The article presents and analyzes the internationalized Peruvian shamanic landscape shaped by what the author calls 'shamanic reappropriations.' These result from encounters between new European, South and North American spiritualities and local neo-shamanisms, among those who travel to meet shamans and the shamans themselves. This evolving landscape is attested since ancient times, evidenced by the circulation of ritual, medicinal, and psychotropic plants and their names. So-called 'shamanic tourism' is not the origin but participates in a diffuse process.
Among the Awajun people of Peru, personhood and the acquisition of a new soul are constructed through the use of psychotropic plants such as tobacco, angel trumpet, ayahuasca, and chagropanga, along with associated words, discourses, and implicit logics. These processes involve both shamanism and vision quests, which hold different meanings for common people versus shamans. The vision quest requires a purge and spiritual experience to become 'clean, beautiful, adorned' and achieve a life of plenty, while shamanic practice demands contamination to become prickly and access the invisible. These perspectives are opposite yet complementary, as shamanic practice protects individuals from magical aggression or witchcraft during the vision quest.
An anthropologist's way of approaching the field, tasting things, and feeling them impacts both the data collected and the analyses produced. Jean-Loup Amselle's book "Psychotropiques," subtitled "La fièvre de l'ayahuasca en forêt amazonienne," illustrates this epistemological truism. It is a peculiar anthropological work because, in the name of a rationalism to be defended, it criticizes a social practice ("végétalisme") by presenting partial and biased truths. At a time when social science researchers increasingly value grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss 1967), which is inductive and where facts should emerge from the field, the author proposes a resolutely deductive approach.