41 RECIIS – Elect. J. Commun. Inf. Innov. Health. Rio de Janeiro, v.3, n.2, p.41-46, Jun., 2009 Research in Progress [www.reciis.cict.fiocruz.br] ISSN 1981-6286 Healing verses: ethnography of popular healing practices in visual poetry DOI: 10.3395/reciis.v3i2.253en Abstract This study intends to analyze ‘cordel’ 1 booklets on popular healing practices, and their visual-poetic production. This work assumes that popular healing practices found, in the universe of booklets, an important means to disseminate cases, stories, and history. Not only does it attempt to depict the divergence that imparted a secondary role to these practices; it questions, above all, the epistemological asymmetry that lies between scientific ‘knowledge’ and popular ‘belief ’. It is also important to question the traditional classification both of this wisdom and of this poetic genre in the superstition and folklore categories, since such judgment would imply loss of that which may be characterized as the expression of a witchery of practices, in addition to the lack of observance of the singularity and status of poetry, and the relationship of alterity resulting from speech in writing and its pictorial resources. With this purpose an eth- nography will be made in the IEB-USP Archive – which hosts collections of rolled up booklets – with the intention of confronting the initial purpose of the survey in the face of the appropriation of this poetic genre in the project Third Trip of Poets to Brazil - Northeast - Caravan of Health (PERNAMBUCO, 1994), which resulted in the production of booklets on preventive medicine. Keywords healing practices; popular booklets; visual poetry; Pernambuco Messias Basques Postgraduate Program in Social Anthropology, Federal University of São Carlos, São Carlos, Brazil messias.basques@gmail.com Introduction This study results from the classification and orga- nization activities involving the collection of booklets, manuscripts, and pictures of the Institute of Brazilian Studies of the University of São Paulo (IEB – USP) carried out in 2007. Notwithstanding the fact that the work as an archivist did not include reading the booklets, only organizing them in the spaces assigned to the files, I would at times interrupt my usual tasks, and my attention would be drawn to the way the poets/ designers seemed to submit any and all subjects to the style of their narratives: a visual poetry based on an orderly inscription of speech into writing, where diverse practices and characters are intertwined among verses and pictures The relationship between the archive and the anthropologist who, in that situation considered himself to be more of an employee than a field re- searcher, occurred as a result from the fact that work in