‘Everybody’s creating it along the way’: ethical tensions among globalized ayahuasca shamanisms and therapeutic integration practices

ABSTRACT

Ayahuasca has a variety of traditional uses, yet there is a growing global interest in its potential therapeutic benefits for mental health conditions. Novel approaches to psychotherapy are emerging to address the needs of ayahuasca users to prepare as well as to guide them in ‘integrating’ their powerful psychedelic experiences, yet there is little discussion on the ethical frameworks that may structure these therapeutic processes or the social and cultural assumptions that influence the assignment of ayahuasca as a medicine. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in San Martín and Loreto, Peru, I examine the varied social meanings and uses of ayahuasca in the Peruvian vegetalista tradition and the potential ethical tensions among curanderos, mental health practitioners, and ayahuasca retreat centres. Practitioners and ayahuasca centres are left with navigating globalized concepts of mental health and ethics while attempting to remain authentic to local ontologies of healing, care, and safety.

KEYWORDS:

• Ayahuasca
• shamanism
• ethics
• anthropology
• vegetalismo
• mental health
• integration

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Merrill Singer, César Abadía-Barrero, Françoise Dussart, and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on different versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Beyer was hardly the first to comment on the heightened international interest in ayahuasca and the concomitant rise in ayahuasca-related tourism. Marlene Dobkin de Rios (1994, 2002) was an early critic of ayahuasca-related tourism, advancing concerns that such activities will destroy traditional practices as new, untrained, unskilled people pose as shamans in order to benefit from the growing popularity and financial opportunity of ayahuasca practices.

2 Ken Tupper (2008) has also referenced the ‘benefit maximization’ that occurs when psychotherapeutic or other integration practices as combined with ayahuasca use.

3 The term shaman is often used among scholars, travellers, foreigners, and some locals to refer to Indigenous and mestizo practices that involve contact with the spiritual world for a variety of purposes (e.g. diagnosis, healing, apprenticeship, spiritual warfare, creating balance). However, in addition to the dozens of Indigenous-language terms in the Amazon, local Spanish-language terms for ritual specialists such as medico (healer/doctor), curandero (healer) and vegetalista (one who works with the spirits of a broad number of plants or vegetales) are more accurate. Nevertheless, local and Indigenous people have adopted the term chamán when speaking amongst foreign clientele and often the terms curandero and shaman are used interchangeably in conversation, on websites, in books, and in scholarly publications. Indeed, ayahuasca shamanism itself has become a term that refers to the entirety of the mestizo and globalized Indigenous ayahuasca-related practices, including dietas, purgas, and other processes that may not include the ingestion of ayahuasca. Although such a conflation of curandero, chamán, and vegetalista might be objectionable, the term shaman and ayahuasca shamanism have come to be equated (perhaps erroneously) with the ethnographic context in which I conducted fieldwork. Thus, throughout this paper I use the term shaman and curandero to signify the same role of the ritual-specialist. See Martínez González (2009) for further discussion.

4 https://www.vice.com/en/article/nnkjaw/we-asked-why-someone-would-take-ayahuasca-more-than-20-times.

5 I refer to a ‘globalized context’ as markedly different from an Indigenous or local mestizo context in that the ceremony is conducted for non-Indigenous or non-local participants; may be led by someone whose community of origin (whether Indigenous or not) does not have an ancestral ayahuasca-related tradition; and interweaves spiritual features from around the globe (see Tupper 2009 for a discussion of cross-cultural vegetalismo and Labate 2014 on the internationalization of vegetalismo).

6 I remind the reader that my analysis is focused on the vegetalista tradition. For a similar analysis based on fieldwork in a Shipibo community, see Brabec de Mori (2021).

7 I conducted 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2015 and 2019 in and around the jungle cities of Tarapoto and Iquitos, with some interviews also conducted among ayahuasqueros in Pisac and Calca. Ethical approval was continuously reviewed and granted by the University of Connecticut IRB (#H15-129).

8 The term banco ayahuasquero refers to someone who has achieved the highest level of mastery as an ayahuasquero. There are other kinds of bancos who do not work with ayahuasca.

9 This is discussed in a different context by Lévi-Strauss in his comparison between the individual and social myth, which I address in a different publication (Marcus and Fotiou 2019).

10 Community Shamans of Perú https://ayahuasca-wachuma.com/the-comunity-shamans.php and CAISAE https://caisae.com/shamans-who-are-we/, for example. The fact that these also double as retreat programs themselves is another topic of discussion.

11 While there is not sufficient data to suggest that brujería increases with more clientele, this has certainly been suggested as fact by many of my participants. Bonilla (2016) discusses the relationship between market-based consumerism and predatory behaviour among the Paumari, which provides an insightful discussion of how logics of exchange transform relationships in Amazonia.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fulbright-Hays under Grant [PR/Award No. P022A170029]; The Tinker Foundation; and the Source Research Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Olivia Marcus

Olivia Marcus completed an MPH in Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University and a PhD in medical anthropology at the University of Connecticut. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Behavioral Sciences Training in Drug Abuse Research program sponsored by New York University with funding from the National Institutes of Drug Abuse (5T32 DA007233). Points of view, opinions, and conclusions are the authors alone.