Relationships between healers and medicinal plants in traditional healing traits

Abstract

This article analyzes the practices of three healers from the municipality of Pato Branco, seeking to understand how their knowledge and practices are constructed in dialogue with medicinal plants, spiritualities, and multispecies relationships. The research uses a qualitative approach, grounded in sensitive listening and close observation, to reveal how healing is experienced beyond conventional medicine, involving body, mind, and spirit. The healers' experiences highlight resistance to the erasure of traditional knowledge, especially in the face of pressures from agribusiness, monoculture, and the use of pesticides, which directly impact backyards and the availability of healing plants. At the same time, they demonstrate their role as guardians of practices that articulate memory, spirituality, community care, and the agency of plants and other nonhuman beings. Drawing on authors such as Stengers, Haraway, Tsing, and Shiva, the study reinforces the importance of recognizing local, multispecies, and spiritual epistemologies as alternatives to the hegemonic logic of knowledge and care. Thus, the research contributes to the debate on the valorization of traditional knowledge, the preservation of biodiversity and the construction of possible futures in territories threatened by colonial and capitalist forces.