Las enfermedades culturales y la sanación popular en las Islas Canarias

Popular medicine in the Canary Islands has a series of essential aspects that go hand in hand with the healing process. This article analyses some of the fundamentals underlying the healing process in Popular medicine in the Canary Islands. The existence of ‘cultural illnesses’, outside the paradigm of biomedicine, are at the basis of the practice of the curanderas and santiguadoras, whose aim is to give the sufferer a sense of their disorder, through a dialogical praxis and the referral to a complex universe of shared symbols. It also highlights the configuration of a whole series of cultural codes that, operating with the substratum of Popular Catholicism, articulate spaces and sacralised elements of healing. It also addresses, among other issues, the reception of the ‘gift’, ‘grace’ or ‘power’ to heal, the charismatic legitimation of the healer/sanctifier, and crucial aspects within the healing process such as the word as therapeutic mediation, the relationships of trust involved between healer and sufferer, and the configuration of the healing process itself as a ritualistic performance.