Ethnographic fragment 01/21/2020 - Pataxó blessing
- Marcio Maia Malta
- 14 de out. de 2022
- 1 min de leitura
After going to the bathroom after returning from a visit to the former cacique Zé Baraia, I was walking through Dona Guiomar's backyard, further ahead, in the open water tank on the ground was Mr. João Cancela refreshing himself.
Without any premeditation, I asked him if he could bless me (his granddaughters had already told me that he was a healer). He asked me what was wrong with me, and I answered that it was the "evil eye" (in fact, I was worried about the uninterrupted misfortunes that had been afflicting me since the eve of the fieldwork) and he asked me to wait near a fallen coconut tree trunk in the center of the yard. Ten minutes later, he came from the back of his house in the yard with a small bunch of leaves in one hand. He asked me to position myself in a certain way and warned me that he would throw the evil to my left (later when I lifted the drone I discovered that in that direction was the sea). He prayed to my body three times from the front and three times from the back, at the end we prayed an "Our Father", and he said it was done. As I walked towards the kitchen so that I could have lunch, Mr. João Cancela walked in the direction of where he had thrown the evil, at the side edge of the yard. He analyzed the bunch of leaves that he had used to bless me and threw it away on the other side of the fence.#MarcioMaiaMalta
