The symbolic efficacy of medicinal plants: practices knowledge and religious beliefs amongst the Nalu healers of Guinea-Bissau

摘要

BackgroundIn attempting to understand how the use of medicinal plants is symbolically valued and transformed according to specific cosmologies, we gain valuable insight into the ethnopharmacologial practices, in terms of the major role played by healers, as custodians of local ethnobotanical knowledge, but also as ritual masters.Thus, the goal of this paper is to understand how medicinal plants are used differently depending on a combination between the healers’ field of expertise and personal history on the one hand, and the diversified religious and symbolical frameworks on the other.