Prendre soin des enfants au quotidien. Dynamiques relationnelles et spatiales des pratiques de soins caseiros au Brésil

• Main Author: Marina Rougeon
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Association Anthropologie Médicale Appliquée au Développement et à la Santé 2018-11-01
• Series: Anthropologie & Santé
• Subjects: children; daily care; care pluralism; spaces of proximity; Brazil
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/anthropologiesante/4270

Many children in Brazil benefit from a pluralism of healthcare practices, administrated daily for prophylactic or healing purposes by different actors. Children are the main concern of community health workers, who are the main actors of the Family Health Program’s public policy. Mothers and grandmothers are also involved in daily care, providing different forms of medication and food practices. Finally, children are frequently blessed at home by specialists of body and spirit troubles, or by their mothers, in order to heal afflictions and to give them a spiritual protection. Based on an ethnography carried out in the Central-West region of Brazil and from the results of a finalized research, the study of these heterogeneous remedies highlights their inscription in spaces of proximity, some emic nosological categories specific to childcare, and local conceptions of children’s bodies. The analysis of local relational and spatial dynamics is key to understanding the underlying logic behind these forms of care. Their arrangement varies depending on several factors: inter-generational relationships, strategies of power and legitimacy, including the religious universes in which such practices are present. Such an arrangement produces caseiro care, specific to the therapeutic space woven between the streets and the houses of the neighborhoods. Based on an ethnographic approach and on the heuristic reach of an emic category, this paper questions and complexifies the association between the daily care given to children and the domestic sphere of social life.