Conflicts over healing practices: a discursive analysis of the pajelança cabocla in the Belle Époque in Pará

Abstract

The pajelança, despite its cultural and spiritual importance, faced merciless persecution by the medical and judicial authorities in defamatory campaigns in the Pará State press during the passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. In a period in which urban modernization and sanitarianism were prioritized by the country's political authorities, pajelança was signified as a threat to the monopoly of healing that academic physicians sought to establish. In view of the above, the aim of this paper, theoretically and methodologically based on materialist Discourse Analysis, is to analyze the effects of meaning on pajelança in the Pará State press, highlighting the tensions regarding the meaning of this shamanic practice between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. To begin with, we will work on the theoretical notions that will guide this study, besides discussing the disputes of meaning about shamanism. Then, we will advance in the discussion by debating the Press and the antagonistic conception regarding alternative healing practices in Pará State. Finally, we will present the discursive analysis of the corpus composed of excerpts from newspaper articles. We will finish this text with the final considerations, returning to the complexity of the disputes of meaning, as well as the relations of forces that are materialized in the discourses.