O conhecimento médico local à luz da teoria da evolução cultural : processos microevolutivos em uma análise temporal

Abstract

Ethnobiology has findings that reveal several evolutionary processes of a culture. Cultural Evolution Theory enriches the interpretation of these findings, being an important tool for the growth of this science. In this context, local medical systems are opportune objects of study in view of understanding the evolution of cultural groups, since they are present in all the populations of the world, guiding their survival. Several microevolutionary processes can guide the evolutionary path of medical systems, and a diachronic perspective, even in a short time, is essential for the monitoring and confirmation of such processes. The search for new knowledge, including through dialogue with biomedicine; the prioritization of knowledge according to the perception of the importance of each disease, as its severity and incidence; and the routes and biases of transmission that serve as a clue to understand the direction and speed of the evolution of local medicine, are the main in-depth questions in this thesis, which uses as a model a local medical system of the Brazilian northeast, studied in a range of eight years. Our findings show an important cooperation between local medicine and biomedicine, both of which are used to meet the health priorities of a population, which is guided mainly by the perception of the incidence of diseases. The local medical system has shown to increase its medicinal stock and information sharing over time for the most incident diseases, without necessarily adding more transmission errors to these information. The transmission of knowledge still prioritizes the local models, instead of the biomedicine models, and this transmission occurs mainly by the vertical route, although this type of transmission does not show itself as conservative as expected by Cultural Evolution Theory. In addition, other models of learning outside the family are sought throughout the life of the individuals, being preferred those with more prestige or success in the field of medicinal plants, making the evolution of the medical system much more dynamic and able to respond to disorders than the theoretically expected of a system based mainly on vertical transmission. Regarding these questions, and with a bibliographical review based on presenting the evolutionary perspective for ethnobiologists, this thesis contributes to the structuring of the recent area of Evolutionary Ethnobiology, promoting the dialogue between two important disciplines and concluding many questions still open in the literature of Ethnobiology and Cultural Evolution Theory.