Paper short abstract:

I examine Yanomami health agents' experience of training as an act of translation that paradoxically aimed to join while separating globalised practices of biomedicine and Yanomami practices of shamanism, raising important issues about intercultural care and health agents' training courses

Paper long abstract:

In 2005, health authorities in Venezuela decided to revamp the longstanding Simplified Medicine Programme in Venezuela, implemented mostly in indigenous areas with few doctors. Rather than a matter of 'task shifting', the new programme follows from the state's renewed interest in indigenous peoples and an effort towards providing 'intercultural' health services. For health authorities, interculturality supposes respecting cultural difference, yet changing practices which result in illness according to the prevailing biomedical paradigm. From their perspective, the training of indigenous health agents operates as an 'educating translation' where doctors teach indigenous peoples who become representatives of biomedicine. In contrast, for the Yanomami health agents, the training course was an act of translation through which they could learn to walk 'the paths of health' and do like doctors, without achieving semantic commensurability or identity with doctors. Health agents acted as brokers of alterity: on the one hand, they were learning from the doctors and undergoing bodily transformations into health workers; on the other, they asserted the validity of their own systems of healing, while generally keeping their medical ontology concealed from the view of doctors. I examine several analogies made between schools, shamanic initiations and the training course, and also between clinical algorithms and shamans' healing paths. This case challenges the idea of training courses for health agents as a space of knowledge transmission, and exemplifies a strategy of translation in which versions of healing co-exist but do not mix, with comparative value for other intercultural contexts.