Public Project
Mexico Mágico
All around the country different kinds of "curanderos", shamans, psychic continue to exist and to be important in their communities.
These pictures have been taken all around Mexico, from Oaxaca's rural areas, Sierra Negra in Puebla, Mexico City and Chihuahua, in the Narcos' land, where Raramuri people live.
This indigenous group excels in running competitions worldwide, but to the authorities, they're becoming known for something else: as they're settled in Narco-traffickers' lands, they're now exploited to grow up and smuggle drugs to the US. Raramuri are a simple, spiritual, family-oriented, agricultural people, who aim to live in peace and harmony with nature, their whole life revolves around the earth and the environment. But there is no job, they repeatedly suffered drought, famine and other environmental crises due to the climate change and the powerful Sinaloa Cartel in charge doesn't help them to go out from their isolation and poorness.
These people have no choice and the only way to heal themselves is to consult a Curandero, the indigenous medicine that have survived after the colonisation and has been handed down from generations.
The basis of curanderismo derives from the shamanistic practices of local indigenous cultures, often blended with the Christian conquer's principles, but now we can find significant Native American herbal therapies and traditions included in the first west world pharmacopeia.
The curanderos are not doctors, their approach to the pathologies suggests the patient to use remedies and medicinal herbs and to look at the disease in a metaphysical way, as if it were provoked by a trauma, a displeasure or even, according to them, by supernatural origins.
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