RESUMO
Religiosity/spirituality can affect health and quality of life in myriad ways. Religion has been present since the first moments of our evolutionary history, whether it is understood as a byproduct or as an adaptation of our cognitive evolution. We investigated how religion influences medicinal plant-based local medical systems (LMSs) and focuses on how individual variation in the degree of religiosity/spirituality affects the structure of LMSs. The knowledge of people about their medical systems was obtained through the free-listing technique, and level of religiosity/spirituality was calculated using the Brazilian version of the Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness/Spirituality. We employed a Generalized Linear Model to obtain the best model. Religiosity/spirituality is predictive of structural and functional aspects of medicinal plant-based LMSs. Our model encourages a discussion of the role of religion in the health of an individual as well as in the structure of an individual's support system. Religiosity/spirituality (and the dimensions of Commitment and Religious and Spiritual History, in particular) act to protect structural and functional elements of LMSs. By providing protection, the LMS benefits from greater resilience, at both the individual and population levels. We suggest that the socialization process resulting from the religious phenomenon has contributed to the complexity and maintenance of LMSs by means of the interaction of individuals as they engage in their religious observances, thus facilitating cultural transmission.
Assuntos
Conhecimentos, Atitudes e Prática em Saúde , Medicina Tradicional/psicologia , Qualidade de Vida , Religião , Espiritualidade , Adaptação Psicológica , Adulto , Brasil , Etnobotânica , Etnofarmacologia , Feminino , Humanos , MasculinoRESUMO
ETHNOPHARMACOLOGICAL RELEVANCE: This study sought to understand the role of plants and animals in traditional medical systems and evaluate the capacity of these systems to absorb impacts and maintain their identity by determining the existence of functional substitutes. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Ethnobiological data were collected through semi-structured interviews and free lists at a rural community in the semiarid region of northeastern Brazil. The data were subjected to the utilitarian redundancy model and analyzed by tests of proportion and variance. RESULTS: We found that most of the therapeutic targets treated with animal-based remedies were also treatable by plant-based remedies; these targets were perceived as very usual, although they were not considered dangerous. Furthermore, people considered the plants and animals to be equally effective at curing overlapping therapeutic targets, but the plant remedies were used more frequently. The findings show that local knowledge about medicinal plants and animals follows similar patterns regarding the utilitarian redundancy, with high functional overlap among these features. However, the ease of access to the medicinal resource influences the choice of treatment, leading to an increased preference for plants over animals. In addition, we suggest that during the cultural evolution process, people concentrated their efforts on experimenting with different resources for the treatment of diseases that were very frequent locally, even if not very severe, which contributed to the resilience of the local medical system. CONCLUSION: Furthermore, we infer that plants may effectively perform the function of healing, whereas animals act as reserves of resilience for the system, maintaining system function in the face of disturbances that may affect the availability of plant species.