This page respects the original work's rights terms and independently introduces its bibliography, abstract, main results, and limitations. It is not a full translation.
About this resource
This is not a full-text translation of the original article. It is an independently written detailed introduction based on the publisher’s public text and article page, covering participants, methods, analytic categories, cultural reports, and evidence limits. The qualitative study centers accounts from Indigenous people who use rapé; it was not a clinical efficacy trial in humans for a specific disease.
“Integrative” and “therapeutic” in the title are a framework used by participants and authors to express connections among culture, health, and cosmology. Symptoms were not measured against a comparison group, and reported meanings or experiences cannot automatically be reinterpreted as medical diagnosis, pharmacologic action, or treatment effect.
Study design
Semi-structured interviews and field diaries were used in participatory qualitative research. Participants were shamans, leaders, and community members belonging to Kulina, Kaxinawá, Huni Kuin, and Nawa in Acre state; Potiguara in Paraíba state; and Baniwa and Tukano in Amazonas state. A total of 23 interviews were conducted. Collection sites included Potiguara communities and meetings of Indigenous leaders in Brasília, particularly the 2015 Acampamento Terra Livre.
Interview records were transcribed and organized through Bardin’s content analysis into 3 categories: “rapé and traditional medicine,” “paricá and Indigenous cosmology,” and “transcendence and healing.” Random sampling, blinding, a control group, before-and-after clinical scales, and chemical analysis were not part of the design.
Content
Participants described powders that might contain tobacco, other herbs, bark, and related materials, but ingredients and names differed by people and region. Potiguara accounts included names such as “torrado” and “espirrador,” associated with everyday life and bodily distress in older generations, while the possibility that knowledge was declining among younger generations was discussed. The study states that past or current use was confirmed in 10 of 33 Potiguara settlements.
In categories involving Baniwa and Tukano, paricá/rapé was not presented as a single chemical class of tobacco product but within a cosmology involving environment, prayer, protection, and relationships between bodily and spiritual domains. Accounts from participants in Acre were organized as overlapping bodily and transcendent meanings. These 3 categories cannot be combined as effects of the same product and constituents.
Results
The authors summarized that physical or medical meanings were comparatively prominent in Potiguara interviews; Baniwa and Tukano accounts emphasized cosmologies involving protection and harmony; and participants from Acre strongly connected bodily and transcendent meanings. Rapé was positioned not simply as consumption of a substance but as a cultural practice involving intergenerational knowledge, community, relationships with nature, authority, and ritual.
The study demonstrated diversity of meanings expressed across 23 interviews. It did not show that participants’ cultural reports were wrong, nor did it confirm clinical effects for disease. Its importance as qualitative research lies in making visible views of health that external biomedical terminology alone may not capture and providing context needed for dialogue among different systems of reasoning.
Limitations
The sample was small at 23 interviews. Although it included multiple peoples and states, it does not guarantee representativeness by ethnicity, age, or role. Interviews conducted within communities and at a political gathering occurred in different contexts, and recruitment routes and speaking environments may have influenced responses. Participatory methods and content analysis allow deep attention to meaning but also involve researcher classification and interpretation.
Potiguara, Baniwa, Tukano, and the peoples represented from Acre must not be flattened into 1 “Indigenous perspective.” The article page gives a 2019 publication date and recommended citation, while the issue is displayed as Vol. 2 No. 2 (2015) and received/accepted dates are in 2016. This resource follows the publication page and assigned slug in using 2019, while retaining the metadata inconsistency.
Safety
The study did not systematically measure adverse events, heart rate or blood pressure, blood nicotine, dependence, nasal-mucosal effects, or long-term outcomes. Cultural descriptions indicate that powder may contain tobacco, other plants, and bark, but ash, pH, total nicotine, free nicotine, and contaminants were not analyzed. Something called “paricá” cannot be assumed chemically identical to marketed rapé or tobacco powder from another region.
Participants’ accounts of harmony, protection, and use for bodily distress should be respected as cultural testimony, but they do not provide a clinical response rate or safe conditions of use. This resource gives no preparation, administration, or self-treatment method.
Source and rights
Original source: França RCM, et al. Rapé como prática cultural integrativa e terapêutica dos povos indígenas: um estudo de caso a partir do olhar indígena. Antropología Andina Muhunchik - Jathasa. 2(2):87–104. DOI: 10.59159/2015/286.
No clear Creative Commons terms applying to the individual article were identified on the primary page. This is therefore an independently worded detailed introduction rather than a translation. It does not reproduce extended statements, tables, or original prose. The inconsistency between publication year and issue year is retained as bibliographic uncertainty.