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Paper Short Abstract:

Our contribution aims to reflect on the (im)possibility of dialogue between human agents - as patients, patients' families and medical staff - and non-human agents - as spirits, ancestors and divinities - in an ethnographic research with children diagnosed with disabilities and their families.

Paper Abstract:

As part of the research project "Integra: Between biomedicine and local therapies. Crossed looks on Mental Health in Mozambique", our contribution aims to reflect on the (im)possibility of dialogue and integration between human agents, as patients, patients' families and medical staff, and non-human agents as spirits, ancestors and divinities.

In a context characterized by austerity measures, cuts in international funds and an armed conflict in the north of the country, Mozambique finds itself in a new economic, moral, and financial crisis.

It is in this scenario that families find themselves to manage their children's disabilities while navigating a plurality of precautions and strategies in a context of social vulnerability. The presentation shows, from one hand, how divinations, promoted by traditional healers, do not always mitigate uncertainty, nor the efforts of healers to manage these invisible forces are always successful. Some traditional interpretations tend to put at stake the responsibility for disability to third parties or invisible forces. This tend to increment symptoms of collective insecurity creating conflicts at the level of the household and of the neighborhood. On the other hand, conventional medicine, commonly gives uncertain and hasty diagnosis offering, almost exclusively, a pharmacological intervention.

During their search for meaning – in between failures and previous attempts – families risk to find themselves in a "paralysis of action". They struggle to move among the plurality of interpretative models searching for a solution of pacification and purification in order to activate the therapeutic device that introduces changes in their children’s life.