Paper short abstract:

In Afro-Brazilian religions, health issues are examined and treated on the basis of oral tradition, including myths and narratives. How are narratives of illness constructed? In which cases do they integrate oral tradition?

Paper long abstract:

In Afro-Brazilian religion, health issues and healing procedures are determined through oracle consultation, where myths (presenting situations involving people, animal, plants, divinities) constitute a paradigm that is interpreted and actualized in order to shade light on and face current problems. Furthermore, a series of myths and stories compose an oral tradition that is narrated and taken as example in ordinary advices concerning behaviours to be avoided or simple rituals that may be realized in order to solve less serious problems.

Biographical narratives, in the healing process, are intersubjectively constructed, told, enacted through words, actions, gestures. They may involve family members, ancestors, other members of the religious community, divinities, objects. Narratives are composed of personal memories, reflexivity, sensibility, affect, bodily experience, and symbolic, aesthetic, social, political and spiritual elements.

Narratives are constructed as a personal myth (often interweaving the healing process with religious experience), that gives a meaning to disease – and, sometimes, to a whole life – on the basis of a collective myth, articulating the two dimensions that Lévi-Strauss detects, respectively, in psychoanalytic and shamanic practice. They constitute, at the same time, a construction of a narrative on oneself and a narrative construction of oneself.

On the other hand, personal myths – especially when they respect specific characteristics – may become part of collective myths, that are told and used as examples that direct choices and behaviours of other people, in a continuous process of growth, evolution and accumulation.