Plantas ritualísticas e medicinais em comunidades quilombolas e afrobrasileiras na Baixada Cuiabana, Mato Grosso - Brasil

Abstract

Ethnosocial factors, such as the expropriation of African culture imposed to black Brazilians, the disintegration of African memory, as well as an increase in the rate of European immigration to Brazil during the nineteenth century, triggered a domination and a superimposition of white values on black. It is understood as whitening the entire movement of erasure of Afro cultures to the detriment of others. For the Ethnobotanical record and managed by the populations in the landscape units, application of semistructured and open interviews. For the qualitative analysis, the landscape unit was divided into three categories: (a) cerrado; (b) forest; (c) backyards. They were grouped into four ethnocategories of uses: Medicinal and Mystical Religious. In the quantitative approach, the Use Value of each species was calculated and to identify the plants with the greatest purpose, calculating the informant consensus through the Fidelity Level. Most declare to be of Afro-descendant racial origin. In the interviews with leaders of AfroBrazilian religions, a total of 65 species were obtained, which act both as medicinal and mystical-religious, playing an important role in the cosmoperception of quilombola communities and faithful of Afro-Brazilian religions. More than 50% of the cited species are native, while the rest belong to the African and European continent. For the quilombola communities of Acorizal, Nossa Senhora do Livramento and Chapada dos Guimarães they use the plants through teas (infusion), however, when verifying the same use in the Afro-Brazilian religions in the "Baixada Cuiabana/Cuiaba Lowlands" , the main use of plants is made through baths (32% of the cited species), followed by the medicinal ethnocategory with 17% of the relative frequency of citations, with 12% of the species cited as amulet, followed by smoking (11%). The ceremonial uses accumulate 5%, while the species used as settlement accumulate 3% of the total of cited species. The use of plant species is indispensable in Ethnobotanical practices, whether of traditional origin (quilombola communities) or religious in Afro-Brazilian cults, whose ancestral knowledge permeates this knowledge in an intrinsic and, therefore, inseparable way.