Health in Movement: an ethnography of health practices at the Marielle Vive! camp, in Valinhos, SP.

• Grant number: 23/18234-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: March 01, 2025
• End date: August 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Rural Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Nashieli Cecilia Rangel Loera
• Grantee: Luciana Cavalcanti Alvarez
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project proposes the elaboration of an ethnography of the health practices carried out in the Marielle Vive! camp, located in the rural region of Valinhos (SP) and organized by the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST). At the camp, there is a health sector, that coordinates visits by doctors and medical students to provide care and educational activities on health topics. In addition to the health sector, there are other practices that are of interest to this project. One of them is the maintenance of a medicinal garden and the preparation of therapeutic products with medicinal herbs, which are used by residents as well as recommended by the aforementioned doctors. Finally, collective embroidery cycles are also carried out, an activity designed as care in the field of mental health for women, but which also has a political formative role. At a national level, in the movement's guidelines, the Health Sector has the role of organizing health demands and promoting health for people in MST territories, as well as carrying out educational and debate activities on the topic. Based on participant observation in the activities listed above and taking the notion of "common" as a theoretical-methodological operator, the aim is to carry out an ethnography of these practices that seek to promote and care for the health of camp residents, searching to identify collective constructions of health at a local level and tension them with the notion of health present in the movement's guidelines. Therefore, the central objective of the project is to ethnograph the local and everyday compositions of this notion and forms of health care, paying attention to the relations between people, land, plants, food and the circulation of information, knowledge and objects, as well as for the pedagogical dimension of knowledge exchange and knowledge production in this daily process. (AU)