@article{ref1,
title="Indigenous narratives about suicide in Alto Rio Negro, Brazil: weaving meanings",
journal="Saude e Sociedade",
year="2016",
author="de Souza, Maximiliano Loiola Ponte",
volume="25",
number="1",
pages="145-159",
abstract="Higher suicide mortality rates are recurrently found among indigenous in comparison with surrounding populations, including in São Gabriel da Cachoeira, in the state of Amazonas, the Brazilian city with the highest percentage of self-declared indigenous people. To understand how suicide is represented in specific indigenous contexts is a qualitative and relevant dimension, but poorly explored. The aim of this study was to analyze seven narratives about suicide of a kumu (traditional healer) from the most populous indigenous community of São Gabriel da Cachoeira. In the analytical and interpretative process, we attempted to make the practice of double hermeneutic, interpret the interpretation of the narrator, seeking support on the classical and contemporary ethnographic literature, theories about the construction of the person and of kinship in the Amerindian context.   The analysis of the narratives allowed reconstructing suicide as a phenomenon associated with conflicts deeply inserted in socio-cultural and historical aspects of the indigenous populations of that region, which refer to intergenerational tensions, gender and kinship. The management of these conflicts seems to be compromised, since traditional strategies appear to lose their symbolic effectiveness, and other appropriate alternatives were not found to replace them. Alcohol use, although an important element in the understanding of suicide, should not be taken as the central explicative element, but above all as a catalyst of these conflicts.   Keywords: Suicide; Indigenous Population; Narra- tives; Transcultural Psychiatry. <p /> <p>Language: pt</p>",
language="pt",
issn="0104-1290",
doi="10.1590/S0104-12902016145974",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0104-12902016145974"
}