At an ayahuasca tourism centre in Peru, Shipibo healing practices of curing and sorcery have adapted to international clients seeking primitivist healing. Sorcery does not target clients but operates among healers who capitalize on guests’ rejection of modern life while working in conditions of economic scarcity and poverty. Ayahuasca tourists generally do not believe in sorcery, yet their presence both generates and negates the local moral economy of sorcery in new ways. The article reveals a paradox: guests purge anxious desires for capital accumulation, the very desires healers fulfill when curing them.
Anthropologists often criticize neurophilosophers for reducing mind to brain, yet they cite philosophers who view mind as emerging from brain, body, and environment. This article examines 'phenomenal internalists'—neurophilosophers who believe consciousness can supervene on the brain alone. Their ontological commitment is driven by existential and political experiences, from false awakenings to disenchantment with 1970s counterculture, and draws from neuroscientific research on the dreaming brain. The article concludes with a plea for anthropologists to attend to relations of detachment, both social and neural, and to reconsider their own ontological commitment to externalism in light of dream research.
Spiritualist mediums simultaneously claim and disclaim responsibility for their actions by foregrounding and backgrounding their own agency and that of spirits. They take credit for producing words, healings, writings, and paintings, yet attribute these expressions to sources in the spirit world. This dual pattern has persisted historically, even as mediums' voices shifted from imitating spirit speakers to a casual, non-imitative conversational style. Examining how agency moves metaphorically in relation to mediums' expressive actions reveals how they cultivate in audiences the sense that they are not truly the speakers, yet no one else could speak as they do.