Markos Panayiotou
The entanglements of Kichwa Healing Practices with Other-Than-Human Environments
In my dissertation, I will ethnographically engage with the ways communities in Napo, Ecuador, perceive, interact, and heal with their land. Drawing on critical insights from medical anthropology, political ecology and the decolonial turn, the main goal of my research is to investigate the entanglements of local healing practices with other-than-human environments. By placing emphasis on the political ecology of healing, I aim to extend biomedical definitions of ‚curing‘ diseases, to embodied and socially embedded practices underlying health and well-being (Middleton 2010). In this way, healing will be contextualized within social and ecological environments which I see as formative of social identities and relationships.
The political ecology and planetary frameworks will facilitate the conceptualization of different scales of healing, spanning from the micro-level of multispecies interactions to the macro-level of politico-economic and climatic conditions. ‚Ecology‘ will not be viewed neutrally; rather, it will be perceived in conjunction with socioeconomic and sociopolitical conditions, such as ethnic, class, and gender relations. These analytical frameworks permit a multiscalar analysis of the complex interrelations between climate change, the health of local populations, and their possibilities for healing. This opens up a space for thinking about other-than-human environments not just as “disease ecologies” but also as spaces of well-being and care, in which other animals, plants and spirit dueños possess healing agency.