This research focuses on the work of the Urban Aboriginal Community Kitchen Garden Project (the Garden Project). The Garden Project aims to be a culturally appropriate health promotion project with urban Aboriginal people, drawing on traditional Indigenous approaches to health and healing, and rooted in community food work. The project is situated within the context of colonialism, the destruction of traditional foodways, and subsequent increased need for Indigenous people to rely on a dominant food system that is seen as destructive to human and ecological health. The purpose of my research is to describe the Garden Project’s main goals and achievements from the perspective of project leaders, project participants as well as through my own observations and experiences. The research methodology was guided by participatory and community based approaches to research and qualitative methods were employed, focusing primarily on semi-structured interviews with project participants and project leaders. I also participated in and observed the project for two years, from September 2006-September 2008. Data collection and analysis happened through an iterative process of action and reflection. Based on my time with the Garden Project, I suggest that it can be seen simultaneously as a community food security, health promotion, and Indigenous health project. It connects participants with food as a natural product, builds skills around cooking and growing food, and increases knowledge about food system issues. Drawing on the health promotion discourse, it can be seen building community and social support networks, treating the whole person, and empowering participants to take actions around their own health needs. It is rooted in Indigenous approaches to health and healing in the way it promotes individuals’ physical, mental/emotional and spiritual health, the health of the community through cultural revitalization, and the health of the Universe through the opportunity it provides for awareness about ecosystem health. This research project was very site specific. Nevertheless, the findings suggest that food work with urban Indigenous people, carried out in a culturally sensitive manner, may be a powerful leverage point for promoting health with this population. These types of projects can also be vehicles for social change.

This research focuses on the work of the Urban Aboriginal Community Kitchen Garden Project (the Garden Project). The Garden Project aims to be a culturally appropriate health promotion project with urban Aboriginal people, drawing on traditional Indigenous approaches to health and healing, and rooted in community food work. The project is situated within the context of colonialism, the destruction of traditional foodways, and subsequent increased need for Indigenous people to rely on a dominant food system that is seen as destructive to human and ecological health. The purpose of my research is to describe the Garden Project’s main goals and achievements from the perspective of project leaders, project participants as well as through my own observations and experiences. The research methodology was guided by participatory and community based approaches to research and qualitative methods were employed, focusing primarily on semi-structured interviews with project participants and project leaders. I also participated in and observed the project for two years, from September 2006-September 2008. Data collection and analysis happened through an iterative process of action and reflection. Based on my time with the Garden Project, I suggest that it can be seen simultaneously as a community food security, health promotion, and Indigenous health project. It connects participants with food as a natural product, builds skills around cooking and growing food, and increases knowledge about food system issues. Drawing on the health promotion discourse, it can be seen building community and social support networks, treating the whole person, and empowering participants to take actions around their own health needs. It is rooted in Indigenous approaches to health and healing in the way it promotes individuals’ physical, mental/emotional and spiritual health, the health of the community through cultural revitalization, and the health of the Universe through the opportunity it provides for awareness about ecosystem health. This research project was very site specific. Nevertheless, the findings suggest that food work with urban Indigenous people, carried out in a culturally sensitive manner, may be a powerful leverage point for promoting health with this population. These types of projects can also be vehicles for social change.

This research focuses on the work of the Urban Aboriginal Community Kitchen Garden Project (the Garden Project). The Garden Project aims to be a culturally appropriate health promotion project with urban Aboriginal people, drawing on traditional Indigenous approaches to health and healing, and rooted in community food work. The project is situated within the context of colonialism, the destruction of traditional foodways, and subsequent increased need for Indigenous people to rely on a dominant food system that is seen as destructive to human and ecological health. The purpose of my research is to describe the Garden Project’s main goals and achievements from the perspective of project leaders, project participants as well as through my own observations and experiences. The research methodology was guided by participatory and community based approaches to research and qualitative methods were employed, focusing primarily on semi-structured interviews with project participants and project leaders. I also participated in and observed the project for two years, from September 2006-September 2008. Data collection and analysis happened through an iterative process of action and reflection. Based on my time with the Garden Project, I suggest that it can be seen simultaneously as a community food security, health promotion, and Indigenous health project. It connects participants with food as a natural product, builds skills around cooking and growing food, and increases knowledge about food system issues. Drawing on the health promotion discourse, it can be seen building community and social support networks, treating the whole person, and empowering participants to take actions around their own health needs. It is rooted in Indigenous approaches to health and healing in the way it promotes individuals’ physical, mental/emotional and spiritual health, the health of the community through cultural revitalization, and the health of the Universe through the opportunity it provides for awareness about ecosystem health. This research project was very site specific. Nevertheless, the findings suggest that food work with urban Indigenous people, carried out in a culturally sensitive manner, may be a powerful leverage point for promoting health with this population. These types of projects can also be vehicles for social change. / Land and Food Systems, Faculty of / Graduate

This dissertation investigates the ancient healing tradition of the Maya sweatbath, its landscape, and rituals, which after three millennia is still practiced today among the contemporary Maya. Frequently overlooked because of its size, the ancient Maya sweatbath's location in ancient ceremonial cores, royal courts, and near important ritual structures and sacred water features accentuates its importance and need to understand its role, siting, and connection with the landscape. A three step approach of rooting, projecting, and transcending is applied to the investigation's structure for examining the sweatbaths conception as the womb of Mother Earth, the structure as a replica of the cosmos, the liminal landscape tethering together water, topography, and the celestial domain, and rituals of purification, healing, and transformation. In addition, the ancient Maya site of Yaxchiln and its three sweatbaths serves as the epicenter, the investigation's initial point of beginning, from where projections are made outward to twenty-eight additional sweatbaths augmenting and defining the scope of sweatbath features and site conditions. A combination of archeological drawings, architectural and landscape plans and sections, ethnographic and ethnohistoric texts, and epigraphic interpretations are examined, in combination and juxtaposition, as a means for integrating the symbolic and physical layers, which in union compose a complimentary narrative highlighting liminality as a principal quality encompassing the sweatbath. Liminality, associated with transition and transformation and fundamental to the Maya notion of gestation and creation of the cosmos, is revealed and demonstrated through the cyclical and everchanging nature of the sweatbath landscape of earth, water and sky, and reflected in man's inherent life processes and fundamental to the sweatbath rituals' symbolism of rebirth and renewal. / Ph. D.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Esta pesquisa tematiza o conceito saúde na perspectiva dos modelos médicos vitalistas, situando-se no eixo da dimensão doutrina médica das Racionalidades Médicas, e tem como objeto de estudo os vitalismos de Hahnemann e Nietzsche. A partir do levantamento e análise bibliográfica de textos e da abordagem disciplinar histórica e filosófica, teve como objetivos analisar os conceitos de vida, saúde, doença e cura presentes nos pensamentos desses autores, traçar correspondências e explicitar as diferenças dos pensamentos envolvidos. Como apoios teóricos os trabalhos de Canguilhem, Luz e Foucault. Partindo da ênfase na atitude vital do sujeito em seu processo de saúde-doença-convalescença-cura, que ambos pensadores destacam, buscou-se avaliar as hipóteses de o vitalismo hahnemanniano se assemelhar ao nietzscheano e se seria possível afirmar que a busca da grande saúde equivaleria à meta do tratamento homeopático ao contemplar a liberdade do espírito na conquista da ampliação da normatividade vital. Concluiu-se que os vitalismos de Hahnemann e Nietzsche são semelhantes na medida em que as bases de seus pensamentos ressaltam a vida enquanto um jogo de forças e luta, onde enfatizam a irredutibilidade dos fenômenos dos vivos às propriedades físico-químicas; a concepção dos seres humanos como totalidades únicas e singulares nas quais há um jogo de forças atuantes, promovendo diferentes saúdes no mesmo indivíduo, de acordo com as variadas fases da vida; e as hierarquias existentes entre as forças, resultando em análises diagnósticas, possibilidades de intervenção terapêutica e acompanhamento do processo saúde-doença. Correspondem a formas de olhar a vida humana de modo dinâmico, valorizando todos os aspectos físicos, mentais, emocionais e as interações/relações com o meio em que vive. A grande saúde para um espírito que se torna o que é amplia o ideal de cura homeopático ao contribuir para a ressignificação do conceito de saúde como expansão da normatividade vital e da vida como criação de valor, promovendo deslocamentos de perspectivas individual e coletiva, a fim da conquista de uma saúde mais alegre e vital e afirmadora do espírito livre. Ambos os pensamentos podem promover importantes reavaliações do conceito de vida e saúde na sociedade e na medicina contemporâneas, centradas nos valores estatisticamente determinados, generalizantes e normalizadores do paradigma normal/patológico / This research discusses the health concept from the perspective of vitalistic medical models, ranging in the axis of Medical Rationale medical doctrine, having as study object the vitalist studies by Hahnemann and Nietzsche. From the survey and literature review of texts and the historical and philosophical disciplinary approach, it aimed at analyzing the concepts of life, health, disease and cure in the thoughts of these authors, drawing connections and explaining the differences of thoughts involved. The theoretical support were the works of Canguilhem, Luz and Foucault. Starting from the emphasis on the vital attitude of the subject in the health-disease-convalescence-healing process, that both thinkers emphasize, we sought to assess the idea that Hahnemanns vitalism resembles Nietzsches, and whether it is possible to say that the pursuit of big health would the goal of homeopathic treatment to address the freedom of spirit in achieving the expansion of the vital normativeness. It was concluded that Hahnemanns and Nietzsches vitalisms are similar in that the foundations of their thoughts emphasize life as a game of power and control, which emphasize the irreducibility of the phenomena of living beings to physical and chemical properties; the design of human beings as unique and singular wholes in which there is a set of interacting forces, promoting different types of health in the same individual, according to the varied stages of life and the hierarchies between the forces resulting in diagnostic tests, opportunities for therapeutic intervention and monitoring of the health-disease process. They correspond to ways of looking at life in a dynamic manner, valuing all physical, mental, emotional aspects and interactions/relations with the environment in which they live. The great health to a spirit that becomes what it is it expands the ideal of homeopathic cure by helping reframe the concept of health as expanding the normativity of life and life as value creation, promoting shifts in individual and collective perspectives, to conquer a living and happier life and affirming the free spirit. Both thoughts can promote significant revaluation of the concept of life and health in contemporary society and medicine, focusing on values statistically determined, generalizing and standardization of individuals of the paradigm normal/pathologic

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Esta pesquisa tematiza o conceito saúde na perspectiva dos modelos médicos vitalistas, situando-se no eixo da dimensão doutrina médica das Racionalidades Médicas, e tem como objeto de estudo os vitalismos de Hahnemann e Nietzsche. A partir do levantamento e análise bibliográfica de textos e da abordagem disciplinar histórica e filosófica, teve como objetivos analisar os conceitos de vida, saúde, doença e cura presentes nos pensamentos desses autores, traçar correspondências e explicitar as diferenças dos pensamentos envolvidos. Como apoios teóricos os trabalhos de Canguilhem, Luz e Foucault. Partindo da ênfase na atitude vital do sujeito em seu processo de saúde-doença-convalescença-cura, que ambos pensadores destacam, buscou-se avaliar as hipóteses de o vitalismo hahnemanniano se assemelhar ao nietzscheano e se seria possível afirmar que a busca da grande saúde equivaleria à meta do tratamento homeopático ao contemplar a liberdade do espírito na conquista da ampliação da normatividade vital. Concluiu-se que os vitalismos de Hahnemann e Nietzsche são semelhantes na medida em que as bases de seus pensamentos ressaltam a vida enquanto um jogo de forças e luta, onde enfatizam a irredutibilidade dos fenômenos dos vivos às propriedades físico-químicas; a concepção dos seres humanos como totalidades únicas e singulares nas quais há um jogo de forças atuantes, promovendo diferentes saúdes no mesmo indivíduo, de acordo com as variadas fases da vida; e as hierarquias existentes entre as forças, resultando em análises diagnósticas, possibilidades de intervenção terapêutica e acompanhamento do processo saúde-doença. Correspondem a formas de olhar a vida humana de modo dinâmico, valorizando todos os aspectos físicos, mentais, emocionais e as interações/relações com o meio em que vive. A grande saúde para um espírito que se torna o que é amplia o ideal de cura homeopático ao contribuir para a ressignificação do conceito de saúde como expansão da normatividade vital e da vida como criação de valor, promovendo deslocamentos de perspectivas individual e coletiva, a fim da conquista de uma saúde mais alegre e vital e afirmadora do espírito livre. Ambos os pensamentos podem promover importantes reavaliações do conceito de vida e saúde na sociedade e na medicina contemporâneas, centradas nos valores estatisticamente determinados, generalizantes e normalizadores do paradigma normal/patológico / This research discusses the health concept from the perspective of vitalistic medical models, ranging in the axis of Medical Rationale medical doctrine, having as study object the vitalist studies by Hahnemann and Nietzsche. From the survey and literature review of texts and the historical and philosophical disciplinary approach, it aimed at analyzing the concepts of life, health, disease and cure in the thoughts of these authors, drawing connections and explaining the differences of thoughts involved. The theoretical support were the works of Canguilhem, Luz and Foucault. Starting from the emphasis on the vital attitude of the subject in the health-disease-convalescence-healing process, that both thinkers emphasize, we sought to assess the idea that Hahnemanns vitalism resembles Nietzsches, and whether it is possible to say that the pursuit of big health would the goal of homeopathic treatment to address the freedom of spirit in achieving the expansion of the vital normativeness. It was concluded that Hahnemanns and Nietzsches vitalisms are similar in that the foundations of their thoughts emphasize life as a game of power and control, which emphasize the irreducibility of the phenomena of living beings to physical and chemical properties; the design of human beings as unique and singular wholes in which there is a set of interacting forces, promoting different types of health in the same individual, according to the varied stages of life and the hierarchies between the forces resulting in diagnostic tests, opportunities for therapeutic intervention and monitoring of the health-disease process. They correspond to ways of looking at life in a dynamic manner, valuing all physical, mental, emotional aspects and interactions/relations with the environment in which they live. The great health to a spirit that becomes what it is it expands the ideal of homeopathic cure by helping reframe the concept of health as expanding the normativity of life and life as value creation, promoting shifts in individual and collective perspectives, to conquer a living and happier life and affirming the free spirit. Both thoughts can promote significant revaluation of the concept of life and health in contemporary society and medicine, focusing on values statistically determined, generalizing and standardization of individuals of the paradigm normal/pathologic