In the complex and vibrant religious panorama of contemporary Brazil, a number of spiritual movements born in this country have spread beyond its borders and crossed the oceans to all inhabited continents. This is the case, for example, of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus) and of Umbanda. Less known, but no less fascinating, are the Brazilian ayahuasca religions.
Originating in the rubber tapper culture of the Brazilian Amazon in the twentieth century, Barquinha, Santo Daime, and the União do Vegetal (UDV) remained geographically confined to the north of the country until the 1980s. Thereafter, though, they started to become known to a wider public. Santo Daime and the UDV, in particular, expanded significantly, reaching all regions of Brazil and stimulating the production of a sizeable literature on the ritual and religious use of ayahuasca; documented, for example, in the book Ayahuasca Religions: A Comprehensive Bibliography & Critical Essays (Labate et al., 2009).4
Today, the Santo Daime and the UDV diaspora has grown large indeed and involves transnational networks and alliances, raising intriguing questions about cultural tradition, language, and religious diasporas. Santo Daime5 has spread to at least 43 countries on all the inhabited continents (Labate & Assis, 2016), while the UDV is present in the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Holland, and Australia. This process of internationalization has, in turn, stimulated its own literary output, issuing from places as far apart as Ireland, Australia, and the United States. Although this intellectual production is expanding yearly, it remains somewhat dispersed and diffuse, posing difficulties to researchers and other interested people wishing to access this field of studies and preventing deeper analytic inquiry into the phenomenon.
Here, then, we look to unite and critically evaluate literature worldwide on the internationalization of the Brazilian ayahuasca religions. This includes articles, master’s theses, and doctoral dissertations in Portuguese, Spanish, and English, both published and unpublished, along with practitioners’ publications that engage with the theme of internationalization.
Due to space limitations, and the ever-increasing number of works on the theme, it is impossible for us to include all of this intellectual production. Various texts have been omitted from our discussion, therefore, without implying that we consider these to be less valuable. The present chapter is not intended, therefore, to comprise all texts published on the topic, but to be a general guide that signposts various paths for lay readers and researchers interested in this universe, acting as a catalyst for the development of future research. With this aim in mind, we have divided the article into five sections: Social Sciences; the Ayahuasca Diaspora; Legal Issues and Regulation of Ayahuasca; Biomedicine, Psychology and Public Health;6 and Native Literature and Religious Texts.
Although the earliest reports of ayahuasca religious rituals being performed outside Brazil’s borders date from the 1980s, studies of the internationalization of these groups only began to be produced years later. Despite expanding research in the areas of biomedicine, health, law, and public policies, the most fertile area so far has been the social sciences, especially anthropology. Here, we start by assessing the extensive bibliography on Santo Daime, beginning with the inaugural texts, followed by publications according to the regions where studies have been conducted, before turning to works written by foreign authors in Brazil. Next, we examine the research on UDV, and, finally, we turn to ethnomusicological studies.
Among the inaugural works, we can cite the doctoral dissertation by Alberto Groisman at the University of London (2000), the first ethnography on ayahuasca religions conducted outside of Brazil. In this work, based on short-term field research, the author studies the Santo Daime groups in Holland, pursuing an exploratory and descriptive approach. In subsequent years, Groisman continued to study the internationalization of Santo Daime, including its expansion to Europe in one article (2009) and the legal aspects of its expansion in the United States in his postdoctoral work, published in a chapter in the collected volume Ayahuasca y Salud (2013a). He has also written about the “creative appropriation” of elements of the Santo Daime doctrine in the Dutch context (2013b). Another early contribution was Carsten Balzer’s work (2004; 2005). Along with its innovation, his work provides an important account of the informal and mostly non-institutional beginnings of Santo Daime’s internationalization, a phase during which ceremonies were mainly held in the context of weekend workshops until more structured rituals gradually began to gain ground.
The British scholar Andrew Dawson was one of the first to produce a full-length book on the internationalization of Santo Daime (2012) published in Europe. The author looks to comprehend the internationalization and transformations of the religion at a theoretical level, constructing a distinctive conceptual framework. He situates Santo Daime within the wider circuits of New Age religiosity and the contemporary religious consumer market, something he had already done in a more wide-ranging publication on the New Age movement that touched on the theme of ayahuasca religions (2007). His theoretical analysis, informed by a conceptual originality, is limited, however, by the lack of solid ethnographic data and long-term field research. This leads the author to take regional and contextual aspects of the religion, such as possession trance, as general features of Santo Daime (2011). On the other hand, the doctoral dissertation by Marc Blainey (2013) examines Santo Daime in Belgium. It includes details on the religious context in general, Belgian colonization in Africa, and also some quantitative data on Santo Daime in Europe. His main thesis is similar to Dawson’s, namely, that the religion is not opposed to contemporary “secular” society, but embedded within it, comprising a technology, a tool, and a mystical solution to the problems faced by the modern self.
Gilliam Watt presents a pioneering master’s thesis on Santo Daime in Ireland (2013) that adds fresh data on the religion in this location, such as the description of hymns evoking pre-Celtic deities. Writing about the situation in Holland, Judith Sudholter (2012), in her master’s thesis, provides a close account of the way in which Dutch followers experience Santo Daime rituals and transform them into narratives. For his part, the German psychologist Jan Weinhold (2007) sets out to explore ritual “mistakes and failures” in the European context, problematizing the question of the ritual efficacy of ayahuasca and Santo Daime in a sociocultural context exogenous to Brazil; an approach that, as we had occasion to witness personally, elicited protests among the German Santo Daime community.
Heading from Europe to North America, the researcher Kenneth Tupper has produced the only doctoral dissertation existing at present on the expansion of ayahuasca to Canada (2011). Based on the case study of a Canadian Santo Daime church, the Céu do Montreal, the author embarks on a discussion of drug policies, emphasizing the role of stereotypes and the choice of language in narratives concerning tradition in Canadian public opinion and in the establishment of policies on psychoactive drug use. This text, along with others by Tupper (2008; 2009; 2016), exemplifies a new line of studies on ayahuasca that examines public polices and drug policies, an approach that has burgeoned over recent years. In the United States, the master’s thesis by Alfonso Matas (2014) describes the Céu da Lua Cheia, a Santo Daime church in Miami, and the difficulties of adapting to the North American context, discussing at a more superficial level theoretical issues already explored by Dawson and Blainey, such as Santo Daime’s entry into a religious market. Still on the North American continent, Guzmán (2013, 2015) sketches a historical overview and a contemporary panorama of Santo Daime in Mexico, as well as preliminary observations on legal questions, the incorporation of Mexican religious elements into Santo Daime rituals, and the presence of Santo Daime in alternative therapy networks.
One topic that remains little explored is the spread of Santo Daime in Mercosur countries. Juan Scuro looks to fill this lacuna in his master’s thesis on Santo Daime’s arrival in Uruguay (2012a) in the 1990s, as well as subsequent articles on the same topic (2012b, 2012c), where he identifies the “Uruguayan ayahuasca field” (see also Scuro & Apud, 2015). Lavazza (2007, 2014), in turn, examines the trajectory of Santo Daime in Argentina, setting out from an ethnography of a group from Buenos Aires and the negotiations between their local social reality and the imaginary of Brazilian Amazonia. In 2015, the anthropologist Valentina Zelada completed her monograph on Santo Daime in Santiago, Chile. Her investigation, which contains a generic description of the rituals already available elsewhere, relates the process of construction, internal crises, and institutional affiliation of this church to ICEFLU. It is valuable for its examination of a country home to various ayahuasca groups that have been little studied so far.
It is worth remembering that Santo Daime is also present in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. However, the literary output in English concerning these contexts is virtually non-existent. An exception is the article by Sobiecki (2013), which describes his personal experience in a Santo Daime ritual in Johannesburg through a discussion of healing and “spiritual medicine.”
In Brazil, the expansion and internationalization of Santo Daime has been addressed by Assis (2013), who observes the presence of Santo Daime in contexts as distinct as Minas Gerais, the Netherlands, and Germany, looking to insert the religion within the wider field of studies of the sociology of religion and the contemporary global religious panorama. On the other side, the article by Labate and Assis (2016) contextualizes the expansion of Santo Daime within the diaspora of Brazilian religions as a whole, analyzing this expansion in terms of the particular structural features of this religion, defined by the authors as its miscibility and psychoactivity.
In recent years, there has also been a considerable output of works by foreign researchers on Santo Daime groups in Brazil and abroad. Sulla (2005) wrote a master’s thesis in psychology on the ideas of residents of Céu do Mapiá (the headquarters village of ICEFLU in the Amazon) concerning the question of healing in the religion and the healing system used in the community. Another master’s thesis on Céu do Mapiá is by Lowell (2013), who examines the transformations experienced by the community during Santo Daime’s expansion and internationalization, a topic also covered by another article co-authored by Lowell & Adams(2016). There is also a text by Barnard (2014) that provides a wide-ranging and generic examination of the use of entheogens in religious contexts based on the case of Santo Daime and a work by Schmidt (2007) that contemplates Santo Daime as an eco-religious movement.
Dawson (2010) presents a field report of his visit to Céu do Mapiá, and also a description (Dawson, 2013) of the feitio ritual performed to make the beverage, extremely important in the religious life of Santo Daime, yet little studied. Similarly, Blocksom (2015) describes the Santo Daime community of Fortaleza, on the outskirts of Rio Branco in Acre State. Meyer (2014), in turn, produces one of the most analytically interesting works on Alto Santo, based on a dense ethnography. This group is more hermetic than ICEFLU, and the author has been one of few academics to have been granted permission to carry out research. Henman (1986; 2009) deserves mention for writing about the União do Vegetal and the earliest phase of its expansion in Brazil.
As we can observe, the low level of institutionalization and bureaucratization of ICEFLU/Santo Daime, along with its intense exchange with diverse other forms of religiosity, makes it easier to research its global spread. Hence, the most abundant, fragmented, and dispersed literature on the internationalization of Brazilian ayahuasca groups is dedicated to the study of Santo Daime. By contrast, there is a widely recognized lack of research on the UDV in international contexts compared to Santo Daime, reflecting the difficulty that scholars from diverse areas of knowledge have faced in studying the UDV. While the institutionalization and bureaucratization of this religion has enabled a consistent output of native publications, its secretive and closed nature has tended to block autonomous research from being conducted by people not belonging to the group.
The only monograph written in English dedicated entirely to the UDV was authored by Anderson (2007) and discusses the environmental values in the group’s religious life. Patrícia Lima published an article (2014) and presented a doctoral dissertation in Portuguese (2016) on UDV’s presence in Europe, especially in Portugal. She argues that in UDV rituals, the acoustic dimension is very important in the subjective perception of the participants, who may have very distinctly different experiences of the plant within the same acoustic setting. We have also learned of other research projects being conducted with the UDV that have, however, remained unfinished or are unpublished, due in part to the legal situation of the UDV and ayahuasca in diverse countries.
In relation to the musical aspects of the ayahuasca religions, one emerging area of studies is ethnomusicology, a field that already has a reasonable number of publications. One of the most wide-ranging is the doctoral dissertation by Lucas Kastrup Rehen (2011). Based on the author’s short-term field experience in a Santo Daime church in Holland, it examines the question of music in the ritual and its relation to emotions and discusses the divinely inspired quality of authentic hymns compared to normal musical compositions. Labate, Assis, and Cavnar wrote a chapter on the expansion of Santo Daime from a musical perspective (2016), seeking to analyze the way in which its hymns are interpreted, sung, imbued with new meanings, and translated outside of Brazil. This is one of the few studies to explore the question of language and the establishment of transnational networks in the Santo Daime religion.
Internationally, we find a combination of ayahuasca religions and other spiritual movements in a multitude of therapeutic, neoshamanic, and other modalities, making it difficult to analyze the internationalization of ayahuasca religions in isolation, that is, without contemplating the wider universe of alternative religiosity. Today, the ritual and therapeutic use of ayahuasca has become a global phenomenon – closely linked to New Age spirituality networks – diffused by indigenous peoples, vegetalistas, and diverse kinds of therapists and facilitators, especially in North America and Europe.
Losonczy and Mesturini (2010; 2011) seek to understand the reasons behind ayahuasca’s success as a plant of power in the Amazonian setting and also as a sacred substance in the international New Age circuit. Observing the history of the hallucinogenic brew’s spread, the authors identify two key roles performed by ayahuasca: as an intangible cultural heritage, and as a translator of the Latin American shamanic universe to the Western public and vice versa. In the Latin American region, an interesting work was recently published by Caicedo-Fernández (2015) on the Colombian yajecero field: the shamanic networks of Amazonia and neo-shamanism (or neoshamanisms, in the plural) in the context of spiritual tourism and globalization of the use of ayahuasca. The book touches on critical issues like the cultural ownership and medicalization of ayahuasca.
Sánchez and Bouso (2015) recently examined the process involved in the globalization of ayahuasca and its legal implications, while Dawson (2016) analyzes the international diffusion of ayahuasca through the idea of invented traditions, arguing that one of the inherent traits of modernity is its constant feeding on the traditional. The Australian Alex Gearin (2015), for his part, embarks on an important and pioneering comparative study on the use of ayahuasca and its relation to healing in Amazonia and Australia. López-Pavillard wrote a doctoral dissertation on ayahuasca shamanism in Spain (2015), observing its therapeutic results from the viewpoint of the epistemology and rationality of the shamans themselves. In an article on ayahuasca tourism in South America, Kavenská and Simonova (2015) quiz tourists about their experiences with the brew, observing their motivations along with the benefits and risks of this contact. A similar approach is undertaken by Prayag, Mura, Hall, and Fontaine (2016), who examine not only the viewpoint of the tourists, but also the shamans’ views of ayahuasca tourism.
An interesting collection exploring ayahuasca’s diffusion is Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond (Labate & Cavnar, 2014a). Though dealing with Amazonian shamanism in general, the volume focuses mainly on the expansion and development of the rituals involving ayahuasca consumption worldwide, discussing key themes, like the relationship between ecotourism and ethnic tourism, the combination of shamanism with a global therapeutic and religious network, and cultural hybridization. Meanwhile, the book The Internationalization of Ayahuasca, in turn, edited by Labate and Jungaberle (2011), is entirely devoted to the internalization of ayahuasca, approaching the question from a multidisciplinary perspective. The volume is organized in three thematic sections that discuss the many different manifestations and uses of ayahuasca as a cultural and religious phenomenon; its pharmacological, chemical, medical, and therapeutic aspects; and also the processes of legalization, institutionalization, and recognition of ayahuasca religions in different countries. Labate, Cavnar and Gearin (2016) are responsible for an international collection dedicated to examining what they call “the world ayahuasca diaspora,” including chapters on the expansion of ayahuasca religions and Amazonian shamanism. The work puts to use previously unpublished ethnographies to explore the reinventions and controversies involved in the global expansion of ayahuasca. Rose carried out research on the contact and alliances between indigenous peoples and urban ayahuasca groups for her doctorate (2010), which examines the Fogo Sagrado (Sacred Fire) through the encounters and intersections between the Guarani, ayahuasca, and the Caminho Vermelho (Red Path). Langdon and Rose (2012) deepen the exploration of this theme by pondering the role of the international expansion of ayahuasca in the process of the Guarani people incorporating the hallucinogenic brew.
Coutinho (2011) provides a innovative observation of the transposition of ayahuasca consumption from Kaxinawá villages to urban centers through a case study of nixi pae in Rio de Janeiro. Along the same lines, Aline Ferreira Oliveira (2011; 2012) discusses the reinvention of traditions and the cultural and social flows of the ayahuasca universe in the contemporary context, where urban ceremonies coexist alongside a variety of indigenous practices, and where ayahuasca shares space with many other substances, such as rapé, sananga, and kambô. In this new scenario, visits by Brazilians and foreigners to indigenous festivals in the north of Brazil are increasingly common, and the flow of Peruvian and Colombian indigenous people, including shamans, is growing in the cities.
Labate and Coutinho (2013) also observe the recent impact of the expansion of ayahuasca religions among diverse indigenous groups (Kaxinawá, Guarani, Apurinã, Kuntanawa, and Yawanawá), showing that the narrative connecting the history of urban ayahuasqueros to the traditional Amerindian universe has now been appropriated in various ways by indigenous peoples themselves, accelerating their insertion in the urban ayahuasca circuits. In the Latin American context, Alvarez (2015) produced an innovative and productive multimedia book, available on the Internet, with audio, images, and videos, concerning the impact of ayahuasca tourism on traditional ayahuasca practices. Apud (2013; 2015) and Apud, Scuro, and Sánchez Petrone (2013) provided a detailed account of the insertion of ayahuasca, the neo-ayahuasquero and neoshamanic groups in Uruguay. Also in the latter country, Scuro (2016) has produced a thought-provoking doctoral dissertation on neoshamanism, examining the arrival of three different Latin American traditions in Uruguay: vegetalismo, Santo Daime, and Caminho Vermelho. The author treats neoshamanism as a “device” through which the ideas of “Amazonism” and neo-orientalism are advanced to explain the presence of this religiosity within the modernist/colonialist paradigm.
Evaluating the map of the Brazilian and international neo-ayahuasquero universe, we can note an overall expansion in this field of studies. The texts cited here are a good starting point in this promising area; one, indeed, whose presence has been growing considerably in international forums and congresses.
Each country deals with the questions of drugs and ayahuasca in a distinct way, which leads these groups to assume a variety of configurations, depending on each locality. While in Holland, which has relatively tolerant drug legislation, the Santo Daime groups are well structured and have dozens of members, Santo Daime rituals are banned in Germany, and its groups are small and sparse, with a low level of organization. On the one hand, in the United States, the UDV – and, in some states, the Santo Daime, too – have the legal right to use ayahuasca; on the other, in France, the plants used to make ayahuasca are prohibited. The examples could be multiplied. This myriad of legislation and the underlying questions – religious freedom, drug policy, human rights – make the legal and juridical aspects of the process of internationalization of ayahuasca religions one of the most fertile areas of study.
Labate and Feeney (2012) and Feeney and Labate (2013; 2014) explore the legal issues involved in the regulation of ayahuasca and the religious freedom of the groups that use it as a sacrament. They observe the narratives deployed both by the ayahuasca religions and by state agents, as well as the specificities and contrasts between different contexts of use. Jeffrey Bronfman (2007), one of the major leaders of the UDV outside Brazil, has written about the group’s legal battle with the US government for the religious right to use ayahuasca as a sacrament. This question is also examined in another work, published some years later (Bronfman, 2013), where he further discusses the relationship between the legal aspects of the brew and religious freedom. The UDV’s legal battle in the US Supreme Court was such an important landmark that it inspired various other texts and reflections, including those by Godoy (2011), Bullis (2008), and Groisman and Rios (2007), as well as the text by Labate (2012) that discusses the agreement reached between the UDV and the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
Anderson et al. (2012) wrote the Statement on Ayahuasca, a document arguing for the non-criminalization of ayahuasca religions from a human rights perspective, based on a survey of the anthropological and biomedical literature. Clara Novaes (2012), for her part, explores the topic in the French setting. Though based on research in psychology, the work includes information on the French legislation, discussing how ayahuasca practices are treated as cults in that country. MacRae (1998; 2008) takes an original approach, contrasting the legality of the religious consumption of ayahuasca with the illegality of cannabis use in the context of Santo Daime, where it is known as “Santa Maria.” His texts remain benchmarks on the topic.
Another prolific area of studies on ayahuasca in the international setting is health. Anthropologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and medical researchers and doctors have all been contributing to a flourishing literature on the theme. Ayahuasca y salud, edited by Labate and Bouso (2013), is a recent collection of articles addressing therapeutic and health aspects from a multidisciplinary viewpoint. Comprising 22 chapters, it ranges from anthropology to biochemistry and pharmacology, including clinical studies, the first such work discussing health in the ayahuasca universe.
Investigating the potential benefits of ayahuasca for human well-being, Halpern, Sherwood, Passie, Blackwell, and Ruttenber (2008) undertook a quantitative study with US members of Santo Daime to assess ayahuasca’s psychological benefits and its ability to help fight depression and problematic drug use. However, the study lacked a control group, limiting its validity. The same year saw completion of a doctoral dissertation by Barbosa (2008) that assessed and conducted a follow-up of the mental health of 23 people who experimented with ayahuasca for the first time, both in Santo Daime and in União do Vegetal. The evaluation of the health of UDV and Santo Daime neophytes is the focus of other works by the author (Barbosa, Giglio, & Dalgalarrondo, 2005; Barbosa, Cazorla, Giglio, & Strassman, 2009), who also reported on the health condition of ayahuasca users in a more recent article, based on bibliographic research using the PubMed database (Barbosa, Mizumoto, Bogenshutz, & Strassman, 2012).
In the North American context, Harris and Gurel (2012) used quantitative questionnaires to examine the relationship between ayahuasca use and personal habits like diet, alcohol consumption, and feelings like compassion and self-acceptance. Bouso Fábregas, Antonijoan, Rodríguez-Fornells, and Riba (2013), in turn, compared groups of regular and occasional ayahuasca consumers, investigating the effects of the ayahuasca brew on neuropsychological activities: for instance, those related to memory.
Working in the same area, Bouso et al. (2012) conducted a longitudinal neuropsychological study of ayahuasca consumption in control groups from Santo Daime (Céu do Mapiá, Amazon) and Barquinha (Rio Branco, Acre), while Santos, Landeira-Fernandez, Strassman, Motta, and Cruz (2007) assessed the effect of ayahuasca on people’s emotional sphere by monitoring Santo Daime adepts. Dobkin de Rios et al. (2005), Silveira et al. (2005), and Doering-Silveira et al. (2005a; 2005b) all undertook neuropsychological evaluations of adolescent users of ayahuasca in the UDV, while Camargo (2003) wrote a master’s thesis on the relation between ayahuasca and psychosis in the UDV and Santo Daime. Although an interesting and little studied topic, this study suffers from an absence of specialized bibliographic research and the lack of analytic distance from the study object.
Following the expanding wave of publications on ayahuasca from a health perspective, in 2014, Labate and Cavnar released The Therapeutic Use of Ayahuasca, a collection of 13 chapters analyzing the therapeutic use of ayahuasca and its relation to the health and well-being of the people who consume it. Researchers from different areas discuss ayahuasca’s potential in combating depression, problematic drug use, and other ailments. Blainey (2015), for example, uses a case study of Santo Daime in Belgium to discuss the contrasts and conflicts between prohibitionist policies and the emergence of a therapeutic subculture based on the consumption of entheogens.
Another area where we can observe the emergence of an academic literature on ayahuasca religions is psychology. Panneck (2014), for instance, analyzes the curative potential of ayahuasca use in Santo Daime rituals in the United States and its efficacy in stressful situations, while Villaescusa (2002; 2003) analyzes the psychotherapeutic aspects of Santo Daime ceremonies in the United Kingdom. Others pursuing similar lines of research include Méndez (2014), who speculates on the meaning of the Queen of the Forest through Jungian psychology and archetypes, and Oliveira (2015), who undertakes a psychological evaluation of Santo Daime children living in the Céu do Mapiá (Amazonas state) community.
The US psychologist Clancy Cavnar has engaged in pioneering studies of sexuality and gender identity in the context of ayahuasca religions, having written her dissertation (2011) and other works (2014a; 2014b) on the topic, based on her personal experience with Santo Daime in California, Europe, and Brazil. Her work points to a broad and fertile field of studies almost entirely overlooked in the anthropological literature, one that may become increasingly important in the future. A more recent study examining the issues of gender and health is Echazú Boschemeier’s doctoral dissertation (2015). Based on her ethnographic experience in Tamshiyacu, Peru, the author examines ayahuasca shamanism from the viewpoint of gender. This perspective encompasses the relation between men and women in shamanism, and the perspective of women in this context, as well as the universe of plants and traditional medicines. In the process, the author seeks to deconstruct the myth of “the male-shaman-who-heals-with-ayahuasca.”
Parallel to the academic literature on the topic, the ayahuasca religions produce their own texts and books from a “native” perspective. These publications are important guides for members of each religion, and also provide information on their internal organization, as well as their values, symbols, beliefs, and so on. In terms of Santo Daime, in the last few years, a small book was released, written in the form of cordel folk literature by the movement’s main leader, Alfredo Gregório de Melo, more generally known as Padrinho Alfredo. Viagens ao Juruá (2007) narrates the first two journeys made by Alfredo to the Juruá River region to meet his family members. It contains illustrations by the author and a glossary with explanations of Amazonian plants and wildlife. The book is bilingual, highlighting the impact of Santo Daime’s internationalization within the religion itself.
Another publication by ICEFLU is Jornal do Céu, published sporadically, with news on Céu do Mapiá, the church’s projects and the most important events involving the community and its leaders. It is run by the Vila Céu do Mapiá residents’ association and sometimes contains information on foreigners who visited the locality. ICEFLU has also published works outside Brazil, some already dating back decades, especially the texts of Alex Polari de Alverga (1994; 1999; 2000) that, published in more than one language, translate into poetic and literary form the author’s visionary experiences with daime (ayahuasca) and the teachings of Padrinho Sebastião Mota de Melo, the main leader of this expansionist branch of Santo Daime.
The União do Vegetal has the newspaper Alto Falante, containing a variety of information, chronologies, and institutional reports, as well as news on the diverse UDV hubs around the planet, demonstrating its strong organizational structure. An interesting publication that touches on the theme of the internationalization of the UDV is the book Hoasca: The Sacrament of the União do Vegetal – Science, Society and Environment, edited by Joaze Bernardino (2013). This book stemmed from the Second International Hoasca Congress, organized by the UDV in 2008, in Brasília. The work divides the texts by 44 authors into three sections: Hoasca and Science, Hoasca and Society, and Hoasca and the Environment. It includes discussions on the religion’s history, the plants used in preparing the brew, and important contributions on the UDV’s expansion and internationalization, such as, for example, the number of followers and places where the UDV is present worldwide.
After evaluating 117 works, we may obtain a panoramic overview of this literature. A change can be detected in the nature of the publications on the theme since the release of Ayahuasca Religions: A Comprehensive Bibliography & Critical Essays (Labate, Rose, & Guimaraes dos Santos, 2009), the largest assessment available on the specialized literature. First, we can observe a growing academic literature on health-related issues, including the increasing involvement of professionals linked to biomedicine and pharmacology. Simultaneously, there is an expanding number of works discussing juridical and legal aspects of religious ayahuasca use. This terrain remains extremely fertile, given the multitude of different contexts in which the UDV and Santo Daime are active, the diversity of legislations and legal interpretations in each national setting, and the increasing dialogue between the studies of sacred plants and drug and health policies, including the steady increase in funding and international events focused on these areas.
In the specific context of anthropological and sociological studies, a certain academic endogamy existed for many years; in other words, the field of studies on ayahuasca religions was relatively self-contained. Moreover, many of the texts seem to have an enthusiastic or “promotional” tone, in part because of the difficult legal situation faced by these groups in Brazil. This has changed recently, and research on these groups has started to dialogue with critical topics of contemporary anthropology and the sociology of religion, as well as the literature on the diaspora of other religious phenomena and cultural expressions. A further point worth stressing is that, precisely because of its internationalization, more foreign scholars have become interested in this field of studies, conducting master’s and doctoral research among Brazilian groups or with Brazilian groups abroad.
In addition, studies have adopted a more distanced and critical stance in relation to the subject matter, an approach illustrated by this new phase of research on the religious use of ayahuasca, more multidisciplinary and less “native.” However, it is worth noting that, at least from the viewpoint of the social sciences, the literature on the UDV continues to be largely endogenous and institutional. There also exists a wide spectrum of texts and conferences that are hybrid in nature: partly academic, partly New Age and native.
As in Brazil, so too internationally, Santo Daime has been more widely studied academically than the UDV. While this obviously results from the choice of research topic by individual scholars, it also reflects the organizational style and international reach of each group. While the expansionist branch of Santo Daime is generally easy to access and allows reasonable freedom to researchers, the UDV strongly controls academic production about itself. However, we can also note a recent tendency for change in this area, with the UDV now appearing more open to research.
It is worth noting that, although Santo Daime rituals are performed on several continents, the studies on this religion outside of Brazil are mostly concentrated in the United States and Europe. Other contexts where Santo Daime groups are present remain to be better explored, including various South American countries, Israel, Scandinavia, Central Europe, South Africa, and Japan. These contexts undoubtedly afford a good opportunity to analyze the Santo Daime diaspora and can contribute to the construction of comparative analyses, currently scarce in the academic literature.
In relation to native perspectives, the most recent publications also reveal particular structural characteristics of the two groups in question. The Santo Daime publications are sporadic and closely linked to its charismatic leaders. Not coincidentally, the recent, more notable publications have been written by its principal figure, Padrinho Alfredo, and important leaders like Alex Polari de Alverga. For its part, the UDV maintains a more regular output of official publications, as well as books on the group’s identity and institutional makeup.
Due to its wide-ranging and fragmented nature, this literature is sparse and frequently lacks any internal dialogue. Indeed because of its “ethnographic novelty,” the research on ayahuasca religions in different countries and localities ends up being largely descriptive, repeating observations and reflections already made by anthropologists years earlier. Many foreign authors do not read Portuguese, and thus fail to cite basic references in the field. Along the same lines, the international literature still lacks a “hard core” of research, though we can identify an original set of concepts being produced and very interesting lines of research for exploration. One of the aims of this chapter has been precisely to reveal these research possibilities and promote dialogue between the works already published. We hope, therefore, to stimulate future works on the highly contemporary and intriguing phenomenon comprised by the diaspora of the ayahuasca religions; an area capable of revealing fascinating relations between language, music, religion, law, health, subjectivity, and the ritual use of psychedelics in the twenty-first century.
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