Nosology and Sustainability: Indigenous healing knowledge and sustainable human-environment relations in Northwestern Amazonia

João Paul Barreto Lima, Rosijane Fernandes Moura, Wolfgang Kapfhammer, Jaime Diakara Moura Fernandes, Silvio Sanches Barreto.

Nosology and Sustainability: Indigenous healing knowledge and sustainable human-environment relations in Northwestern Amazonia

This project is situated at the interface of social anthropology and medicine to investigate the impact of Indigenous healing methods on human-environment relationships in northwestern Amazonia. Specifically, the project seeks to explore ethnographically the ways Indigenous healing knowledge, which holds balanced relationships with non-human beings as prerequisite for individual integrity of the body, establishes „rules of life“ that have the potential to create sustainability in a “Western” sense. The Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at LMU and the Global Mental Health Research Group at LMU Klinikum collaborate on this research question with Indigenous members of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Manaus (UFAM). This interdisciplinary research connects Indigenous, anthropological, and medical perspectives as an innovative and decolonial contribution to discourse and practice of perpetuating strategies of sustainability to meet the challenges of planetary climate change.

This project is funded by the LMU Munich funding for sustainability and it collaborates closely with the DFG-funded Reinhart Koselleck-Project on Planetary Healing as Transformative Process, led by Eveline Dürr, Project number: 529294330.