International Journal for the Study of New Religions 7.

2 (2016) 199–220
ISSN 2041-9511 (print) ISSN 2041-952X (online)
10.1558/ijsnr.v7i2.31955

Dividual Vision of the Individual: Ayahuasca Neo-shamanism

in Australia and the New Age Individualism Orthodoxy

Alex Gearin

The University of Queensland

akgearin@gmail.com

There has been ongoing scholarly debate concerning whether New Age spirit-
uality may be defined by individualistic more than collectivistic values, beliefs
and behaviours. Most scholars have answered in the positive and indicated
how New Age beliefs and techniques emphasize the importance of the self
and self-interests of the practitioner. This article contributes to debates on
New Age individualism with an analysis of ayahuasca neo-shamanism in Aus-
tralia. I introduce thick ethnographic evidence of collectivist logics of social
action in ritual practices of ecstatic purging and visions. I argue that these
practices can be interpreted through anthropological notion of “dividualism”
whereby the person is multiple, partible, and exchangeable along social rela-
tions of obligation (Strathern 1988; Mosko 2013). The article illustrates how
ethnographic theory may contribute to debates on individualism and collec-
tivism in New Age spirituality by creating space for “native” or emic theories
of social action.

My hesitation to use a variety of hard anthropological concepts, such as ritual,

religion, the sacred, and the profane—except as vague sign-posts—was precise-
ly because they were not based upon, nor did they reflect, indigenous catego-
ries, which were more complex and more shaded than such constructs allowed.
(Jack Goody Towards a room with a view)

Obligations to do things for others, or to sacrifice the self to the wishes of

family or work or society, may operate on levels of cognition linked to cultural
categories of motivation that are invisible to eyes untrained in the “native” or
emic cultural categories. A commitment to native or emic understandings and
Keywords: ayahuasca, New Age, dividualism, individualism, entheogenic esotericism

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200 Dividual Vision of the Individual
practices is a hallmark of anthropology and ethnography. The type of thick
data it provides can offer important perspectives to discussions about New
Age or alternative spiritualities in Western societies; an area that has typically
been researched from the perspectives of sociology, social psychology, and the
history of religion. An ongoing debate in studies of New Age spirituality has
concerned the question of whether contemporary alternative spiritualities
represent a social shift towards individualism when compared to traditional
religions. The answer, according to a good portion of the research, is in the
affirmative. Bellah et al. (1985) argued that therapeutic strategies of New Age
spirituality involve a rejection of communal values and communal commit-
ments and a favouring of personal self-fulfilment; Bruce argued that New
Age beliefs and practices are a manifestation of the modern epistemology of
capitalism and represent the “zenith of individualism” (1995, 122); Farias and
Lalljee (2008, 277) present empirical evidence that suggests that in the United
Kingdom, New Age practitioners—when compared to Catholics—“adopt an
individualistic outlook similar to that of nonreligious people” whereby the
practitioners assert independence and prioritize personal goals over communal
or “in-group” goals; similarly, Houtman and Mascini (2002) present empirical
evidence that suggests high levels of “moral individualism” among New Age
participants in The Netherlands; and other researchers have provided different
ideas and forms of evidence that suggest types of social individualism among
New Age groups (Lyon 2000; Taylor 2002; Possamai 2004).
Important to many arguments of New Age individualism is the idea of belief
“bricolage” (Aupers and Houtman 2006, 202). New Age beliefs and practices
may include elements from many different religious and cultural traditions—
such as Taoism, Buddhism, African Spiritism, Indigenous shamanism, Chris-
tianity, Western psychotherapy and popular culture. The pastiche mytholo-
gies of New Age spirituality are typically arranged by its adherents in a vision
of perennial cosmic holism, disclosed to the individual’s “inner experience,”
in what has been labelled “self-spirituality” (Heelas 1996, 2). The elements of
this “pick-and-mix religion” (Hamilton 2000) are arranged by the New Age
practitioner in ways that appear to reflect a market economy logic in which
individuals define their identity through consumptive practices (Lyon 2000).
Further, the vast pluralism of New Age beliefs accommodates an individual-
istic epistemology whereby truth is defined and arbitrated by the individual
(Partridge 1999). In an earlier piece of research I presented on ayahuasca
neo-shamanism in Australia (Gearin 2015), I illustrate an example of this in
terms of how a bricolage or radical diversity of spiritual beliefs is encouraged
by formal ritual conventions.

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Alex Gearin 201
While it would be unproductive to argue that New Age individualism the-
ses are ungrounded or false, it is productive to be wary that ideas of New Age
individualism have become something of an orthodoxy in sociology (see dis-
cussion in Aupers and Houtman 2006), and among anthropological studies
of neo-shamanism.1 Without recourse to evidence, Towsend (2004) begins
his research from the premise that neo-shamanism is an “individualist reli-
gion,” and, similarly, Jakobson argues that because neoshamanic practitioners
can choose to go, or not go, to neoshamanic social event, “neo-shamanism
with its highly individualized method of using spirit-helpers and healing…
appeal[s] to the members of a society that is seen as highly fragmented and
diffuse” (1999, 176–177).
In contrast, various scholars have presented ideas that challenge charges
of New Age individualism. Heelas (1996) and Aupers and Houtman (2006,
218) argued that New Age spirituality shares a coherent ideology in which
practitioners are “socialized into compliance to the doctrine of self-spiritu-
ality”; Cadge (2007) and Chile and Simpson (2004) argued that forms of
holistic New Age spirituality help to integrate individuals within social and
cosmological environments; similarly, Hedges and Beckford (2000) illus-
trate self-centred and selfless practices in New Age spirituality and argue that
through the principles of cosmic holism or universalism, New Age practition-
ers cultivate commitments to values of benevolence and compassion; simi-
larly, empirical research developed by Oh and Sarkisian (2012, 299) suggests
New Age “mind-body-spirit” practices are “positively associated with altru-
istic behaviours, participation in nonreligious voluntary associations, and
individual political action”; and finally, Itzhak (2015) illustrates through an
ethnography of neo-shamanism in the United States how key healing prac-
tices grounded in encounters with alterity involve disruptions to a coherent
sense of self.
In this article, I contribute to the debate on New Age individualism by
introducing thick ethnographic data of relational, collectivist logics of social
action in ayahuasca neo-shamanism in Australia. I challenge the binary of
in/dividualism in research on New Age individualism by drawing upon
similar debates in the anthropology of personhood where a bifurcation of
Christian individualism contra indigenous “dividualism” is being challenged
(LiPuma 1998; Mosko 2015; Vilaça 2015). The article demonstrates collec-
1. By “neo-shamanism” I refer to what Atkinson termed “the new shamanism” (1992, 233)
that emerged in the 1960s “counter-culture” in which urban, middle-classes people from
around the globe engaged in the construction of spiritual beliefs and practices associated
to indigenous cosmologies and practices.

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202 Dividual Vision of the Individual
tivist categories of motivation and understanding in modes of practice native
or particular to ayahuasca neo-shamanism in Australia. The type of evidence
of this particularization raises critical methodological questions regarding
absolutist theories of individualism and collectivism in the study of New
Age spirituality. The article first outlines key concepts in the anthropology
of “dividualism” and then explores the concepts in the context of Australian
ayahuasca neo-shamanism.
Individualism and dividualism: Anthropological perspectives
My approach to using the concepts individualism and relationalism is guided
by Sherry Ortner’s notion of relationalism, defined loosely as “implications of
corporateness; of social obligations given by relationships” (Ortner 1995, 360).
By focusing ethnographically with the concept of “social obligation,” I attempt
to make a useful integration of anthropological concepts of relationalism with
theories of individualism and collectivism in the study of New Age spiritual-
ity. The culture and practices at ayahuasca neoshamanic healing retreats entails
unique configuration of how social obligations are thought, imagined, prac-
ticed, and defined by ayahuasca drinkers. From the messy or complex ethno-
graphic ground of ayahuasca healing retreats, I consider key “native” or emic
rationalities among ayahuasca drinkers in Australia with regard to the question
of how the individuals conceive of the social and how they exist socially—
including how personal motivations, perceptions and actions dynamically
relate to the non-ordinary experiences of ayahuasca trance healing.
I first heard about ayahuasca during an undergraduate anthropology class
on the topic of the body, and at the time I was becoming familiar with the
famous anthropological dictum, “Westerners are individualistic.” When I
began to study ayahuasca use in Australian society, this dictum was guid-
ing my thoughts and eyes in ways that I was not aware. Diverse research
in anthropology supports the claim that Westerners are individualistic,
including Louis Dumont’s (1970) work on equality and the individualiza-
tion of hierarchy in Western social organization, Clifford Geertz (1975) on
the bounded Western self, Marilyn Strathern’s (1988) research on indige-
nous “dividualism” in Melanesia, and the diverse body of literature on non-
Western relational personhood (Bird-David 1999; Lenaerts 2006; Glaskin
2012). Given this basis, it appeared likely that I would discover a ghost of
individualism in ayahuasca neo-shamanism in modern, urban, industrialized
states. In addition, my mind was further primed by literature on the concept
of cultural appropriation to discover aspects of individualism in ayahuasca
neo-shamanism, given that “Indigenous knowledge, when transplanted and

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Alex Gearin 203
commoditized, comes to take on the fragmentary nature of the society by
which it is appropriated” (Vitebsky 1995, 205). This line of thought invari-
ably supported approaches to ayahuasca and individualism I have developed
previously (Gearin 2015).
The thorny issue of indigenous individualisms and Western dividualisms
threw a partible labyrinth around my thinking. In the anthropology of indig-
enous Amazonia there are examples of types of individualism (Rivière 1984)
not linked to capitalist or modern society and, in addition, some researchers
broadly define indigenous shamanism as individualistic (Hultkrantz 2004,
164). A neat analytical Othering and bifurcation of modern and pre-modern
along the lines of individualistic and relational does not appear sufficient
in light of the evidence of indigenous individualisms. In parallel, Dumont’s
notion that “a society conceived by individualism has never existed anywhere
for the reason we have given, namely, that the individual lives on social ideas”
(Dumont 1970, 9–10) engenders an approach in which the concepts of indi-
vidualism and relationalism seem best considered not simply as opposites but
as an integrated conceptual tool.
Ethnography conducted in Oceania has contributed in-depth “thick data”
and key theoretical innovations to discussions of individualism and relation-
alism in anthropology. Investigating social exchange relations in Melanesia,
anthropologists have demonstrated how relational “dividual” persons charac-
terize social action and subjective experience (Strathern 1988; Strathern and
Stewart 2000; LiPuma 1998). The ethnographic accounts detail how “the
person” may act and think as a corporate entity indivisible from the relations
of which he or she is constituted. Dividuals are the “the plural and composite
site of the relationships that produced them” (Strathern 1988, 13) and social
action “consists in detaching and revealing the person’s internal capacities as
previously composed of the actions of other persons” (Mosko 1992, 698).
The “parts of person” that are exchanged in Melanesian gift-economies may
include such a range of things from foods, medicines, and brides to tech-
niques for cooking, gardening, courting and “the proper conduct of bride-
wealth, warfare, and sorcery” (Mosko 2013, 167).
These forms of relational personhood—wherein the person is multiple,
partible, and distributed across bodies, minds and objects—have been con-
trasted by anthropologists to a commodity form of “the person” associated
with capitalist society. In a seminal work on possessive individualism, Craw-
ford Macpherson (1962) draws the modern concept of the individual to
Enlightenment political and economic theories of Hobbes and Locke and,
specifically, to a correspondence with the “actual relations of market society”

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204 Dividual Vision of the Individual
(1962, 4). The individual “presupposes an absolute distinction between own-
ing subjects, each bound in their own right from one another and from their
owned objects” (Mosko 2015, 372). Macpherson described the “possessive”
individualism of capitalist society.
The individual [is] essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities,
owing nothing to society for them. The individual was seen neither as a moral
whole, nor as part of a larger social whole but as owner of himself… The
individual, is free inasmuch as he is proprietor of his person and capacities…
[and free] from dependence on the wills of others.
(Macpherson cited in Mosko 2015, 372)
In this evaluation, the person is atomized, bounded, and distinct in ways that
contrast to dividual forms of personhood wherein persons are multiple, part-
ible, and exchangeable along social lines of obligation.
The simple division that Westerners are individualistic and indigenous peo-
ple are dividualistic or relational, however, received heavy criticism in anthro-
pology, given its ideological implications (Ortner 1995) and given that,
across the globe, “each language inscribes the use of a “you” as well as an “I,”
and identity and self construction are the result of socially created relations”
(LiPuma 1998, 57). In any study of individualism, the shadow concept of
relationalism is indispensable, or, as Ortner argued, “we can say that shaman-
ism is relational only if we are prepared also to see the ways it is not” (1995,
371). Not isolating the concepts but considering both with regard to how the
person is constituted, LiPuma argued that:
My reading of ethnographic theory and methods indicates that the ontologi-
cal form is the dual person delineated by dividual and individual facets. Uni-
versally, then, the person emerges from the tension, itself always variable and
culturally/historically shaped, between these two aspects of personhood and
the ways in which they are objectified and embodied. (1998, 75)
This type of integrated conceptualization has informed my investigation of
individualism in the ritual and healing practices of ayahuasca neo-shamanism
in Australia. By undertaking a commitment to native or emic knowledge and
practice systems of divination, ecstatic purging, and narrative-making at Aus-
tralian ayahuasca retreats, I illustrate ways in which dividual and individual
modes of social action intersect in a fringe spirituality movement of Western
capitalist societies.
Dividual healing in ayahuasca neo-shamanism in Australia
Unless indicated otherwise, all descriptions of ayahuasca use below are
derived from my ethnographic research conducted in Australia. During

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Alex Gearin 205
2011 to 2014, I undertook ethnographic research among ayahuasca drink-
ers in Australia in various locations on the east coast of the continent.
My primary mode of research was participant observation in which I attended
thirty ayahuasca retreat ceremonies and joined ayahuasca drinkers in social
events outside ayahuasca retreats (such as ayahuasca related music, arts, and
educational events). The ayahuasca retreats are usually conducted during the
weekend—beginning Friday late afternoon and finishing Sunday afternoon.
I attended one particular group’s retreats regularly while also attending five
other retreats that are conducted by different ritual specialists or ritual facili-
tators. While there are not always clear differences between the various groups
and networks of Australian-based ayahuasca ceremonies—and ritual special-
ists will at times co-facilitate rituals with other specialists, and drinkers may
attend multiple, different retreats across the continent—my research focused
on the oldest and largest network of ayahuasca drinkers in Australia. After
attending weekend retreats for twelve months and conducting forty in-depth
interviews, I conducted an online email questionnaire of a key Australian-
wide network of drinkers.2
Ayahuasca use emerged from indigenous Amazonia (Labate and Cavnar
2014) and it came to Australia through a realm of Western experimental
psychedelic culture in which practitioners are also privy to consuming LSD,
psilocybe mushrooms, DMT and various other psychoactive materials.
These psychedelic practitioners or experimentalists typically conflate psyche-
delic materials within a rubric of psychedelic spirituality or “entheogenic”
practice. During the first decade of being in Australia, however, ayahuasca
summoned a relatively unique practice with some of the original experimen-
talists explaining that they “found their medicine” and now only consume
ayahuasca. In some instances, ayahuasca drinkers make distinctions between
organic and inorganic chemistry—such as between ayahuasca and LSD—and
hierarchize ayahuasca to levels of sanctity, power, and purity beyond synthetic
or “man-made” chemicals. This original split in the cosmology of ayahuasca
neo-shamanism reflects core aspects of its etiological system whereby healing
pivots upon distinctions between nature and society and, fundamentally, the
socialized individual overcoming a form of psychic alienation from “Gaia” or
the spirit of the natural world.
The two explicit reasons that Australian drinkers tend to provide for why
they drink ayahuasca are for “healing” and “wisdom”—which may be crudely
2. The email list consisted of 2000+ people, and I also sent the questionnaire to a variety
of smaller email lists that consist of different networks. I received 105 responses (54,000
words) in total.

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206 Dividual Vision of the Individual
delineated as practices of purging and ecstatic divination. When drinkers
explain that they consume ayahuasca for wisdom and healing, they are typi-
cally referring to, on the one hand, wisdom received from visions, epiphanies,
insights, and divine council that emerge during ayahuasca trance experiences,
and, on the other hand, types of healing and spiritual cleansing associated
with ceremonial vomiting, sweating, and other forms of ecstatic purging. Yet,
the two categories “purging” and “ecstatic divination” are not always stable
or distinct in the minds, bodies, and practice of the drinkers. The conceptual
distinction between revelation and purging, or between wisdom and healing,
blurs while the quest for arcane knowledge and understanding conflates with
longings for healing and wellbeing, and processes of purging and purifica-
tion occasions novel, everyday perceptions and esoteric knowledge. Drink-
ers describe receiving insights or perspectives on how they “ought” to live
with regard to issues internal to domains of family, friend, and workplace
relations, and these insights are understood as “healing insights.” In some
instances, drinkers explain that the sometimes horrific and grotesque visions
and sensory experiences of ayahuasca trance represent forms of purging and
that what they vomit is in fact aspects of the ecstatic visions. Divination and
purging, in this context, may represent integrated practices.
Examining divination practices reveals key aspects of the ritual structure of
ayahuasca neoshamanic ceremonies and an etiological system of healing that
appears to indicate a form of social individualism. By approaching divination
as a special “form of inquiry that constitutes knowledge about the world”
(Myhre 2006, 313), it can be said that the forms of divination practiced in
Australian ayahuasca neo-shamanism involve individuals inducing a trance
experience in which visions and purging are the framework for knowledge
objects of a personal healing journey. Drinkers divine wisdom from their own
visions and articulate it during formal post-ceremony sharing-round rites. The
visions constitute individual speech acts that are typically directed towards
the remedying of the individual’s mind-body, which is explicitly linked in
narrative accounts of trance to the individual’s past behaviours, past experi-
ences, and social relations.
Divination practices across the globe typically involve a diviner that is
equipped with skills to mine non-ordinary realms of experience, cosmology,
and rationality for a client (Worsley 1982). In the case of ayahuasca neo-sha-
manism in Australia, the diviner is also the client. The divination practiced
in this context occasionally may involve drinkers gaining knowledge from
visions of the future of themselves, society, or planet earth. However, typi-
cally, the practice of divination involves the patient receiving insight on how

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Alex Gearin 207
to better his or her life. This axiom of the practice of visions, when consid-
ered with the individualized belief bricolage it accommodates and encourages
(Gearin 2015), situates Australian ayahuasca neo-shamanism among other
forms of “self-spirituality” (Heelas 1996, 2) in Western societies.
Among the ayahuasca networks I researched, notions and experiences of the
self or ego may undergo radical revisions during and after trance ceremonies.
They may momentarily dissolve, through which experiences and codifications
of the laws of space and time, and the borders between persons, become less
rigid or fixed. The drinkers describe raising their vibrations and frequencies dur-
ing ayahuasca ceremonies, and the notions of vibration, frequency, and self-
dissolution signify processes of healing and cultivating the self. The notions
also refer to synesthetic content of ayahuasca trance-experiences in which all
the senses subtly vibrate and resonate. In this cosmos of sensory vibrations,
people may resonate with visions or sensory materializations of other people,
representing experiences of relational personhood. “When you are around peo-
ple of your own vibrational frequency,” popular Australian ayahuasca spokes-
person Rak Razam explains, “it reinforces your own vibrational frequency and
you grow together, as a collective” (Razam 2011). The trope of resonating or
vibrating as a collective represents a composite dividual entity that is material-
ized as types of sensory and bodily experiences during ayahuasca trance.
The ecstatic effects of ayahuasca typically begin approximately 30 min-
utes after ingestion and continue for several hours. The most significant and
dramatic bodily process typical of ayahuasca ceremonies is undoubtedly the
purgative, vomiting actions of the brew. The act of ayahuasca purging is usu-
ally unpredictable, surprises the individual, and coincides with a sharp rise
in psychoactive effects that may include emotion dilation, radical auditory
and visual alterations, along with the saturation of other sensory faculties.
The sound of vomiting can be so loud and ferocious, it can compete with
the volume of the ritual music, and like a sensorial sympathetic contagion,
drinkers may uncontrollably imbue the sounds of vomiting with associated
visuals, smells, and feelings, onto the visionary synesthetic canvas of the dark-
ness, to then erupt into forms of purging themselves. Sensory experience
becomes acutely porous to surrounding sounds and smells and couples with
imaginative properties from which, in this specific case, purging begets purg-
ing, or, as one ritual specialist explained to me, “energy and spirits jump
between drinkers.” This social experience and understanding represents an
example of dimensions of the ecstatic person being partible and exchangeable
on the level of synesthetic group trance. The act of vomiting in ceremonies
can become transferrable and shape other participants’ visions or experiences

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208 Dividual Vision of the Individual
through synesthetic registers and thus the bodily act may extend to an imme-
diate social field in ways that are typically not possible without drinking aya-
huasca.
The experience of vomiting under the effects of ayahuasca tends to be under-
stood by drinkers as initiating types of spiritual and emotional purification or
unblocking. Purging may include not only vomiting but yawning, burping,
sighing, crying, sweating, laughing, or defecating, or, in some extreme cases,
all of the above. Ayahuasca purging, drinkers explain, is a means of purifying
and healing a polluted mind and physical body of afflictive psychic entities,
substances, emptiness, or past experiences.
Drinkers may describe releasing psychic content during ayahuasca purging,
and the content may include a wide variety of things. The most commonly
described psychic contents of the purging appears to index traumatic experi-
ences or “past residues.” Drinkers describe letting-go, releasing, and unblocking
past experiences, and thereby healing trauma through the act of physically
expelling or vomiting. Examples of past traumatic experiences being purged
typically involved implicit or explicit references to types of victimhood
related to familial and social relations. This references may include themes of
sexual abuse, domestic violence, childhood bullying, and in some cases, expe-
riences at war. While psychic-bodily “residues” of types of social victimization
appear to be the most common content that drinkers described purging, in
other instances drinkers described purging out different people. For example,
Christina described.
Most of my vision centred around my mother and maternal concepts. I had an
amazing vision of being connected to a long line of maternal ancestors and they
were supporting me and passing down wisdom. When I was purging I asked the
question what I am trying to get rid of and it was my mother.
Another drinker explained to me that ayahuasca purging “cleared out four
generations of past conditioning which was in my cells and body.” Some-
times drinkers will describe purging for other people, including other people
present or not present at the ceremony retreat. That is, they describe purg-
ing psychic sicknesses that are embodied in other people. In some instances,
drinkers describe purging for groups of people, such as when a woman
described purging for all the women in India that have experienced sexual
abuse.3 Similarly, Marcus, a Caucasian Australian, explained to me that:
The purge is the best part. I love a good purge, spew, shit, yawn, laughing,
tears. It most certainly removes unwanted energies. I have even purged for
3. At the time, Australian popular media were reporting an increase in sexual abuse in India.

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Alex Gearin 209
other people in my journeys. Once I felt I purged for the indigenous peoples
of this land. I have so much gratitude for the experience.
Other less common descriptions of the psychic contents of purging may
include: residue from pharmaceutical medications, psychic effects of media or
news programs, electromagnetic radiation, non-organic or “artificial” foods,
and sometimes the content is simply called “toxins from society” (Gearin
2017).
The physical fluids of purging in Australian ayahuasca neo-shamanism—
whether vomit, sweat, tears, or faeces—index a complex variety of etiological
themes. All the etiological themes are made possible by a constitution of per-
sonhood wherein the individual is not necessarily bound to one body, but is
partible, fluid, and exchangeable, in ways that are often deemed pathological.
While purging appears to be the main healing technique of ayahuasca neo-
shamanism, it may take many forms, including (1) the release of emotion
and/or of trauma (including in various allegorical sequences wherein bod-
ily processes influence the forms and acts of the visions); (2) the releasing
of pathogenic spirits, objects, or blocks from the body; the purging of peo-
ple from the psyche; and purging for other people, including for groups of
people. In addition to purging, experiences of undergoing transformation in
corporeality or “body image” (or turning into other people, animals, nature,
the universe) represent an additional minor technique of healing. The body
and the senses in the techniques by which ecstatic healing and wisdom are
achieved thus include forms of relational personhood in which the “I” of the
drinker may incorporate other people, spirits, and psychic objects that relate
to the actions of other people. This healing body, as a relational microcosm,
resembles generalized conceptions of the dividual of Melanesian culture
described by Strathern.
The Melanesian image of the body as composed of relations is the effect of its
objectification as a person. In the partibility of its extensions into relations be-
yond itself and in the internal relations that compose its substance, the body
consequently appears as a result of people’s actions. (Strathern 1988, 208)
The ayahuasca trance experiences that drinkers articulate and share may
involve heightened states of wellbeing and sickness that are codified with
language that indexes sensorial and bodily dimensions of social life. The
bounded self that Geertz attributed to Western personhood (1975) is blurred
on the level of ecstatic bodily and sensory experience. The practice represents
an example of the “sensorial production of the social” (Yuet Chau 2008),
and I would add, bodily production of the social, given the ways in which

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210 Dividual Vision of the Individual
the dramatic sensory and bodily experiences of ayahuasca trance are defined
by drinkers with a lexicon of terms that signify relational modes of ecstatic
personhood linked to aspects of everyday sociality.
While divination and ecstatic purging should not be considered as com-
pletely separate modes of practice in the rituals, in general terms they appear
to parallel a delineation of concepts of individualism and dividualism.
As described above, the ideal of divining wisdom from ayahuasca visions
involves ritual conventions and belief ideologies in which the self is empha-
sized as an agent that arbitrate personal inner healing knowledge—represent-
ing a pole of individualism. The pathological fluids of ecstatic purging index
dividual modes of sociality in which relationality is highly active—represent-
ing the pole of dividualism. If the healing practice of ecstatic purging in
Australia appears to be characterized by an increase in dividual elements, the
pathological relational fluids of the purge may signify a psychic confronta-
tion with relational modes of sociality by a decidedly individualistic culture.
While this claim is very speculative, I think it is important to consider.
In the next section, I introduce several examples that provide evidence of
ways in which ayahuasca neo-shamanism in Australia involves articulations
of “ethics” or social obligations linked to experiences of dividualism or rela-
tionalism. Rather than attempting to present an encompassing cartography
of relational modes of personhood and collectivist ethics in ayahuasca neo-
shamanism, I indicate a few key examples and case studies in detail. Part of the
orientation of this article is to illustrate how emic knowledge and practice sys-
tems may involve forms of collectivism that are complex with an internal logic
that may not easily “translate” or appear in the results of studies and surveys
that attempt to measure collectivism and individualism cross-culturally, such
as Singelis et al. (1995) and Farias and Lalljee (2008).
Narrative, ethics, and the dividual among ayahuasca drinkers
An evening of ayahuasca purging and/or experiencing ecstatic visions is fol-
lowed by a short period of sleep and then the sharing-round ritual whereby
drinkers attempt to articulate and form understandings of their previous
night’s trance. The narratives in sharing rituals tend to include insights for
the drinker about what he or she ought or ought not to do with regard to
ethical dilemmas of everyday social life.
Drawing upon the work of Michael Lambek (2010) on ethics, I analyse
the narrative or speech acts of ayahuasca trance as discursive practices that
are instructive to everyday ethics, while locating ethics “in the dialectical
movement between the spoken and the unspoken… [between] objectifica-

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tion and embodiment… the ostensible and the subjunctive… [or] the “is”
and the “ought”” (Lambek 2010, 6). The question “How ought I live?”
is individually articulated and answered by Australian ayahuasca drinkers in
the formalized sharing-round rituals of weekend ceremonies. A dialectical
movement appears in the ways in which the trance experiences—that include
dividual bodily processes and sensory states—become articulated in narrative
accounts of trance that index individualized ethical projects of drinkers and
the movement from “is” to “ought” and back again.
The anthropology of ethics provides useful conceptualizations for studying
narrative accounts of ayahuasca neoshamanic trance, and concepts of relation-
alism, collectivism, and individualism, due to the place of the “ought” in ethi-
cal life (Lambek 2010, 6) and the significance of notions of social obligation to
theories of relationalism (Ortner 1995) and collectivism (Singelis et al. 1995;
Farias and Lalljee 2008). Drinkers describe consuming ayahuasca and receiv-
ing insights, perspectives or ideas on how they “ought” to live with regard to
issues internal to domains of family, friends, and workplace relations and these
insights are defined for the drinker within notions of the verb to heal.
The sharing-round ritual represents a ritualization of a general ideal of
attempting to integrate the ayahuasca trance experiences into everyday life.
The sharing-round rituals of Australian ayahuasca neo-shamanism typically
begin with the ritual specialist explaining that people may have powerful
healing experiences when describing their trance and that attendees need to
respect this process. Part of the respect involves not interjecting, commenting
upon, or explaining the ayahuasca trance visions of another person, but sim-
ply “holding space” for other people to articulate meaning about their per-
sonal trance experiences. While drinkers are not required to share accounts
of trance experiences during the sharing-round ritual, most drinkers, in my
experience, participate in the ritual by orating different accounts of healing
and wisdom.
Analyzing narrative accounts of ayahuasca trance healing in Australia with
the general properties of language, “propositionality, representational capa-
bility, [and] indexicality” (Miller and Hoogstra 1992, 87) reveals some key
dimensions of the narratives. Firstly, drinkers typically utter propositional
acts of healing and gaining wisdom that include variations of “I gained heal-
ing and wisdom during my ayahuasca visions last night.” This represents a
core or meta-form of propositionality characterising the discourse. Secondly,
drinkers may go to great lengths in attempting to represent the phenom-
enology of the experience and this may include flexible uses of metaphors,
parables, and an abundance of adjectives. Thirdly, the speech acts include

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various forms of explanation in which drinkers attempt to make sense of
their experiences in relation to everyday social life and, as analysed below,
these articulations index processes by which everyday ethics are articulated
and reconstituted. These three linguistic dimensions of narrative are, how-
ever, not necessarily separate in accounts. For example, an account of trance
may include rich metaphors and adjectives that attempt to account for the
phenomenology of the trance and this richness is described as allowing the
drinkers to integrate the healing and wisdom in more profound ways. In this
instance, representational capability enhances propositionality.
These dynamics of language, narrative and experience may unfold in
diverse ways among ayahuasca drinkers. For example, In February of 2013,
Mark—a neuroscientist and ayahuasca drinker—and I had organized to meet
at his home in Melbourne on the same day in which he was to return from a
weekend of drinking ayahuasca with one of Australia’s most active ayahuasca
networks. During the morning, he phoned me and asked if I could wait until
the evening because he wanted to spend the day with his wife discussing his
trance experiences and “integrating the insights” with her. During the even-
ing, Mark described to me that his trance-experiences entailed “teachings”
and “insights” that included “relating to the source of all creativity,” “the life-
force or existence-force,” and learning to “not be so hard and masculine, but
more sweet and receptive to [his] wife.”
While the contents of ayahuasca visions may include sacred relational expe-
riences that reverberate through articulations of everyday life and the social
obligation-relations of the drinker, drinkers also describe trance experiences
of seeing, encountering, and interacting with family members, work col-
leagues, friends, and other significant human others. Drinkers describe peo-
ple “dropping-in” or appearing in visions and these experiences often inform
or are drawn upon in articulations of everyday ethics that drinkers share dur-
ing retreats. For example, Kate, a graphic designer, described to me how her
personality had changed since drinking ayahuasca. She discussed a sense of
duty she has to her brother that was emphasized during an ayahuasca trance:
[Ayahuasca provides] access to more parts of myself that I don”t usually recog-
nize in this waking state and the learning is in navigating and learning how to
bring it back to this reality and to exercise the same intentions here. Since I”ve
been drinking ayahuasca I am a lot more positive in myself. I don”t have all the
negative self-talk I used to have… Lately it has been my brother dropping-in
and I”ve just been feeling a lot of love for my family. Last journey I realized
that I don”t appreciate my brother enough, he is amazing, and that I should
just go and see him. Why wait for some family event, you know, things like

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Alex Gearin 213
that. There is a lot of connection and a lot of the [ayahuasca trance] journey is
about remembering. In the aya-space you are suddenly like “Ohh, that’s right!
How could I have forgotten this?! I love my brother. I love my mum. I love my
dad. I should spend more time with them.” Everything can make a lot more
sense in that space. All the other shit just gets pushed out of the way.
Some drinkers explain that the human spirits that “drop-in” to trance
visions are aspects of the unconscious psyche of the person appearing. In
contrast, other drinkers explain that the “drop-ins” are constructions of the
person drawn by the drinker’s psyche. In both of these ontological positions,
the “drop-ins” are experienced and related to in terms of processes of learn-
ing and gaining insight about social life and often what the drinker “ought”
or “ought not” do. Talking broadly about her first time drinking ayahuasca,
Kate explained to me:
I had to unmake everything… it was so scary. I had to unmake all my relation-
ships with my family, friends, and the world. They get turned in and out like
the visuals, and the body feelings, and then my personal relationships come
back into shape or are made anew, better, clearer, with more room for love.
During an ayahuasca trance experience in which she accessed more “parts”
of her “self ” and in which her brother “dropped-in” or appeared in her visions,
Kate remembered and felt a sense of obligation to visit her family.
Ethical speech acts, in ayahuasca trance articulations, involve the exercis-
ing of judgments that draw upon the relational criteria that the individual
brings to ayahuasca rituals and that provide the basis by which his or her
narrative accounts of trance are articulated. When Kate states, in reference to
ayahuasca trance experiences, “my relationships come back into shape or are
made anew, better, clearer,” she is making reference to the criteria by which
her social relations are based and by which her ethical judgments are consti-
tuted. Thus, ayahuasca ceremonies entail ecstatic, dividual sensory and bodily
acts from which the criteria of judgments and social relations are reorganized
and empowered or disempowered.
The theme of learning to be a better person and learning to cultivate better
relationships with people is central to narrative accounts of ayahuasca trance
in Australia. The accounts embody themes of ethical empowerment in which
transformations of a psychic embodiment are commonly described in rela-
tional terms. For instance, Jane, a regular ayahuasca drinker, explained to me:
On one journey, she [ayahuasca] showed me who I was especially while in
confrontations with other people. I witnessed myself burning-off dark life-
energy all in the name of proving I was right and the other person wrong.

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214 Dividual Vision of the Individual
Once I witnessed this horrible self-importance, it purged from my body with
such ferocity I thought I was dying. But once this passed I felt a peace within
myself I never knew existed. It has inspired me to be a better person, a better
friend, and lover, a better sister. It is such a gift to have these plants in our lives.
In these examples of narrative accounts of ayahuasca trance healing, the ethical
sensibilities of the drinkers, or their notions of social obligation and becom-
ing “better people,” are foregrounded. Through considering the accounts of
trance in general, it appears that the fluxes in the experience of bodily process
(various forms of purging) and in perceptions and sensory experience during
trance (various forms of visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile experience),
along with encounters with spiritual “others” (such as “mother ayahuasca”
and human “drop-ins”), are articulated by drinkers in ways that involve
blurred definitions of the boundaries between, and the constitution of, self
and other, or the “I” and “Not-I.” Furthermore, these bodily, sensory, and
spiritual fluxes correspond with fluxes in drinkers” articulations of everyday
social ethics and obligations to others.
Drinking ayahuasca, the individual finds him or herself in processes of
redefining and rearticulating his or her relationships with other people and
the world. The spiritual substances, visions, and spirits of ayahuasca trance
constitute failures and promises in “moral sociality” (Londono Sulkin 2005,
13). With vision, sound, touch, and smell intimately tied to the immanence
of emotional and intentional experience, and with an enhanced intensity and
acuity across the senses, the ayahuasca trance lends itself to reflexive disposi-
tions given the sheer alien nature of the experience. By intensifying their
experiences with unique and distinct perceptual modulations, synesthetic res-
onances, emotion dilations, dramatic bodily processes, and encounters with
spirit entities and dividual states, ayahuasca drinkers dislodge the everyday
which then throws the everyday into view. The contents of trance (in visions
and purging) represent “objects of relatedness” (Bird-David 1999) in which
everyday social relations and ethical sensibilities are thrown into view and
redefined through the medium of the ecstatic senses and body.
Conclusions: individualism, collectivism and ethnographic theory
Ethnographic theory involves a commitment to native or emic knowledge
and practice systems around the globe that present formulations of social
and cultural life that are novel to academic thought, including, or even espe-
cially, with regard to abstract definitions such as those of self and other and
individualism and collectivism. Emic systems of knowledge and practice may
constitute collectivist or relational modes of social life that are not observable

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Alex Gearin 215
through cross-cultural surveys of individualism and collectivism. The realities
of the collectivist motivations that are articulated by ayahuasca drinkers may
be difficult to measure cross-culturally, because not many other cultures are
drinking ayahuasca.
Australian ayahuasca practice, as illustrated in this article, empowers forms
of ethical comportment among drinkers. The configuration of how social
obligations are materialized in modes of ecstatic sensory and bodily practices
and are orated in formalized sharing-round rituals, present evidence for native
or emic logics of social action that are “more complex and more shaded”
(Goody 1991) than generalized cross-cultural constructs of individualism
and collectivism may fully accommodate. As mentioned at the beginning of
the article, obligations to do things for others, or to sacrifice the self to the
wishes of family or work or society, may operate on levels of cognition linked
to native categories of motivation that are invisible to eyes not trained in the
native understandings. Any universal approach to measuring individualist
and collectivist values and beliefs in social groups is bound to overlook and
silence forms of individualism and collectivism that exist in culture-specific
theories of social action; a domain that ethnography appears best equipped
to study. A step in the right direction of coming to terms with the complexity
of ethnographic realities would be to recognize and appreciate the partiality
of understandings of social existence that different social scientific method-
ologies afford. This, hopefully, can lead us to more complementary, cross-
disciplinary approaches to understanding the social and cultural and forms
of individualism and collectivism in New Age spirituality.
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