Etnobotânica dos cultos afro-brasileiros na Região Sudoeste do Paraná: a importância das plantas na construção da identidade cultural

Abstract

Ethnobotanical studies recognize the natural dynamic between humans and plants. Pajés, shamans, wizards and witches are valuable sources of ethnobotanical studies since they hold an ancestral knowledge about the healing powers of plants and their ways of management. Priests of African-Brazilian cults, such as Umbanda and Candomblé, have a mystical cosmos around nature and its elements, thus contributing to the preservation of medicinal knowledge and ritual uses of plants. However, the national population of African-Brazilian cults’ adherents is decimating, and taking much of their knowledge that were not understood and even recorded. This study aimed to carry out an ethnobotanical study of African-Brazilian cults in Paraná’ Southwest Region, assessing the importance of plants used in magic-religious practices for construction of their cultural identity. The survey was conducted with priests of Umbanda and Candomblé in the cities of Pato Branco, Dois Vizinhos and Espigão Alto do Iguaçu, where 13 priests were interviewed, where nine where umbandistas and four candomblecistas. To find key informants was used unintentional sampling type Snowball. To collect the ethnobotanical data of plants used within the religious context, socioeconomic questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, free listing, guided tours, and collection of botanical material were applied. The relative importance of the ethnospecies was calculated through the Cultural Significance Index and the similarity of species listed among priests was analyzed using the Jaccard coefficient. The talks of the informants were coded with the intent to discover patterns, enabling comparisons. 177 plant species distributed in 70 plant families were found. Species such as Ruta graveolens L; Petiveria alliacea L; Sansevieria trifascata Prain; Rosmarinus officinalis L; Plectranthus barbatus Andr; Citrus sinensis L; Lavandula angustifolia Mill; Zea mays L. e Eugenia uniflora L. were the most cited and the ones with most relative importance value. Plants that appear idiosyncratic in the free list may be the most valuable for a single informant, or belong to a cultural domain and be widely recognized, as it was the case of the Milicia excelsa Welw. and Cola acuminata P. Beauv. The plants are designed in most of its uses for medicines, baths and offerings/ witchcrafts, such uses, combined with blessings practices and fumigation, strengthen ethnomedical therapeutic practices, where the leaves are more representative of use. Umbandistas claim receiving ethnomedical procedures from the instruction spirits, and they associate plants to spiritual entities according to those who attribute the instruction. Candomblecistas have plants as essential materials to any religious practices, having a classification of plant associated with their Orishas cautiously and accurately. These forms of knowledge are very conservative, which is transmitted vertically with symbolic ties. Gender, age, and initial local and time were not factors influencing the discovery of patterns in the cultural identity associated to plants in the group studied in this ethnobotanical pioneer research pioneer with African-Brazilian cults in the Paraná’ Southwest Region.