Critical analysis of interculturality in the National Policy for the Care of Indigenous Peoples in Brazil

Concern for culturally appropriate and intercultural care, based on the articulation and complementarity among health knowledges, has been a priority for ensuring primary health care for indigenous peoples since the Alma-Ata Conference. In Brazil, a country with significant sociocultural variety in the South American indigenous context, a National Policy for the Care of Indigenous Peoples (PNASPI) was established 16 years ago, focusing on the notion of differentiated care. This concept, considered incomplete and contradictory, has been variably operationalized in indigenous primary health care. Therefore, the present article proposes an analysis of the formulation and operationalization of this concept in PNASPI. The analysis brings to light the ethnocentric nature of PNASPI, the numerous contradictions and oversights that fail to encompass the interchange and articulation with traditional knowledges and the indigenous emic views of health and the processes of illness/cure. The reversal of these limitations will require greater reflexivity, problematization, and epistemological surveillance of both the social and political sciences as well as social movements and indigenous social control to redefine indigenous primary health care in Brazil in intercultural terms.