Four aspects are considered: the local dynamics of gender, the diversity of the specialist practitioners, the complexity of ideas about healing, and the centrality of plants in a local pharmacopoeia in which ayahuasca is but one plant among many.ĭuring its expansion from the Amazon jungle to Western societies, ayahuasca use has encountered different legal and cultural responses. Within the results of a historical approach and long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Lowland Peruvian Amazon, the aim is to provide tools for the deconstruction of this myth by examining social, cultural, and historical roots of Peruvian curanderismo. Guided by a reflexive empirical approach, the authors bring together four nodes of the myth (1) the male, 2) the shaman, 3) the one who heals, and 4) the ayahuasca) in order to compare them systematically with key chosen aspects. This myth is related to power relationships between people and plants that are commodified and embedded in the context of capitalism and patriarchy. This chapter presents the construction of the idea of a “Male-Shaman-Who-Heals-With-Ayahuasca” as an emergent myth in societies from the political North – a myth which asserts powerful meaning in a global world. This unique book explores classic and contemporary issues in social science and the humanities, providing rich material on the bourgeoning expansion of ayahuasca use around the globe.
Larger questions on the global economics of ayahuasca in terms of notions of commodification and the categories of sacred and profane are also addressed. Authors explore symbolic effects of a “bureaucratization of enchantment” in religious practice, and the “sanitizing” of indigenous rituals for tourist markets. The chapters include ethnographic investigations of ritual practice, transnational religious ideology, the politics of healing, and the invention of tradition. The role of science in the confrontations between ayahuasca drinkers and the law is also contemplated. This encounter is discussed in the book in terms of how it discloses contemporary controversies regarding religious ambivalence in modern societies, and how disparate and competing ontological and epistemological discourse on ayahuasca use has emerged among ayahuasca drinkers and between them and the state.
During its expansion from the Amazon jungle to Western societies, ayahuasca use has encountered different legal and cultural responses in the destination countries. This book investigates how certain alternative global religious groups, shamanic tourism industries, and recreational drug milieus grounded in the consumption of the traditionally Amazonian psychoactive drink ayahuasca embody various challenges associated with modern societies.
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