The ‘woman that clean’: a critical-constructive revision of the intercultural interpretation in the urban markets of Cuenca (Azuay, Ecuador)

Abstract

This article documents and analyses the concepts of etiology and prevention as well as the healing methods used by the urban healers of the province of Cuenca, Ecuador. Through the analysis and deconstruction of key concepts of our investigation, we conclude that the term of ‘cultural hybridization’, in the sense of unconscious and arbitrary processes of the mixture and pastiche of cultures (a paradigm of the cultural logic of globalism), is insufficient because it does not consider the dense description of the cultural practices of urban healers, which demonstrates the conscious and reflexive appropriation and incorporation of elements of other cultures in the cultural grammar system of Andean ancestral medicine that we prefer to call ‘interculturality’. The result of our investigation is that the cleansing rituals in the urban markets of Cuenca testify to a strong indigenous heritage, without the incorporation of elements of western biomedicine. Our investigation proposes to translate these practices of Andean popular medicine as ways of resistance of indigenous culture, born during the large historical process of domination and exclusion by the ‘White Man’. In this perspective, which abandons the discourse of the victimization of the Indian, we affirm that the urban healers baptize a large number of the children in the peripheral urban spaces of Cuenca with indigenous spirituality, which we call ‘spiritual-cultural reconquest’.