Neoshamanism arises as part of the process of profound transformation of paradigms and epistemologies in many areas of knowledge, a process that began in the second half of the twentieth century. As we have pointed out before (Scuro & Rodd, 2015), one essential characteristic of that process is the incorporation of Native American technologies, even among non-American shamanisms. “Native American” became a place to look to and learn from, in order to build other models, different from the hegemonic ones based on modernity/coloniality.2 Native American epistemologies gradually gain visibility and propose different outlooks, which question the dominant Euro-American epistemologies.
I do not see neoshamanism strictly as a classification category, but as the dispositif arising as the turns of “Western” or “modern” paradigms, having as their main subject the “Native Americans” – and more specifically, the circulation of their “shamanic” techniques, such as the use of sacred plants (including ayahuasca) and other rituals (Sun Dance, Sweat Lodge, Vision Quest) – bring different epistemologies close to each other.
The concept of dispositif, used by various scholars, owes much to Michel Foucault, who in 1977, in an interview, offered the following definition: “What I’m trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the dispositif. The dispositif itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements” (Foucault, 1985, p. 128). He then adds, “I understand by the term ‘dispositif’ a sort of – shall we say – formation which has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need” (Foucault, 1985, p. 129). That is, the dispositif is “strategies of power relations that support some kinds of knowledge, and are supported by them” (Foucault, 1985, pp. 130–131). The classic dispositifs studied by Foucault relate to institutions such as prisons and asylums: processes shaped by events. But dispositifs are not only institutions; they should be understood, in a wider sense, as discourse networks producing subjectivities.
Neoshamanism grows and takes root in the world among Westernized consumers, mainly among White persons from privileged social sectors, with a cultural, social, and economic capital that allows them to psychologize their own trajectories, give free rein to their existential concerns, and look for new horizons in the consciousness-expanding experiences facilitated by power/sacred plants or other neoshamanic techniques. The dispositif of neoshamanism creates the possibility that a number of other forms of relating – for example, through knowledge, nature or history – may reach the social spaces inhabited by those who reproduce, and put into practice, the dominant forms of relating in such spaces.
In Shamanism Today, Jane Atkinson (1992) called attention to the process of re-emergence of the subject. The main elements the anthropologist identified at the time as roads for the reemergence of shamanism were multidisciplinary interest in the fields of consciousness and therapeutic mechanisms and widespread strong interest in alternative forms of spirituality. More recent approaches, such as that of Michael Winkelman, gather those different trends in the notion of “integrative modes of consciousness” (IMC) (Winkelman, 2010) and “psycho integrative plants” (Winkelman, 1996), referring to the process of universalization of shamanic practices through the notion of shamanistic healers. As Alhena Caicedo (2007) pointed out, this shows the strong emphasis on healing present in neoshamanistic spaces.
An important element in the development of neoshamanism has been the start and progress of a dialogue with the biomedical systems. The increase of neoshamanism’s visibility – and legitimacy – is also partly a product of the increasing interaction between those two spheres of knowledge (the biomedical field and the traditional one). The dialogue is a result of the development of the dispositif and also contributes to that development. Besides a crossing of techniques, it is a process of legitimation and, at the same time, expansion of an array of new therapeutic possibilities: “Other” therapies, coming from an Otherness seen as potentially healing. Shamanism, power plants, and healing are important constituting elements (among others) of the new shamanism, oriented to the satisfaction of mystical-therapeutic demands of urban Westernized individuals, usually with highly psychologized trajectories, searching for spiritual alternatives that they do not find in the classic forms of religion or therapy to which their parents, for instance, would have had recourse.
To consider neoshamanism as a dispositif, and to do it from the modernity/coloniality approach, as has been done already in other works (Caicedo, 2007; Scuro, 2016), implies also to consider the reemergence of discourses, epistemologies, and practices which re-vitalize the dominant ones, basic in the building of national histories and the hegemonic Euro-centered imaginaries. Neoshamanism is a dispositif fed by several sources. Though arising in the context of a counterculture that questions the hegemonic Euro-North-American paradigm and producing subjectivities intended to question the knowledge-power relationships, it is also a product and consequence of that same modernity/coloniality project, in relations, degrees, and forms that require ever deeper analysis in studies on religion, beliefs, ethnicity, and modernity in Latin America. A good example of this is the book Variaciones y apropiaciones Latinoamericanas del New Age [Latin American Variations and Appropriations of New Age] (De la Torre, Gutiérrez Zúñiga, & Juárez Huet, 2013). This chapter is a sample of some specific modalities in which the neoshamanism dispositif appears in specific places; in this case, Uruguay.
A number of elements constitute Uruguay as a secular-modern-White-European-country; in all, a Latin American country, in the sense that Walter Mignolo ascribes to this category, when he shows the process of construction of Latin America as Westernism (America as a continuation of Europe), and its corollary, the invention of a Latin America and an Anglo-Saxon America, leaving out a possible Native America or an Afro America (Mignolo, 2007). Two other components of the dominant Uruguayan historical narrative deserve mention: a) a peculiar laicization or secularization of religious beliefs, and b) the annihilation of the Native population.
As to the specificities of Uruguayan secularism, the history of the secularization process must begin with the decades between 1860 and the end of what is called “first batllismo,” in which the main reforms were introduced by the governments of José Batlle y Ordoñez (1903–1907 and 1911–1915). It is the period studied by Arturo Ardao (1968; 2013), and later by Gerardo Caetano and Roger Geymonat (1997). Ardao’s work shows the boom of positivism during the 1880s, with José Pedro Varela, the great reformer, who made education, “lay, gratuitous, and compulsory,” as a good representative. Ardao also points out the secularizing drive in the liberal movement, its relation to Freemasonry, and its development of anticlerical strategies and policies, especially in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Ardao shows that in the first quarter of the twentieth, liberalism, though already transformed and heterogeneous, kept the strong anticlerical and anti-Catholic sense that had characterized it since 1880 (Ardao, 1968; 2013).
The later works of Caetano and Geymonat insist on the search for a precise history of the Uruguayan secular model, supported by batllismo. They also point out the need for a revisitation of the issue in view of the new forms in which religion has lately become visible in Uruguay; specifically, the appearance of religious symbols in public places after 1990 (Caetano & Geymonat, 1997).
After 2000, the analyses of laicism as a part of the identity matrix of the country, with its many facets and effects, acquire new depth. The works of Néstor da Costa (2011; 2009) and Nicolás Guigou (2006; 2000), with different outlooks and connotations, show tensions and rivalries among different possible models of secularism. Beyond their differences, they agree on the influence of the French Jacobin model, with a strong homogenizing bias.
This country, characterized, as we have seen, by a strong secularizing, anticlerical bias, privatized beliefs, and a homogeneously White European image, includes a peculiar episode in its historical narrative. In 1831, at the beginnings of its life as an independent republic, a large part of Uruguay’s original native population, the Charrúas, were ambushed and killed by government troops. In the name of the new order that would prevail in the national territory, the Indians were seen as enemies of progress and national security. Thus, an image of Uruguay as a country “without Indians” was created.
The phrase “without Indians” was immortalized by Uruguayan anthropologist Renzo Pi Hugarte in the introduction to his book Los indios del Uruguay [The Indians of Uruguay], when he says, “It is well known that Uruguay is the only South American country in which there are no Indians” [“Uruguay, país sin indios: es por demás sabido que el Uruguay es el único país de América del Sur en el que no hay indios”] (Pi Hugarte, 1998, p. 5). More recently, writing about this controversial issue, and in line with Pi Hugarte, Daniel Vidart states, “There are no Indians in contemporary Uruguay” [“No hay indios en el Uruguay contemporáneo”], launching a hard critique of the forms of construction of indigenous identities in contemporary Uruguay, using various derogatory adjectives (Vidart, 2012). Looking at the same process from a different standpoint, another Uruguayan anthropologist, José Basini, proposes an analysis of the different forms in which ethnic images and versions are produced in his Índios num país sem índios: a estética do desaparecimento. Um estudo sobre imagens índias e versões étnicas no Uruguai [Indians in a Country Without Indians: The Esthetics of Disappearance. A Study of Indian Images and Ethnic Versions in Uruguay] (Basini, 2003), showing the complexity of the issue in Uruguay and different forms in which it has been approached.
And yet, Uruguay, with its peculiar secularization process (Caetano & Geymonat, 1997), its laicism as an element of identity (Da Costa, 2011; 2009), its narrative built as a lay and civic-religious nation (Guigou, 2000; 2006), and its self-image as a country “without Indians” (Pi Hugarte, 1998; Vidart, 2012), is currently home to a number of discourses and practices that digress from the hegemonic imaginary of a White European nation, opening up the possibility of new forms of identification with religious beliefs and “the Indians,” or “Native Americans.”
Discourses and practices from the meaning-producing spaces surrounding religious beliefs, relations with “Indians” (Native Americans), and “drugs” converge in the neoshamanism dispositif. As they intersect the Uruguayan specificities described before, such convergences are a privileged subject for analysis, because, in those intersections, “local histories become articulated with global designs,” to use the terms proposed by Mignolo (2013). This perspective is useful for thinking about the relationships of (de)coloniality that arise in the neoshamanism dispositif. As Alejandro Frigerio explains, the New Age appropriations of Native American traditions depend on the place the latter have in the dominant narratives of each nation (Frigerio, 2013). In the case of Uruguay, there is an enormous ambivalence about the place of “the Indians”: their presence derives from their absence. The famous “garra charrúa” [lit. “Charrúa claw,” meaning battling spirit], often identified with the Uruguayans, only underlines, through a totally “colonized” presence, the guilty feeling associated with absence and annihilation.
Thus, in a country characterized by strong laicism and the genocide of its indigenous population, we find a number of therapeutic-spiritual offerings that arise as a dialogue with complex chapters of the national history, producing new narratives in which the “cure” is understood, in a large sense, as a producer of a “reconnection” enabling one to re-imagine, and thereby reconstruct, other forms of being in the world.
Starting in the 1990s, a process of weakening of the dominant narrative traits can be observed in Uruguay, with gaps opening that question the dominant imaginaries. For instance, Gerardo Menéndez spoke of a “crisis of the lay-rationalist Uruguay” in the field of beliefs, alluding to “new religions” and “holistic culture” (Menéndez, 1997). The same decade witnessed the reemergence of indigenous identities, as seen in Andrea Olivera’s work among the Charrúa associations in the country (Olivera, 2014).
The return of democracy to Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, starting in the second half of the 1980s, generates a space for the public visibility of “new” religions. The then-called “sects,” coming mostly from Brazil, reach the River Plate and begin to be observed by anthropologists and sociologists. Most of the attention goes to the “Afro-Brazilian” religions (Umbanda and Batuque) and the Neo-Pentecostal churches (such as the “Iglesia Universal del Reino de Dios,” IURD), studied by Ari Pedro Oro, Renzo Pi Hugarte, and Alejandro Frigerio in Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina respectively. During the 1990s, they grew and competed for the faithful (the Afro-Brazilian segment was present in Uruguay for several prior decades; Neo-Pentecostalism is slightly more recent), developing their strategies and devices for visibility and public legitimation.
In that same decade, the Santo Daime went transnational, expanding from Brazil to the whole world, including Uruguay. Thus, the flux of religions coming from Brazil to Uruguay incorporated a “third generation” of religious transnationalization, represented by Santo Daime, that Pierre Sanchis (1999) considered one of the “typical Brazilian religions.” According to him, Umbanda, IURD, and Santo Daime are three typically Brazilian religions that, at different moments, reached different regions outside Brazil. If, as suggested in Oro (1993), Afro-Brazilian religions are “religions for export,” so are the Neo-Pentecostal churches and Santo Daime, as is shown by the numerous studies and ethnographic papers on Santo Daime produced all over the world, including in this book. Today, churches affiliated with ICEFLU (Igreja do Culto Eclético da Fluente Luz Universal) [Church of the Eclectic Cult of the Universal Flowing Light] can be found on five continents.
I have described elsewhere (Scuro, 2012; 2012b) the process of transnationalization that took Santo Daime to Uruguay. Here, I will only point out the importance for that process of the personal trajectory of Ernesto Singer, leader of the Santo Daime church in Uruguay, Ceu de Luz. He started out in 1988, he told me, intending to go to Mexico to find Don Juan, Castaneda’s Yaqui shaman, but long before getting to Mexico, in Rio de Janeiro, he discovered Santo Daime. Very soon after that discovery he become a member of the daimista community of Ceu do Mar, in Rio de Janeiro. Soon afterward, he went to Ceu do Mapiá, in Amazonas, where he spent several years learning about the doctrine and very especially learning to make the daime itself with Zé Gonçalves, well-known feitor of Mapiá. In his first trip back to Uruguay, in 1991, he brought a small amount of the sacred drink, which he shared with a few friends. This happened several times and eventually led to the foundation of the church in 1996. The specific history of the start of the different ayahuasca religions in Brazil has been abundantly described, so I will not dwell on it. A lot less has been published on the origin of Camino Rojo [Red Path], which makes it necessary to include a summary here, for the argumentative continuity of this chapter.
The Red Path appeared in Mexico as a result of the conjunction of two great sources, with their repertoires of discourses and practices: mexicanidad (which became neomexicanidad) and the contact with the Lakota. Mexican anthropologist Francisco de la Peña has described mexicanidad as a spiritual-political movement, revivalist, nativist, and neo-traditionalist, that, besides being prophetic and millenarian, “aspires to restore pre-Columbian civilization and to re-Indianize national culture” [“aspira a la restauración de la civilización precolombina y a la reindianización de la cultura nacional”] (De la Peña, 2001, p. 96).
Two other Mexican anthropologists, Renée de la Torre and Cristina Gutiérrez Zúñiga, explain, “The nationalistic Mexican imaginary was constructed in part on the imaginary of the imperial past, in which the Indians … derive from their history a halo of pride. That is what nourishes the movement of mexicanidad” (De la Torre & Gutiérrez Zúñiga, in press). As they point out, in Mexico, Red Path became practically synonymous with mexicanidad, or mexicayotl, in its most traditional sense, while the expansionist line that took Camino Rojo beyond Mexico is more eclectic and pan-Indian (De la Torre & Gutiérrez Zúñiga, in press).
These practices, brought by Aurelio Díaz Tekpankalli,3 arrived in Uruguay in their expansionist and pan-Indian form around 1995. Tekpankalli toured South America with the aim of re-connecting the indigenous wisdoms of the entire continent, in the wake of the Peace and Dignity Journeys of 1992,4 as an “ambassador” of the Red Path to the South. In 1993, in an ashram founded in Bolivia in 1990, he met some Uruguayan youths who were there discovering, among other things, the peyote ceremonies.
Back in Uruguay, they described their experiences to several people; among them, Gestalt psychologists Alejandro Spangenberg and Solange Dutrenit, who soon afterwards would become the leaders of Red Path in their country. The interest in these kind of practices, and the wish to make them happen in Uruguay, grew rapidly; among other reasons, because Solange Dutrenit had some Charrúa ancestors. They wrote to Aurelio inviting him to visit, saying that, in Uruguay, “all roots had been lost” [todas las raíces se habían perdido]. Apparently, this was what motivated Aurelio to come in 1994 to “raise the prayer” [levantar el rezo], praying for the recovery of tradition. That is the term they used: “recover the tradition.”
The degrees of proselytism and slander that characterize other religious spaces do not exist in Uruguayan neoshamanism; there is, however, a constant play of differences. One of them relates to the use of the term “religion.” A Daimista will probably identify him or herself as a member of a Christian Indo-Afro-Brazilian religion, while for all other neoshamanic options, the word “religion” indicates a direction they do not want to take. They would rather describe themselves as persons engaged in a search for spiritual growth, away from the institutional character ascribed to “religion.” Daimistas would probably share the idea of search and spiritual development, but the legitimizing emphasis of their practices is placed on belonging to a religion, specifically a Christian religion. On the other hand, the rejection of the word religion – meaning institutionalized religion, basically the Catholic model – does not diminish the fact that similar institutional devices are present, for instance, in the Red Path.
Santo Daime (Céu de Luz) and Red Path (later Camino de los Hijos de la Tierra [Path of the Children of the Earth]) are clearly different spaces within Uruguayan neoshamanism. This, however, does not preclude members from moving between both or even having one-time encounters or alliances; although in discourse, the differentiation is always sought, at least from what I have seen in Uruguay. It is also worth mentioning that, currently, there is a visible empathy with Santo Daime among the Camino de los Hijos de la Tierra, who have recently established an alliance with a Brazilian Daime church, giving them access to the ayahuasca needed for their rituals.
I have selected these two cases because, within the Uruguayan neoshamanistic field, they represent two examples of the maximum and the minimum intention of occupying public space and making themselves visible. The Red Path (like other neoshamanic spaces in Uruguay) shows a great talent for communication and public presentation of a therapeutic system, led by socially recognized subjects, while the Daimista church Ceu de Luz goes in the opposite direction, seeking invisibility, not making any alliances, and hardly proselytizing. In fact, in 2011, the public appearance in the news of Ernesto Singer (leader of Ceu de Luz, the only Santo Daime church affiliated with ICEFLU in Uruguay), with a brief statement meant to clarify the situation after a suicide attributed to ayahuasca had been publicized in the media, was not welcome by the rest of the community, which would have preferred silence and anonymity.5
This is very relevant to the Uruguayan context. The secular anticlerical matrix characteristic of the country acts, in my opinion, as a delegitimizing factor. In Brazil, it is essential to emphasize the fact that Santo Daime is a religion, and that is precisely why the use of ayahuasca has been regulated exclusively for religious purposes, by duly recognized religious institutions. But in the Uruguayan case, this strategy acts the opposite way; although, that does not necessarily represent a difficulty for the Daimista community in regard to seeing itself and its rights recognized; the secularism of the Uruguayan state, with its freedom of religion, is their guarantee.
Santo Daime is unique among all neoshamanic forms existing in Uruguay in that it defines itself as a religion. Precisely for that, it is the most easily criticized. The institutional character it proclaims, its doctrine, places it in a marginal area. For the inherited imaginary that sees religion only in institutions and practices relative to Catholic Christianity, Santo Daime could be considered something akin, but its mechanisms and practices will be questioned and pushed to the margins. For the rest of neoshamanic groups, Santo Daime is also marginal; precisely for presenting itself as a Christian religious institution. In Uruguay, neither being a religion nor being a religion of Brazilian origin are valuable legitimizing attributes.
The different neoshamanic spaces in Uruguay seek legitimation through their links with health, wellbeing, and cure. They construct themselves as therapeutic options for people willing to act on their existential concerns. In Santo Daime, there is a greater emphasis on belonging, as seen, for instance, in the use of the farda (“uniform,” in Portuguese) that all members wear at rituals, and of the fardamento, the ceremony of assuming the farda, by which one becomes part of the church, presents oneself publicly as a member of a specific Santo Daime church, and of the Daimista family in general. These characteristics make it difficult for anyone (at least in Uruguay) to present one’s self publicly as a Daimista. (See Groisman [2013] about the uses of the “religion” category in the whole ayahuasca space.)
Going back to the Red Path, Aurelio’s “prayer” upon his visit to Uruguay, as we have seen, was meant to “reconnect” with the tradition of the land. The initial request for Aurelio to visit the country underlined the loss of indigenous roots and the need to re-establish something there. That was the request, the prayer that Aurelio left to the group that was beginning to form in Uruguay: to recover the memory of the land. Initially, the new group affiliated itself with the international organization called Fuego Sagrado de Itzachilatlan [Sacred Fire of Itzachilatlan], led by Díaz Tekpankalli. After a few years, however, the Uruguayan group, led then by Spangenberg, dissociated itself from Tekpankalli’s organization and changed its name to Camino de los Hijos de la Tierra [Path of the Children of the Earth].
Spangenberg’s leadership gave a distinct gestalt bias to the Red Path in Uruguay. The process drifted to the construction of a therapeutic protocol, including meetings, study, and both individual and collective work; here, spaces, knowledge, and subjects from gestalt practice combined with techniques of psycho-spiritual work from groups using sacred plants and other rituals, including the Sweat Lodge, Vision Quest, and Sun Dance. Over time, important changes took place, as the distance from Aurelio Díaz increased and the name, and sense, of the Sun Dance changed and became the Peace Dance. The change from Sun Dance to Peace Dance, and the suppression of the blood sacrifice to the earth, represent steps toward public visibility for the Red Path in Uruguay. As such, it is part of a process that happened mainly through the persons of Alejandro Spangenberg, an ex-university professor and author of many published books, and Alejandro Corchs, who came to the Uruguayan Red Path in the twenty-first century.
The suppression of the blood offering is based, according to them, on the fact that too much blood has been already shed in this land, and no more is needed. Thinking particularly of the Charrúa genocide by the first independent government in 1831, they believe that the process of understanding and reconnecting with the native inhabitants has included enough suffering and bloodshed. Therefore, in Uruguay, the Sun Dance has inverted its meaning and, contrary to the warrior spirit prevailing in the North, has become a Peace Dance.
That peace vibrates with the love and forgiveness message emphasized by Alejandro Corchs. Corchs is known mainly for his autobiographical books describing the process by which he came to understand his own trajectory, beginning with the fact that his parents, Elena Lerena and Alberto Corchs, were imprisoned, tortured, raped, and murdered by the Uruguayan and Argentinian dictatorships. His life story is moving and fascinating and inspires many people to follow his spiritual journey, as is visible in the growth of Red Path, in Corchs’s presence in the media, and in the success of his best-selling books in Uruguay.
His books tell the story of a child born in 1976, who, after few months, was violently separated from his parents, and never saw them again, at least in “ordinary” reality. He aptly narrates a number of complex episodes in which he grew up supported by his grandparents and, after a difficult adolescence, started to discover his own history. At some point, his psychotherapist advised young Alejandro to continue his self-discovery work “with the Indians.” The contact with the “Indians” took place through Spangenberg, who was already leading Red Path in Uruguay.
His first experiences in the new direction started a process of reconciliation that has never stopped. Reconciliation, on the one hand, of himself with his own history; and, on the other, of his profile and individual traits with the “reconnection” process taking place in the Camino de los Hijos de la Tierra. Corchs became Spangenberg’s son-in-law, and this had multiple consequences. The arrival to his wife’s family is, at the same time, his arrival to his own family; the union of the family, as the subtitle of his second autobiographical book says. The union of the family allows Alejandro to enter a system where he will be able to reconnect with his own past and personal history, and, through it, the history of his country.
While in Mexico, the construction of Red Path (coming from mexicanidad) was political before it was spiritual; in Uruguay, it takes root through processes where the spiritual dimension leads to a new relationship with the political one. In Uruguay, the political side translates the spirituality that Corchs represents; it allows his spirituality to be public and visible.
In his own personal history, Alejandro Corchs represents and promotes a discourse of forgiveness and reconciliation with part of the national “recent past”; namely, the military dictatorship (1973–1985). In addition, the whole “family” of Red Path was trying to reconnect to the egalitarian, horizontal way of life supposedly characteristic of the aboriginal populations, exterminated by Uruguay in the process of arising as a modern nation. The main indigenous groups involved in this rescue process are the Charrúa and the Guaraní. The simultaneous reconnections of one individual and one group took up two conflictive points of the Uruguayan past: one in its origins, but still unresolved (the extermination of the Charrúa in 1831); the other, more recent, and with important connotations for the present (the dictatorship). This brings to mind what Cristina Gutiérrez Zúñiga has described as healing or cure through reconnection (Gutiérrez Zúñiga, 2013).
We begin with the narrative of a person born during the dictatorship who, after various difficulties, finds a spiritual road through a pan-Indian praxis and the use of teacher plants that leads him to, among other things, the recognition of nefarious elements in the Uruguayan “recent past.” The symbolic relevance of the military dictatorship and its crimes are quite big in present-day Uruguay. It is very difficult to achieve closure or reparation when many of the subjects involved, both victims and victimizers, are still alive and even publicly active. Not many possibilities for reconciliation between actors and victims of state terrorism are visible. In the last few years, some of the military have been brought to justice, but it was a process starting from the government, with the acknowledgement by the state of its own doings and the corresponding actions. That does not mean that there have not been moves toward reparation coming from the victims themselves. In an exceptional speech, Alejandro Corchs publicly expressed his message of love and forgiveness, which seduced many people from different areas.6
His discourse, and his performance in general, stand in a middle ground between spirituality and politics. His history has a powerful effect. The middle ground he takes allows him to talk of a “spiritualization of politics” that makes his discourse very efficacious in a country like Uruguay, because he appears as a novelty to both sides, feeding his legitimacy. Corchs can publicly express his spirituality because his individual trajectory, and the very construction of his spiritual journey, is directly linked to a semantic space of the Uruguayan imaginary that is extremely sensitive and complex. In other words, the spiritual message of Alejandro Corchs is well accepted in Uruguay because he is not a “shaman,” “guru,” “priest,” or “spiritual leader” like any other, but above all, the child of a couple of desaparecidos [missing persons], victims of state terrorism. It was that condition that led him to start a spiritual search, and that was the way he found the Red Path giving him access to his own past, to forgiveness and to truth. His discourse may be suffused with “Christianity,” but that is not what legitimates his spirituality or allows him to have public visibility. What makes his spirituality attractive and respectable are not its links to beliefs, but its links to the political arena.
The other past Red Path intends to reconnect to is more distant in time, but its place in the Uruguayan imaginary is also associated with state terrorism. The genocide of the Charrúa population, carried out by the young Uruguayan state in 1831, is another point that neoshamanic practices connect with, particularly the Red Path and the Instituto Espiritual Chamánico Sol Nueva Aurora [Spiritual Shamanic Institute Sun New Dawn], led by Santos Victorino, who defines himself as an “ayahuasquero charrúa” [Charrúa ayahuasca-user]. In the Instituto Espiritual Chamánico Sol Nueva Aurora, national symbols are re-interpreted, attributing to them a meaning not associated with the dominant history, told, not from a Eurocentric perspective, but from the standpoint of the original inhabitants of the land. This re-interpretation and “neoshamanic,” or New Age, appropriation of the local “Indian” Otherness is, in turn, determined by the dominant national narrative, as Frigerio rightly points out about the mechanisms of appropriation of practices that become New Age through a process of positive valorization of some – though not all – Otherness’s (Frigerio, 2013).
Neoshamanism permits a reconstruction of forgotten memories and, with it, the reemergence of underground elements that construct other narratives about the past, different from the dominant ones. The symbolic reinterpretation of national symbols by the Instituto Espiritual Chamánico Sol Nueva Aurora refers to the participation of Charrúa warriors in the independence process of Uruguay and to the gestation of the “oriental” identity. The first name of the territory of present Uruguay was banda oriental – the oriental (Eastern) strip – as it is east of the Uruguay River, and its inhabitants were, and still are, called orientales. This led me to study these processes in terms of “neo-orientality” (Scuro, 2016).
In the last few years, there have been several efforts to modify the hegemonic paradigm about drugs and the War on Drugs (and users) policy. Cannabis, in particular, has been legalized and regulated in several countries, including Uruguay, where its market – production, distribution, and consumption – is fully regulated.
Around the world, research with substances like LSD and MDMA or traditional ones, like ayahuasca, peyote, and iboga, is coming back in force and posing a profound change in paradigms. There is a tendency in the drug policies of some countries to abandon the War on Drugs model of the second half of the twentieth century, preferring regulation and research on various drugs, and allowing their use in psychotherapy, or in medicinal, ritual, and even recreational forms. The regulation of the drug market intends to ensure the quality of these substances. In the present condition of illegality, users are exposed to bad quality drugs, in addition to having to go through unpleasant situations to get them. In part, this change in paradigm comes from the study and understanding of the use of some substances in neoshamanic contexts, which contributes to the legitimation of the potentially therapeutic use of altered states of consciousness.
In the process of global expansion of the use of ayahuasca, there have been different discourse “fronts”; different practices, images, and traditions with legitimation processes that articulate different strategies. Some have reinforced their use of ayahuasca as a religious practice and seek legitimacy as such, as is the case with the “Brazilian ayahuasca religions” (Labate, 2004). A significant example is the case of UDV in the United States, described by Groisman (2013).
Santo Daime and the União do Vegetal (UDV), the two Brazilian ayahuasca religions that have reached Europe and the US, have both posed, in their destination countries, interpellations that question the regulation devices of states before religious diversity. The main practice of these religious institutions involves taking a psychotropic drug; this brings into play a number of regulatory norms, ranging from prohibition to protection, as a part of religious freedom. Several researchers have studied the legal situation of the ayahuasca churches in various countries. In Uruguay, there is no specific legislation about ayahuasca. This means that its use, cultivation, purchase, etc. fall under the general norms on the use of drugs.7
The uses of ayahuasca have, however, expanded beyond its role in the Brazilian religions. Peruvian vegetalismo, for instance, has been an important front of expansion. Beatriz Labate has pointed out some important aspects of this internationalization; one of them has to do with what she calls “psychologization,” and another even considers the possibility of speaking of a neo-vegetalismo. The latter “is obsessed with the necessity of ‘establishing one’s intention’ for participating in an ayahuasca session and afterward ‘integrating the content’ ” (Labate, 2014, p. 185). This aspect is insisted upon, for instance, in the holistic center Ayariri, in Montevideo, Uruguay. The important diet restrictions also have some “sacred” status in Ayariri, but the previous intent, and the subsequent integration of the use of teacher plants like ayahuasca, is central. Ismael Apud has shown how the ayahuasca ceremonies were gradually integrated with “previous activities (individual therapy, yoga, holotropic breathing) as well as new proposals (Chinese medicine, biodance, music therapy, plastic expression)” (Apud, 2013, p. 86). In this case, ayahuasca reaches new horizons and appears, not as a sacrament, but as one therapeutic tool among others.
The psychologization that Labate points out in neovegetalismo has to do, in my view, with two issues. First, the presentation of vegetalismo as a “therapy,” which puts it in a frame and gives it a meaning understandable by a community larger than the Amazonian one, an international community hungry for new therapeutic techniques. Ayahuasca’s healing potential, as pointed out by Alhena Caicedo (2007), is one of its main aspects, and a valid form of presentation to the global market. This is an important point about the “healing” through Otherness that happens in neoshamanism (Scuro, 2015), within the exotization that takes place in New Age appropriation of Otherness’s, as Alejandro Frigerio (2013) correctly points out.
The insistence on “psychologizing” legitimizes and supports the practices. A holistic center that includes ayahuasca ceremonies may have to face interpellations by different communities, and this forces it to present itself to the larger society as a therapeutic center where security and success are guaranteed if therapies are adequately conducted. The emphasis on previous intent and subsequent integration of the experience helps to see these practices, beyond the experience itself, as a reliable therapeutic process. The therapy path is, at the same time, a legitimation vehicle because, even as these practices are known and legitimized by a growing public, doubts and mistrust persists, even in the groups’ leaders themselves. In Uruguay, for instance, a well-known physician who leads neoshamanic experiences is careful to remain anonymous for fear of possible reprisals by the medical association.
But, what is important – and this is the second point – is not only Peruvian vegetalismo, or the various neoshamanic groups and centers seeking legitimation; it is the development of a vast international network. This situation indicates the need for research on elements including human rights and the reduction of risks and damages, and possibly a change in paradigms around drugs, and the potential of psychedelic psychotherapy.
Recently, Uruguay has received much attention from the rest of the world for its implementation of a pioneering policy about the cannabis market, with the state in the leading role. Marijuana is widely popular in the country, and a law was passed that permits legal purchase (after registration with the authorities) for “recreational” purposes.
However, cannabis is also sacralized in some spaces; for instance, the Santo Daime church. Other Uruguayan neoshamanic groups do not feel the same way, although the present legal frame allows the exploration of the therapeutic use of cannabis, including the current use in neoshamanic groups. Interestingly, in the Santo Daime, marijuana (meticulously regulated by the state in all its forms) is made sacred, while in Uruguay, ayahuasca (the most sacred of all) is more easily legitimized in its “non-religious” forms than as part of a Christian Brazilian religion. Thus, in Uruguay, the Santo Daime church is a space where something the state recognizes as popular and controls is considered sacred, while the use of the holy drink ayahuasca stirs up all kinds of prejudices when it becomes religious and Christian. It seems that, what in Brazil is regulated for religious use (ayahuasca), in Uruguay, is not even included in the official agenda about drugs, centered on the strict regulation of tobacco, alcohol, and cannabis, which are seen as “secular” drugs.
This chapter intended to show the specifics of a process of expansion of multiple uses of ayahuasca in the neoshamanic field in Uruguay. To that end, it was necessary to describe some elements of the dominant national narratives that shape the forms of appropriation, integration, and legislation, not of one specific plant or substance, but of a set of articulations relating to different symbolic (and other) spaces. In neoshamanism (with ayahuasca as common denominator), different views about drugs, beliefs, and Otherness converge and clash. Any discussion of one of these subjects will necessarily have to include the other two. This is what I wanted to show in this chapter in the specifics of Uruguay.
Is it possible to implement in Brazil, for instance, the regulation adopted in Uruguay for cannabis? Is it possible to implement in Uruguay the regulation developed in Brazil for ayahuasca? Any process pointing to the regulation of ayahuasca in Uruguay certainly would not follow the Brazilian model, where the drink is permitted only in religious contexts. In Uruguay, that would be seen as an intrusion of the state in religious affairs, something very difficult to justify. The lack of regulation of the use of ayahuasca in the country, as shown elsewhere (Scuro & Apud, 2015), has to do, among other factors, with the tradition of “non-intervention” in issues involving religious beliefs and/or institutions. A consequence of this is that the political agenda on drugs concentrates on cannabis, alcohol, and tobacco, each with specific norms. Only if the uses of ayahuasca exceed the bounds of what is strictly “sacred” will it become a possible subject for legal regulation.
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