Abstract

BRANCO-PEREIRA, Alexandre. Among belief and knowledge: culture as a fake reality in a psychiatric ambulatory for immigrants and refugees in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Etnográfica [online]. 2022, vol.26, n.3, pp.625-650.  Epub Jan 30, 2023. ISSN 0873-6561.  https://doi.org/10.4000/etnografica.12118.

This paper presents reflections from ethnographic data obtained during a master’s degree research in a mental health service for immigrants, refugees and deaf people in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. During this research, I worked as a collaborating anthropologist for the service, and this was a dynamic and incessant process of invention and counter-invention as to what an anthropologist would do in a mental health service for people with what was defined as “linguistic and cultural vulnerabilities”. From this, I present the logic of the machinery of production and assimilation (or not) of differences by separating the world between those who believe and those who know, or the premodern and the modern. Finally, I propose to populate these contexts and scenarios by anthropologists, taking seriously the symbolic dimensions in health contexts and producing data and care.

Keywords : anthropology; mental health; immigrants; refugees; Brazil.

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