Género y salud en la Orinoquía Colombianaanálisis antropológico de las comunidades piaroa en la Selva de Matavén

Resumen

Since the 1970s, the U̧wo̧tju̧ja̧-Piaroa indigenous people have experienced great sociocultural changes derived from processes of negotiation-resistance that have sought to integrate them into the modernizing action of the Nation-States. These transformation processes have been enhanced with the emergence of developmental discourses, the expansion of biomedicine and universal formal education in everyday life of communities; alternatives that were added to long-term processes in the region such as the evangelization and the extractive economy. Although these integration processes have brought benefits to the communities and have brought apparent improvements in their quality of life, they have revealed the existence of multiple asymmetric power relationships among the members of the villages; these experiences are in conflicts with the institutions and mechanisms of social organization that supported the ontological models of health and disease, as well as on the conceptions of the body and the legitimacy of the practices and specialists required in the health-disease-care processes. In a dialectical relationship between "voices from outside and voices from within", new roles, functions and responsibilities have been assigned to men and women, leaving particularly stressed the groups that actively participate in intercultural dynamics. Thus, the main objective of this research is to account for the transformations in the lives of U̧wo̧tju̧ja̧-Piaroa indigenous women in Colombia, following the implementation and generalization of the biomedical system in their villages, focusing particularly on the analysis of practices, discourses and gender imaginaries of the inhabitants of the Orinoco zone of the Selva de Matavén Indigenous reservation. The purpose is to know the mechanisms through which the development processes linked to biomedicine, after being re-signified by members of dispersed rural communities, allow the vitalization of ethnic, gender and citizen identities; these are apparently contradictory in contexts of acculturation and miscegenation, however they can generate new fields for the political action of local actors, specifically for women. Key words: gender relations; Colombian Orinoquía and Amazonia; health-diseasecare processes (HDAP); U̧wo̧tju̧ja̧-Piaroa.