of health and illness for practitioners of Omolokô. This study is exploratory, descriptive, qualitative and based on the theory of social representations in its structural and procedural approaches, being developed in two phases: in the first moment, 106 practitioners of Omolokô from six yards in the state of Rio de Janeiro participated, through from which free evocations of the following inducing terms were collected: “health”, “disease” and “yards and health practices”. For the second moment, 23 people were interviewed with the same profile and from the same scenarios who were available to carry them out based on a thematic script. For the analysis of the data collected in the first moment, a database was built with the help of Excel software. The evocations underwent prototypical analysis and similarity by co-occurrence. For the discursive materials of the second stage, lexical analysis was used with the support of the Iramuteq software. In the structural approach to health, the possible central core with the cognems “well-being”, “care” and “life” stood out, with “well-being” reappearing as a central word in the tree of similitude. As for the inducing term “disease”, it presented the terms “pain”, “fear” and “sadness” as a possible central core and, with regard to the tree of similarity, there was also a predominance of the cognem “fear”. When analyzing the inducing term “yards and health practices”, the cognems “charity”, “healing”, “balance” and “faith” appear as a possible centrality in the tree of similitude the term “healing”. The procedural analysis resulted in three classes, subdivided into two axes: block 01 (classes 01 and 03); block 02 (class 02), which exposed the meaning of the health and disease process for the group according to their individualities. Class 01 addressed the existing relationship in the family of saints, relating it to issues such as love, hierarchy, secrets and power. In class 03, we deepened the discussion related to the political dimension in its micro and macro instances. Hierarchy and power issues are present around the object of study, as well as in the construction of this group's identity. It is concluded that the yards are spaces of being and living, where there is a concern with the strengthening of affective and political ties to be achieved through decolonial practices exercised and experienced by their followers. In this way, the importance of the yards being considered outpatient care clinics is evident, requiring the structuring of public policies that already exist or are to be created, so that these spaces are used both by their supporters and by the general population, in partnership with the Unified Health System.