The meaning attributed to the health-disease process by the elderly of the Makuxi ethnicity, Roraima, Brazil

Abstract

The objective of this study was to describe the meanings, representations of health and illness and therapeutic practices in the sociocultural context of the Makuxi indigenous elderly, from a
certain community, in the Raposa/Serra do Sol Indigenous Land. This is a qualitative and exploratory study, based on ethnographic assumptions, carried out with 20 indigenous people. Data were collected in January 2020, through a semi-structured questionnaire, and submitted to Bardin's content analysis, and textual analysis using the Iramuteq software. The understanding of health and illness for the Makuxi elderly makes up questions of their daily life such as: the importance of working in the countryside, the consumption of typical foods of the culture and aspects of the elderly. The illness process, in his view, is strongly linked to the spell, and the search for traditional treatment is common in these cases, but the therapeutic itinerary occurs between traditional and biomedical systems. It is concluded that the knowledge of the health-disease process of the indigenous elderly has a strong cultural content associated with the Makuxi cosmovision, but which has already undergone transformations due to contact with non-indigenous people.