As práticas de cuidado e as interfaces com o processo saúde-doença na Umbanda: um estudo de representações sociais

Abstract

The present study has as its objective the social representation of health, illness and care practices for Umbandistas and as a general objective, to analyze the representations of health, illness and care practices in the terreiros for Umbandistas. This is a descriptive and exploratory study with a quantitative-qualitative approach, guided by the theory of social representations in its structural and procedural approaches, carried out between 2021 and 2023 with participants who declared themselves Umbanda supporters and frequenters of Umbanda terreiros, being developed in three phases. The first includes 112 subjects from whom free evocations of the inducing terms health, illness and care practices were collected. In the second moment, 71 subjects participated, responding to the mise-en-cause and the choix-par-bloc. Then, 22 subjects participated in the in-depth interview. Participant characterization questionnaires were also applied, carried out after an analysis of the main variables. Data analysis on the structural approach, similarity by co-occurrence for free evocations, as well as the content of the interviews, were carried out with the support of the Interface de R pour les Analyzes Multidimensionnelles (Iramuteq). For the group, life and well-being are the central elements of the health-inducing term. While healing and pain are the central elements of the term inducing illness. As for the representation of care practices, herbs and caring are the central elements. In the procedural analysis, through the interviews, 6 classes were generated, with discursive content, showing that the care practices carried out in Umbanda are based on knowledge and have a relationship with care as a therapeutic process. It seems to us that the conception of health, for Umbanda, becomes an important factor in providing opportunities for adherence to health care, mediated by their care practices. Social representations of care practices guide the health-disease process and, therefore, it can be thought that it is important to encourage care practices as a form of support for their daily lives.