How did the ayahuasca come to detach itself from the multiplicity of psychoactive plants discovered during the colonial and postcolonial encounter with the Americas?
Unlike other South American hallucinogenic plants now present in Europe and North America whose consumption can be recreational, that of ayahuasca retreat is always associated with a spiritual quest or a therapeutic use ritually supervised by a person with a recognized function of specialist.
To think of this phenomenon solely in terms of spiritual tourism would be equivalent to privileging the study of displacements towards places of religious experimentation, whereas the apprehension of the routes of internationalized shamanism leads to also identify phenomena of mobility and sometimes of installation of Latin American specialists in the places of origin of the tourists.
Moreover, the short duration of the organized tourist trip does not exhaust the magnitude of the phenomenon, which also includes multi-stage journey-searches and long-term apprenticeships. Understanding the ethnographic landscape around the contemporary consumption of ayahuasca and its association with the category of shamanism implies a brief historical journey of the conditions of its emergence in the ethnic and social context of the Amazon and in the Euro-US.
Unlike other South American hallucinogenic plants now present in Europe and North America whose consumption can be recreational, that of ayahuasca retreat is always associated with a spiritual quest or a therapeutic use ritually supervised by a person with a recognized function of specialist.
To think of this phenomenon solely in terms of spiritual tourism would be equivalent to privileging the study of displacements towards places of religious experimentation, whereas the apprehension of the routes of internationalized shamanism leads to also identify phenomena of mobility and sometimes of installation of Latin American specialists in the places of origin of the tourists.
Moreover, the short duration of the organized tourist trip does not exhaust the magnitude of the phenomenon, which also includes multi-stage journey-searches and long-term apprenticeships. Understanding the ethnographic landscape around the contemporary consumption of ayahuasca and its association with the category of shamanism implies a brief historical journey of the conditions of its emergence in the ethnic and social context of the Amazon and in the Euro-US.
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