“Solving the suffering from the root”: practices and therapeutic representations among medicinal plants users

Abstract

Within the framework of the contemporary proliferation of practices and discourses linked to traditional, alternative and/or complementary medicines in Western societies, this work explores the practices and therapeutic representations of the participants in a training in medicinal plants. It is a training program dictated in a locality of Córdoba province, Argentina. The analysis is done from an ethnographic approach, which includes in-depth interviews with the participants of the training, participant observation of all the meetings that took place in that space and the study of the bibliographic and audiovisual materials offered there. The paper analyzes how the participants came to this space, based on the trajectories of the therapeutic itineraries, exploring into the previous frameworks of understanding that made certain configurations possible. It also problematizes the constructions of notions such as healing that were elaborated there, as a way of understanding ‘health’ in a broader and holistic way, which exceeds the mere absence of disease, linked to the idea and purpose of solving the suffering from the root. Finally, it explores the political dimension that for the participants of the training implied the different ways of attending to the health-disease-care processes, in the search to position themselves from an active and leading place.