Entre el don y el diagnóstico

This article examines popular healing in the Canary Islands as a symbolic, therapeutic, and epistemological system that interweaves body, language, matter, and spirituality. Based on eight years of ethnographic research (2017-2025), it develops a polyphonic ethnography grounded in interviews and participant observation with ten santiguadoras from the eight islands. The analysis is structured around three axes: embodied spirituality, ritual performativity, and ecologies of care. Far from being a residual practice, popular healing emerges as a situated epistemology that combines local knowledge, popular religion, and biomedicine within a postsecular context. The don, transmitted matrilineally, organizes moral and ritual legitimacy, while plants and material objects mediate the restoration of balance. Through this practice, women exercise symbolic agency and spiritual authority. The article offers a critical reading of the “Canarian disciplinary canaima,” that is, the historical structures that have rendered these knowledges invisible, reclaiming their value as a form of contemporary anthropological knowledge production.