Before leaving its first home on the Upper Amazon, ayahuasca had spent a long time mediating between peoples, languages, and cultures, between different shamanic traditions, between the waking world and the world of visions. Between humans and spirits. It was a thread connecting something that no religion, no political power, had yet unified. This mediating power multiplied afterwards, when ayahuasca began to become popularized in urban environments and offered, through its visions, an immediate immersion in what had, until then, appeared insurmountably distant and wild.
The chapter that opens this volume (Labate and Assis) shows how far this embassy has reached: from the forest to the cities and the capitals, to the old and new metropolises, and to other poles of the global panorama. Ayahuasca has already become established throughout Latin America, in the United States, and Western Europe, and, more incipiently, in Eastern Europe, but also in South Africa, Australia, and Japan. As Conrad’s chapter reminds us, this expansion is virtually coextensive and coeval with the growth of the Internet, which has played an important role in its diffusion. But although the Internet has been an instrument in the expansion of ayahuasca, it is also perhaps another allegory for it. Amazonian indigenous peoples – who, for decades, have freely compared ayahuasca with cinema and television – surely have no problem extending this analogy to the network of networks.
As with the Internet, this wide-ranging mediation cannot occur without the traversed borders becoming more sensitive and increasingly disputed. This book explores these controversies, and this foreword also addresses them, in dialogue with the rich collection of chapters offered up by the book, albeit without looking to summarize them – nor concur with them on all their points.
One of these controversies is probably the most extensive and decisive of the Western tradition; namely, the separation between culture and nature. Here, we are not talking about archaeology or about outmoded prejudices; this dividing line is one of the foundations of our legal systems, and traces, for example, the difference between what can be a subject of intellectual property and what cannot, between what is no more than a plant and what constitutes an illegal drug.
These two issues have already given rise to polemics in the world of ayahuasca. Twenty years ago, the patenting of a Banisteriopsis plant provoked one of the biggest scandals in biopiracy, while the growing police repression of the trade in the components of ayahuasca has been based, as the article by Hobbs points out, on the degree of alteration through human manipulation. The nature/culture divide is worth exploring, since it succeeds in penalizing actions like drying and packing, or, more effectively, in criminalizing not the plant itself, but the information relating to it, seen as an incentive to drug use. The nature-culture divide is always like a border drawn in the middle of a metropolis: it serves more to create contraband than prevent it, and ayahuasca is a perfect example of this effect. Typically, its followers, like the judges, place it on the side of nature, thereby eclipsing the considerable human action needed for the activity of a set of plants and their combined possibilities to be known by humans.
Another issue concerns the difference between drug and food (Gearin and Labate). Many of the Amazonian uses of ayahuasca are subsumed under a more general framework of a shamanism of food and are conceived more as “purges” or “diets” than as visionary experiences. The alimentary prescriptions and taboos that surround the use of ayahuasca form a continuum with those that govern the local norms of elaborating the body. For Pano peoples, for example, ayahuasca is included in a set of bitter substances, indispensable to the perfecting of the human body, but prejudicial to the beginnings of its formation; that is, for young infants and for women during pregnancy and while feeding. None of this necessarily presumes a contrast with the West, where a growing proportion of the population shows itself obsessed by the ethical implications of foods and their interpretation as either “medicines” or “poisons.” New users of ayahuasca frequently display much more concern with these interactions than the indigenous users for whom, to give one example, ayahuasca is often carefully separated from alcohol, yet is not infrequently taken to be its equivalent. Ayahuasca may form the center of a comprehensive health practice, or of a religious or speculative quest – without clear boundaries demarcating it from recreational use – and this applies indiscriminately to the entire global trajectory traced by ayahuasca.
The contrast between a primitive authenticity and New Age inventions has become of less and less interest. The professionals and amateurs of anthropology have little by little abandoned their belligerence against neo-shamanism. Sustaining a hostile stance had become difficult, since many intermediary forms – here we can think of Santo Daime or the UDV – had already acquired a patina of respect over time. Moreover, the subjects who supposedly represented the purest tradition – indigenous shamans – had been directly involved in openly hybrid ventures. Also, it is worth noting, in passing, the traditionalist prosopopoeia of neo-shamanism, with its solemn ritualism and priestly attire, provides an insight into how little the indigenous shamanism of the past was “traditional” itself, as it was characterized by widespread borrowing and experimentation. We can no longer understand ayahuasca as simply an extension of Amazonian shamanism (in itself, a very risky generalization): it already has a field of its own, organized around very different techniques and cosmologies.
However, the fact that the tension between tradition and invention has lost its edge has not prevented the conflict from reappearing now in more pragmatic forms. The encounter between the ayahuasca of native Amazonians and more or less wealthy urbanites produces, after the initial euphoria, tensions that, as usual, tend to have more impact on the financially weaker pole. A local resource has become the object of foreign avidity, and what was a means of dealing with vital conflicts has turned into a way of life. From being a singular subject, often situated at the outer limit of alterity, the shaman has become the archetype of the indigenous person, an archetype that needs to be embodied as decisively as possible, since he or she faces competition from new protagonists, coming from all parts of the world to appropriate this role.
On the other hand, as Echazu and Carew note, the same clients, patients, or users who seek out the forest to escape the Euro-American conventions end up importing demands to regulate and control the use of ayahuasca and the relations between its actors. The moral ambiguity that pervades the original world of ayahuasca – a means of healing, but equally a means of aggression, including as a weapon of war – suddenly becomes caught up in a game in which all these ambiguities are no longer parts of the complexity of being, but elements of the penal code. Globalized ayahuasca has its discontents, just like globalization as a whole.
The case of Taita Orlando Gaitán, related by Caicedo, and his prosecution for sexual abuse provides a clear parable of the many equivocations and conflicts surrounding the globalization of ayahuasca, ranging from the management of indigenous identity to the transformation of the shaman into a businessman straddled between religion and the third sector (the NGOs), passing through the readjustment of shamanic codes to a new clientele, and through the blurred overlapping between the power of a leader and the power of the plant.
The chapters by Cavnar and Mesturini touch, in different ways, on another famous duality, the opposition between the individual and the collective: two aspirations that have both equally sought to drink from “primitive” sources. Ayahuasca originates from a world, Amazonia, that has been presented sometimes as a model of community life, sometimes as an anarchic refuge of personal freedom. Mesturini points to a peculiar virtue of ayahuasca that distances it from both these poles: the virtue of, despite its expansion, remaining entangled, propagating itself through networks, and creating them. The virtue of not transforming simply into a substance, into an active principle: the question is always ayahuasca and all the relations that it involves, not DMT. This fact distinguishes ayahuasca from other psychoactives of Amerindian origin that seem more liable to become associated with individual experiences and their auto-referential metaphysic. Cavnar focuses, on the contrary, on the relationship between ayahuasca and the most definitive aspect of individuality today: sexual orientation and identity. For many users from the LGBT scene, the visionary experience – not the social context in which it takes place, for the most part highly orthodox in sexual matters – has played a valuable role in developing a positive perception of a sexual identity challenged by its surroundings.
Cavnar’s chapter brings up another interesting dimension: ayahuasca’s value in the affirmation of homosexuality contrasts with the use, decades ago, of psychedelic drugs (LSD) in order to try to “cure” it. The relation between psychoactives and gender models seems to be equally ambiguous: the chapters of this volume offer different, and even discordant, opinions on this point. Echazu and Carew criticize the masculine bias that has dominated New Age trends like Peruvian vegetalismo and highlight the frequent presence of female shamans in the indigenous world. In contrast, Mesturini observes that the neo-shamanisms have incorporated – unsurprisingly, given the public to which they are directed – a more egalitarian and even feminist conception of gender, including the assimilation of ayahuasca with feminine symbols or archetypes, altering a landscape previously dominated by a masculine ethos. Perhaps these two appraisals are not so incompatible as they first seem: what changes as we shift from one world to another is not so much the gender models but the status attributed to norm and transgression. Women can be shamans in one world, the indigenous world, where spiritual power is a matter of fact, not law. Shamanism is not a priesthood whose efficacy depends on institutional consecration. One can be a shaman despite not taking the usual paths to becoming a shaman: by stealing secrets, for example, or by inventing resources that regular transmission had denied. One can also become a shaman by eluding the male norm. Moreover, such abnormality is not always an impairment to shamanic capacity; in fact, it may heighten it, since the exceptional has powers of which the normal is unaware. In the new situation, women are granted something of this role that previously they seized for themselves, and this points, at the same time, to a kind of liberalization and a species of domestication.
The use of ayahuasca oscillates between a “religion” and being some antithesis of the latter. For a long time, the dualities of this series – religion versus sorcery, magic, superstition, and so on – served to stigmatize any practice not subjected to the frameworks of an institution. But recently, the poles have reversed, and terms like “spirituality” or “holistic therapy” have proven useful to sectors that, having abjured religion and its means, remain interested in what religion proposed as an end. The choice between “religion” and “spirituality” (and related terms) also has other consequences, of course. Depending on time and place, the assimilation of the use of ayahuasca with a religious practice can contribute to its legitimization or the complete opposite. In Uruguay, as Scuro shows, ayahuasca has been careful to avoid becoming associated with religion, something undesirable in a country with a strongly secular tradition. Forming part of a religion is, on the contrary, what has helped legitimize ayahuasca in Brazil and the United States: countries with harsh anti-drug policies. The Irish case, presented in the chapter by Watt, is an interesting example because it unites the two poles. For a time, ayahuasca found a safe niche in its identification as a native variant of Catholicism. Santo Daime was none other than the Amazonian version of this alliance between the Christian message and the pre-Christian religious world that centuries earlier had also given rise to an Irish Catholicism impregnated with Celtic remnants. Ayahuasca was thus a new avatar of this deep-rooted community religion of such importance to the Irish national identity. Later, however, the country’s growing modernization and the moral crisis caused by the sexual abuse scandals within the Catholic Church wiped out the political value of this association, and it became advisable to defend ayahuasca outside the religious model. The story does not end there, though. The growing repression of the components used in the potion, necessarily imported from South America, has led to the realization of ayahuasca cults – almost without ayahuasca. Centered now on another “root” practice, possession, the religion of Barquinha, in Brazil, had already shown the possibility of combining possession and visionary trance.
The chapter by Goldstein and Labate on the relations between contemporary art and ayahuasca, including the art inspired by the latter, may be the most complex. Just as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro argued in a famous text, that inconstancy was the one true constant of indigenous thought, here we could say that there is nothing more “Western” than contemporary art’s passion to abolish all Western norms, dichotomies, and categories, starting with the category of art itself. Enough of contrasting author and public, artwork and everyday object, visual art and theatre, mastery and chance, conventions of beauty and ugliness. Contemporary art strives to overcome these limits, although unfortunately, it fails to show the same determination, or success, in relation to other traditional conditions of the art world; namely, the speculative environment of the market and the dubious world of patronage.
It is in these conditions that indigenous art, or the ayahuasca that served as its inspiration in so many cases, is convoked as an ally. This convocation is ambiguous, since it may be inspired both by the perception of indigenous productions as “art” and by the desire for symbolic demolition to which the new actor is invited to contribute. Of course, the demolition of Western categories is of no more interest to indigenous actors than the categories themselves, making their role somewhat dubious. Artists? Diacritics whose presence serves to enhance the iconoclastic value of an exhibition or performance? Authors or coauthors, duly recognized and remunerated as such? Exotic figurants? The authors note than these experiences of intercultural art frequently explicitly preclude the collaboration of anthropologists in order to establish a purer relation, free of the colonial and academic vestiges of anthropology; although, this good intention may sometimes result in no more than a new staging of old plays that are always easier to applaud in the absence of critics.
Allow me to conclude with a couple of notes of concern that pervade the chapters of this book. The more somber is the observation that the forces that led to the War on Drugs – one of the most dismal legacies of the twentieth century – has not yet run its course, and, while the legalization or de-penalization of marijuana seems on the verge of acceptance, use of ayahuasca – which, for a long time, benefitted from a legal vacuum – is, little by little, being restricted.
It is worth noting that it is not now a question of a war on drugs but a war between drugs. The ideal of a life or a body without drugs was always an illusion; the use of drugs is as old as humankind, and strictly speaking, exceeds the limits of our species; but, it becomes completely hypocritical when announced in the middle of a system that makes massive use of psychotropic drugs from childhood. The real debate is not between the substances and their respective dangers, but between the agencies that control them: the subjects themselves, the networks in which they are embedded, the medical-pharmaceutical complex and its legal apparatus. It remains a paradox that public opinion still trusts the latter more than the former. Hobbs’s chapter reveals the deafness of legislators to scientific works when it comes to ascertaining the danger posed by a substance: the sensationalist press, stirring up phantasms, has always been much more esteemed as an advisor. Perhaps this is because the fear of drugs, rather than being good for public health, is simply “good for banning,” for multiplying draconian laws that the state is incapable of enforcing, but maintains as a reserve of arbitrary power.
Another concern relates to the limitations of multiculturalism. Thirty years ago, when this current of thought became absorbed into legislative frameworks and public policies, it seemed a good way of dealing with the colonial legacy, balancing equality and differences. Thirty years later, everything is governed more than ever by a single criterion from one corner of the planet to the other, and what little remains of cultural difference falls into the hands of an active market of symbolic goods. The contemporary literature on ayahuasca, to which this book adds, conveys the malaise created by this pincer movement, contrasting with the sense of surprise felt years ago when the first steps in an unsuspected diaspora became perceptible. A more amenable vision can only come from this intuition, evident throughout a large part of the book’s chapters, that we are dealing with new networks and objects, created from the clashes and equivocations of the colonial encounter, albeit not fated to perpetuate them forever.
Óscar Calavia Sáez
EPHE-Sorbonne
PPGAS UFSC