Eu pari foi pra curar: cuidado, itinerâncias e decolonialidades do nascer na tradição.

Abstract

This dissertation addresses a subject little studied in Public Health: the practices of care of the midwives na tradição, who are associated with the School of Knowledge, Culture and Ancestral Tradition (ESCTA-Cais do Parto), as well as the care itinerâncias experienced by couples who chose this care format for the birth of their children in the context of the socio public health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Aiming to understand how care na tradição is offered during pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum, we analyze the cosmologies and ways of practicing care as well as the methodologies manifested in ESCTA/Cais do Parto' online group circles of pregnant women and pregnant couples. Moreover, we bring to light the narratives of the couples, how they symbolized their perinatal experiences, the itinerâncias of care, as well as the relationships cultivated with the midwives. This is a qualitative research of ethnographic inspiration, developed during the months of October/ 2020 to March/ 2021, when we performed participant-observation of the online group circles and conducted interviews with couples cared for na tradição. We privilege the strategy of Thematic Analysis for the organization, calculation and interpretation of data collected in the field. In order to understand the scenario of national midwifery, we present the political and social elements involved in the geopolitics of giving birth in Brazil, and then locate in the gradient of knowledge the practices offered by midwives na tradição. We characterize the midwives in question, pointing out that they produce counter-hegemonic and decolonial practices of care. In this sense, we affirm that when approaching decolonial perspective, they construct resistance movements to modern/colonial logic, structuring breaking points to the dominant model of care in childbirth and postpartum. We identify that care na tradição was organized around three cosmological principles: spirituality, three-dimensionality and ancestry, as well as methodological aspects such as orality, popular education and rituals. These elements indicate that care na tradição reaffirms the ontological, epistemic and political difference of its work, thus serving to visualize and rescue traditional knowledge in the field of contemporary Brazilian obstetric health. Furthermore, we analyze the couples' trajectories in the moments before pregnancy, the discovery of pregancy, and in the search and choice for the care "that produced the most meaning", in the context of childbirth and postpartum, in the encounter with the civil registration system and in the comadrio relations. We argue that, despite the different itinerâncias, the choice to be cared for na tradição takes place, revealing individual projects as to how to give birth/birth, whose centrality is the autonomy and desire for the enrichment and singularity of the couples' perinatal experiences. However, by articulating itself to the decolonial collective project of care na tradição, the choice initially mediated by individualism became one that centralized the bond with the midwives, unfolding in the relationship of comadrio, whose basis was communitarianism. Therefore, we can see that the care itinerâncias woven by the couples and heard in this investigation, reveal interrelations between autonomy-enrichment-relationality, thereby forming a type of mixed individualism, whose connotations would be more relational, and can be understood as a relational individualism.