Special Ayahuasca Issue Introduction: Toward a

Multidisciplinary Approach to Ayahuasca

Studies
s t e p h a n v. b e y e r
Independent Researcher
steve@singingtotheplants.com

I was delighted when Evgenia Fotiou, the editor of this issue of Anthropology
of Consciousness, asked me to write a brief introduction to this collection of
papers, four of which were first presented in March 2010 at the 13th annual
conference of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness.
Indeed, these papers offer just a sampling of the eight presentations and
the spirited discussions that took place on that revolutionary Saturday morn-
ing in Berkeley. For the first time, as a result of Evgenia’s own prescience
and enthusiasm, a truly multidisciplinary panel convened to focus on ayahua-
sca, that disconcerting and protean jungle hallucinogen.
The personal and disciplinary interactions were revelatory. On that morn-
ing, a new voraciously multidisciplinary field of academic study was born.
This groundbreaking session was quickly followed by another. The
following month, MAPS—the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic
Studies—convened its annual conference, with the title Psychedelic Science
in the 21st Century, which featured an entire conference track devoted to the
public policy, safety, effects, and therapeutic potential of ayahuasca for addic-
tion and psychospiritual integration.
Perhaps even more important than the formal presentations was the aya-
huasca researchers meeting held on the Sunday afternoon of the conference.
Scholars and researchers from a wide variety of disciplines, many of them
fresh from the earlier SAC conference, met together and realized, to the
astonishment of some, that they were in fact part of an energetic community
of scholars with shared or overlapping interests, mutually illuminating
differences in approach, and a commitment to rigorous and creative research.
There was now such a thing as Ayahuasca Studies.

Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 23, Issue 1, pp. 1–5, ISSN 1053-4202, © 2012 by the
American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved
DOI: 10.1111/j.1556-3537.2012.01053.x

1
2 anthropology of consciousness 23.1

It was about time.

Ayahuasca had slowly been working its way into the popular awareness of
the world outside the Amazon for about twenty years. We can in fact date
the beginning of that awareness, with unusual precision, to the 1991 publica-
tion of the beautifully produced book Ayahuasca Visions (Luna and Amar-
ingo 1991)—a collection of vibrant paintings by former shaman Pablo
Amaringo, depicting visions he had received during his years of practice as
an ayahuasquero, accompanied by his own explanation of each painting and
the annotations of anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna.
Despite the brief spotlight that Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs
shone on ayahuasca in The Yage Letters in 1963, the groundbreaking publica-
tions of Marlene Dobkin de Ríos in 1972 and Luna himself in 1986, and
even the presence of a Santo Daime center in Boston in 1987 (Groisman
2000; Clark 2006), it is probably fair to say that the popular interest in
ayahuasca that began in the mid-1990s—and the accompanying surge of for-
eigners seeking out ayahuasqueros in the Amazon—was driven in large part
by Amaringo’s extraordinary paintings.
We will mention just two of the many landmarks of this increasing popular
interest in ayahuasca. On the February 17, 2009 episode of the television
melodrama Nip/Tuck (Murphy and Chilton 2009), one of the main charac-
ters, plastic surgeon Sean McNamara, drinks ayahuasca in a tipi with his
homicidal anesthesiologist girlfriend. “If you are lucky,” the shaman says,
“you may experience what is called the murdering of the ego.”
Similarly, in the August 18, 2008 episode of the television comedy Weeds
(Morrow 2008), the protagonist—a suburban housewife who has turned
to selling marijuana to support herself after the sudden death of her
husband—drinks ayahuasca as a way to deal with her fears and cure a
chronic headache. Before she drinks, she is told—in a saying that has
achieved its own immortality on ayahuasca websites—“Peyote is a bicycle.
Ayahuasca is a rocket ship. Like 30 years of psychotherapy in one night.”
Such popular references both reflected and crystallized popular attitudes
and beliefs about the nature and effects of ayahuasca. By the time of the
SAC conference, ayahuasca had two faces in the popular media and on
social networks—on the one hand, it was healing and transformative and
redemptive; on the other, the word ayahuasca had become a trope for the
edgy, the transgressive, the seriously cool. Ayahuasca, as cultural critic Erik
Davis (2010) put it, was “swimming in the cultural water supply.”
Claims for the physically therapeutic potential of ayahuasca had initially
appeared around the turn of the century. In 1998, a man named Donald
Topping wrote an article in the Bulletin of the Multidisciplinary Association
for Psychedelic Studies claiming that his metastatic liver cancer had been
reversed by drinking ayahuasca on several occasions after his diagnosis. An
special ayahuasca issue introduction 3

article published in a New York Times on March 13 (Blakesee 2001) quoted

the eminent pharmacologist David E. Nichols as saying, apparently off-
handedly, that ayahuasca reportedly had helped alcoholics stay sober.
As more and more foreigners traveled to the Upper Amazon to seek out sha-
mans who would give them ayahuasca, narratives of remarkable healings
began to accumulate. Interestingly, such therapeutic claims generally centered
on diseases that are salient for otherwise well-nourished foreigners outside the
Amazon—cancer, AIDS, obesity, depression. Ayahuasqueros were quick to
respond to the therapeutic demands of this new demographic. One shaman
near Iquitos, for example, has claimed, on a website directed toward foreign
tourists, that he can heal, among other things, sexually transmitted diseases,
depression, drug addiction, cancer, AIDS, heart disease, mental disorders,
migraines, anxiety, and obesity—disease entities that are culturally salient pri-
marily to foreigners rather than traditionally to mestizos or indigenous people.
We should also bear in mind that, before the influence of foreign medical
models and expectations, ayahuasca was not itself a healing medicine but
rather a diagnostic tool. Shamans—and their patients—did not drink ayahua-
sca for healing; they drank ayahuasca to get information—identity of the
seducer of an unfaithful spouse, the secret dealings of a business rival, the
location and nature of the malignant darts within the patient’s body. As Co-
cama shaman don Juan Curico puts it, ayahuasca was used “to screen the
disease and to search the treatment” (Beyer 2009). Mestizo shaman don
Manuel Córdova Ríos says the same thing: “Ayahuasca, it tells you how, but
by itself it cures nothing directly” (Beyer 2009).
The seekers also came to the shaman with their own set of etiological and
nosological concepts, rooted primarily in popular psychology and alternative
medicine. And they brought with them assumptions about the nature of
ayahuasca and its healing potential that often differed radically from the
concepts of the mestizo and indigenous shamans to whom they come for
gringo-style healing of what were conceptually gringo diseases. Few gringo
tourists understood—or cared about—the cultural assumptions underlying
the ayahuasca ceremony or the nature of the diseases that the shamanic hea-
ler actually addressed, which, in the Upper Amazon, are essentially signs of a
failure of right relationship—a social rather than an individual pathology.
Few foreign tourists came to the Amazon anticipating treatment by a shaman
sucking pathogenic projectiles from their bodies.
At the same time, there was an increasing number of reports of spiritual
transformation, healing of psychological wounds, changes in personality.
A brief review of relevant postings on the social networking site tribe.net in
2008 (see Beyer 2009) showed that potential and actual ayahuasca tourists
spoke of healing, spiritual growth, and transformation of all sorts—personal,
planetary, psychological, and sacred. In the same way, when anthropologist
4 anthropology of consciousness 23.1

Michael Winkelman (2005) interviewed 15 ayahuasca tourists in Manaus,

he found them to be seeking spiritual relations, personal spiritual develop-
ment, personal self-awareness, emotional healing, and access to deeper lev-
els of the self. Websites promoting ayahuasca trips to Peru have typically
spoken in similar terms of personal cleansing and transformation, connec-
tion with nature, deep healing, the transformational power of ancient ritu-
als, and jungle shamanism, mysticism, and spiritual transformation.
Clearly by 2010 the time had come for a rigorous examination of such
claims and for a multidisciplinary approach to the cultural context, nature,
effects, and uses of the ayahuasca drink. What was needed was the creation
of a multidisciplinary field of study—an ongoing coalition of scholars and
researchers from multiple scientific and humanistic disciplines. The papers
collected here represent the first steps in doing just that.
These authors speak from the viewpoints of multiple disciplines, yet all
give serious and sustained attention to the context and claims that surround
ayahuasca. The result is the creation of a synergistic and coherent problem-
atic for Ayahuasca Studies. Here, I think, are some of the foundational ques-
tions addressed in these papers.
How is ayahuasca used, explained, and experienced in different cultures? To
the extent that these uses, explanations, or experiences are different, what
accounts for this difference? For example, foreign tourists in Peru bring with
them their own cultural ideas about the causes, nature, and cure of human
suffering, especially their own. Do they therefore have different ayahuasca
experiences than Peruvian clients of the same healer? Or are those experi-
ences congruent or overlapping, and in what ways? Here Evgenia Fotiou, an
anthropologist whose interests center on the cross-cultural study of health
and healing, relies on her fieldwork among ayahuasca seekers in Iquitos to
provide a valuable basis for this debate.
Does ayahuasca in fact have any or all of the very various therapeutic and
transformative properties attributed to it? Certainly clinical and epidemiological
studies have been and will continue to be done, but this may not be as straight-
forward an empirical question as it initially appears. As Brian Anderson points
out, in his clinically informed thinking about the use of ayahuasca as an antide-
pressant, experiments are themselves affected by the conventional psychiatric pa-
thologizing of anomalous experiences such as those associated with ayahuasca.
To the extent that ayahuasca use is perceived as transgressive of social and
legal norms, what public policies have been implemented—and why—when
ayahuasca is used for therapeutic, religious, or ceremonial purposes? As a
cultural anthropologist, Bia Labate provides us with a detailed case study of
how the formal governmental recognition of the Brazilian ayahuasca
churches was accomplished through astute management of the cultural and
symbolic repertoire of each group.
special ayahuasca issue introduction 5

To the extent that ayahuasca can be shown to have the medicinal or spiri-
tual properties attributed to it, then how does it work? This is a question of
model building. Up until now the dominant model has been mechanistic
and molecular, but here we are gifted with two additional proposals. Based
on his earlier work with EEG monitoring, psychologist Frank Echenhofer
proposes a three-stage model that relates the ayahuasca experience to artistic
and other forms of human creativity. Richard Doyle, on the other hand,
whose research has been on the history and rhetoric of emerging techno-
sciences, offers what he calls a biosemiotic interpretation of ayahuasca experi-
ence as ultimately the product of a meeting of plant and human intelligence.
At the time of writing this introduction, the MAPS conference scheduled
for December 2011 anticipates a full-day workshop on ayahuasca healing and
a less formal meeting of ayahuasca researchers and scholars from all over the
world. I think that Ayahuasca Studies is off to a good start.

references cited
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