The crossroads as a method for activating ancestral and community technologies of care and healing

Abstract

This is a manifest-text, situated in the method of the crossroads, which calls for epistemological shifts in favor of ancestral and popular technologies of care and healing. In a theoretical-critical style, it proposes to put pressure on white-hegemonic ways of doing health research, [re]affirming the centrality of ancestral and popular pluriversalities and cosmoperceptions as the driving force behind sophisticated systems of care. In a spiral movement, a conversation is established in which the ethnographic method is called upon to be traversed by the offal of the interlocutor field, allowing itself to be affected by the cosmoperception of those who are the protagonists of this knowledge-doing-practice based on oral-ancestral memory. From there, ancestral and popular technologies are repositioned as a living science that operates beyond institutionalization and ethnocentric methodological systematization. Finally, the struggle for belonging and for the right to exist of the notorious ancestral and popular know-how and practices, together with their technologies, is highlighted. The crossroads thus emerges as a libertarian, counter-hegemonic and decolonial method, evoking the House as a space-place of inventiveness and dialogical oral readings, where ancestry forges identities and [re]existences in territories and communities that lead networks of sociability and care. The main finding is that the methodology for producing scientific evidence is operated by whiteness and its technologies of fear, hence the need for the crossroads as a pluriversal method for decolonizing scientific production in health.