Mutação de informações em sistemas médicos locais sobre o uso de complexos vegetais

Abstract

The use of plants for medicinal purposes is one of the strategies developed by people who contribute to the formation of local medical systems. In these systems, in addition to using plants individually, people make use of some vegetable mixtures such as bottles, syrups and lickers, considered in this study as vegetable complexes. These plant complexes are produced from experiments and perpetuated by the transmission of knowledge, a process that is susceptible to undergo unintended changes in information. These changes in information are called "Theory of Cultural Evolution" as "Cultural Mutation". When these mutations occur unintentionally, they are called "Information Mutation", when they occur intentionally, they are called "Guided Variation". In the case of Mutation of information (focus of the dissertation), these are one of the main factors that can lead to the establishment of “Poorly adapted traits” (plants used for medicinal purposes that do not have the desired effectiveness) in local medical systems. For this purpose, we seek to identify the plants used as medicinal and which of these are being used in plant complexes, in addition to verifying the existence of mutation of information. Data were collected in the Lagoa do Junco community, located in the state of Alagoas, Northeast Brazil. For data collection, semi-structured interviews were used to address local knowledge about medicinal plants used in isolation and in plant complexes, together with the collection and identification of botanical material. In addition, in a second step, we access the perception of efficiency of all informants who mentioned producing vegetable complexes, in order to identify perceptions related to the effectiveness of the plants that are part of these preparations. In addition, we used this step to verify whether the information changes that occurred were random (mutation) or whether they were intentional (Guided variation). The data were analyzed using the R development environment (R Core Team, 2017), with the aid of the “lme4” package for multilevel analysis. Of the 120 interviewees, 108 mentioned producing or using some type of vegetable complex. The vegetable complexes mentioned by the individuals totaled 141, equivalent to 07 types of medicinal baths, 39 teas, 26 bottles, 64 lickers and 05 types of syrups. The plants used for isolated use and in vegetable complexes were totaled in 52 species and are deposited in the Herbarium Dárdano de Andrade Lima IPA-PE. We found that there is a mutation of information in the local medical system associated with the knowledge of medicinal plants. However, it was found that the occurrence of information mutation is greater for some factors when compared to others. For example, the average mutation rate is higher for the use of isolated plants than for plants used in plant complexes, this difference being significant (p = 0.02); the average mutation rate is higher for medicinal function than for part of the plants used as a medicinal form, this difference being significant (p <0.001). In addition, it was found that there is no relationship between mutation and perceived efficiency of medicinal plants by the informants (p = 0.19) and that the changes in information become more random (mutation) than intentional (Guided variation) ( p <0.001).