“Minha vida por um fio”: mobilização social e os itinerários das mulheres ribeirinhas vítimas de escalpelamento na Amazônia

Abstract

To produce this ethnography, the objective was to understand narratives and therapeutic itineraries in the context of pain and suffering of fishing women and riverine victims of scalping in the Amazon river regions. Scalping is a term in the biomedical field that refers to rip out, in the context in which I investigate, the accident occurs through the winding of women's hair on the engines of small boats made by master carpenters. This text deals with the field work carried out from August 2018 to August 2019 in Belém, Pará State, carried out in particular by the NGO of Motor Boat Accident Victims - ORVAM, with about 150 registered members that aims to accompany them in the post-accident. Women victims of this accident, which in short, occur when they are children or adolescents, have their lives drastically changed, from deprivation of the social environment, dropping out of school, dropping out of spouses, some even suffer from dropping out of family, the life labor market with fishing becomes impractical due to the headaches and the high temperatures of the northern region. Soon their trajectories are taken by therapeutic itineraries, with plastic surgeries, grafts, insertion of prostheses as ears (also sometimes mutilated) and use of wigs, since scalping makes hair growth impossible again, in this sense, they seek by this means rebuild their bodies and become what they call the "real women." The State, for its part, acts by formulating policies in a discourse of combat and accident prevention. Issues such as disability, child labor and occupational accidents are also part of the complex debate surrounding the context of this cruel and sometimes irreparable accident. In this sense, under the light of anthropology, I seek to reflect these issues at the intersection of Body, Health and Emotions.