Outsü, diseases and ritual healing practice in the Wayuu of the Media Guajira, Colombia

Abstract

This article is the product of an investigation that aimed to document in the 21st century the Wayuu indigenous healing practices developed in the Wararalain community of the department of La Guajira, Colombia. These practices are carried out by women outsü in ritual contexts, amid social, environmental, security and abandonment problems by the Colombian State, in which the culture and life of all the members of that town is in a constant threat, turning the Wayuu into people with special condition of vulnerability. Being a native anthropologist, I considered that the appropriate methodology should be dialogic, therefore I used the ethnographic method which was enriched with thematic conversations with older people, young people and women curators of the same community, where the spaces of dialogue I assumed as learning and the Wayuu as my mentors. My argument is that Wayuu healing in ritual contexts are characterized by the dialogic and intersubjective relationship between the healing woman -outsü-, her auxiliary spirit -aseyuu-, objects of power, the sick and her family. All this is possible through dreams, voices and songs as part of the healing practice of your health system, as these define the type of disease, how to prevent and cure it. These healing practices in the community are complemented, in some cases, with the sick's assistance to the biomedical system offered by the Colombian State, which has generated dialogues and conflicts between both health systems. The theoretical reference that I used as a guide for research involves complementary analytical fields that have been approached from the anthropological discipline and the social sciences, such as discussions about the symbolic in ritual healing contexts; the dreamlike as a transversal category; shamanism, which problematized and presented the conceptions that different authors have raised and that in the case of the Wayuu this category prevents account of specificities; I also analyze notions of health and disease that some indigenous communities have and that have been reflected in ethnographic research.