Los Apus : configuración etnomédica en Perú actual

Peru presents a diversity of cultures, ethnicities, languages that cover the three regions of the country: mountain range, coast and jungle. This diversity is not understood as geographic insulation in space and historical from time, but they present channels of openness in which their cosmovisions are resignified and are reflected in new elements as they arrive or bring to their lands of origin. In this context of diversity, we move to the city of Ayacucho, the south-central mountain range of the Peruvian Andes, to enter the imaginary world of the Apus, spirits of the mountains, through the Pongo, its mediator between the supernaturaldivine and the natural-human world. All of this is embedded in a social grouping called the Andean Cosmovision Family Angels Custodians (FCAAC). The main focus of the FCAAC activity is health care for people who come in search of their healing. Most patients have performed a previous therapeutic itinerary before reaching the Apus. Apus, besides being specialists in addressing health problems that afflict people, have, among other functions, to address issues of different nature: justice, family problems, economic problems, religion, agriculture, control of atmospheric phenomena. As a social group, the FCAAC, under Pongo and the Apus, acquires a dimension of religious character, so that there is a overlap between medicine and religion. The present thesis can be divided into three sections. One part deals extensively with the ethnography of the FCAAC as a social grouping, the "Apu Ethnomedical System" with the imaginary world of the Apus with their healing rituals through the so-called healing tables and the Pongo figure as the holder of mystical power. Another part addresses the experiences of patients in the Apu Ethnomedical System, their therapeutic itineraries and some clinical cases with biomedical diagnoses. A third part comes to be the theoretical proposal reached called "Apu Total Ethnomedical Configuration". The theoretical proposal reflects the intellectual immersion in the field of medical anthropology and related sciences, as well as the philosophical reflection synthesized in the interpretative conclusions, in the theoretical proposal and throughout the thesis in the opportune occasions.