Corpos que zelam saberes, saberes que zelam corpos: um olhar interseccional sobre benzimento no Oeste de Santa Catarina

Abstract

This monograph analyzes the forms of knowledge associated with the practice of benzimento (traditional blessing and healing practices) in Western Santa Catarina from an intersectional perspective, seeking to understand how these practices are constituted, resisted, and transmitted amid historical processes of delegitimation, colonization, and subalternization. It is based on the understanding that benzimento is not a residual practice or merely a popular belief, but rather a form of embodied knowledge produced within the margins of institutional and epistemic hierarchies imposed by colonization. The research is organized into three chapters: the first presents the theoretical framework and methodological path, articulating the concepts of coloniality of knowledge and power, coloniality of gender, subalternity, and practical everyday forms of knowledge. It also grounds oral history as a method coherent with a form of knowledge constituted outside official documents and archives. The second chapter reconstructs the colonization process of Western Santa Catarina, demonstrating how colonization promoted by the State and private companies reorganized hierarchies of knowledge, power, and gender, delegitimizing Caboclo and Indigenous cultural practices — including benzimento — through a process of symbolic dispossession that transferred the “goods of salvation” from communities to the institutional authority of the Romanized Catholic Church. The third chapter focuses on the analysis of the life trajectory of a female benzedeira (practitioner of benzimento) from Chapecó, employing intersectionality as the main analytical framework to understand how class, gender, religiosity, and benzimento are articulated and mutually constituted within the experience of those who hold this knowledge. The results indicate that the knowledge of benzedeiras does not exist separately from the concrete conditions of those who practice it, and that an intersectional analysis is necessary to account for this complexity. It is also demonstrated that, despite successive processes of marginalization, benzimento persists as a practice of re- existence and as a form of knowledge that challenges modern and colonial criteria of epistemic legitimacy.