Insertion Strategies of Inga and Kamsá Shamans in the Medium and Small Cities of the Cundiboyacense Highlands: A Proposal from the Packaged Indigenous Medicine Category

Abstract

Introduction: This article wants to discuss the indigenous appropriation of regulation, laws, and decrees established by Colombian state authorities about the production of medical drugs and manage of traditional indigenous medicine, specifically in the Inga and Kamsá communities. Development: This social issue it is better understood by the commercial tradition and the regular traveling of those indigenous communities. The article shows how through the normativity is reflected in the way of perceiving welfare, treatment methods, and disease from the indigenous medicine of the Putumayo inserted in medium and small urban populations of the cundiboyacense plateau of Colombia. This situation makes the indigenous population generate strategies of insertion in small towns. Strategies like packaged medicines looking similar in appearance to the medicines of biomedicine, an inevitable strategy in the social frame of medical pluralism that necessarily presents itself in non-closed contexts, that helps to strengthen the stereotypes of indigenous people. On the other hand, the mandatory commercialization that the indigenous medicines suffer. when they go out to the urban public, a context that does not exchange but buys and sells with money. Conclusions: The norms, laws, and decrees for drug regulation —and the norms that recognize traditional indigenous medicine under the framework of multicultural acknowledgment— are being created under static stereotypes of indigenous stereotypes, reinforcing the need for integration strategies of indigenous medicine in the cities by these communities.