Como as avós ou entre os doutores: memórias de parto e identidade, corpos e territórios em disputa no quilombo do Kaonge, recôncavo da Bahia

Abstract

This work discusses problems concerning childbirth, memory, body and identity (mainly the processes of emergence and/or reinvention of identities in context of conflicts and disputes involving territories and bodies), based on the ethnographic fieldwork held in the Kaonge Maroon/Quilombola Community (i.e., descendants of escapees from slavery) (Cachoeira -BA). It is intent to analyze the meanings of childbirth and care practices related to the woman's body, focusing on gestation, childbith and puerperium. There is a search for understanding two sets of distinct, but articulated problems: on the one hand, even in face of the meanings attributed by such communities to their identity and to what constitutes it, must be understand the interactions between distinct sets of knowledge and practices - scientific medical knowledge and the so-called "traditional" knowledge - in a context of the disappearance of the practice of traditional birth and popularization of hospitalar childbirth; on the other hand, it is a matter of reflecting how (and if) the kinds of childbirth would express different conceptions of health, body, identity and even communitarian life, which, in the case of these Maroon/Quilombola communities, would affect social dynamics and historical processes of interpenetration with the urban universe and its institutions, characterized by disputes between bodies and territories.