Journal de la Société des Américanistes
January 1, 2018
David Dupuis
15 citations
Takiwasi, an addiction treatment clinic and prominent shamanic center in the Peruvian Amazon, offers international participants retreats involving ritual emetic preparations, the psychoactive brew ayahuasca, jungle seclusion, talks, and group discussions. These activities lead participants to perceive themselves as influenced, attacked, or inhabited by usually invisible malevolent forces, with many reporting possession experiences during ayahuasca rituals. By tracing one participant's ritual journey, the author examines how participants adopt these possession motifs, their implications for symbolic identity reconstruction and collective formation, and questions the surprising role of possession within a treatment presented as shamanic.
Journal de la Société des Américanistes
January 1, 2022
Doriane Slaghenauffi
2 citations
The rise of 'shamanic tourism' in urban areas and Shipibo-Konibo villages has led to a resurgence of vernacular sorcery practices, now integrated into the new sociological context of the commercialization of local plant-based shamanism. These occult attacks target not only rival practitioners but also tourists seeking hallucinogenic experiences, some of whom become targets of sorcery rumors. These practices and occult interpretations can be analyzed as forms of resilience built by Shipibo shamans facing the integration of their communities into the international tourism market, hoping to profit from it. They can also be read as manifestations of frustration and concern over the appropriation of local shamanism by global culture, symptomatic of traditionally ambiguous ties between gringos and Amerindians.
Journal de la Société des Américanistes
February 5, 2025
David Dupuis
The term 'ayahuasca'—meaning 'vine of the spirits' or 'vine of the dead' in Quechua—refers both to a specific plant (Banisteriopsis caapi) and to the aqueous preparation in which it is always the sole or main ingredient. This beverage, with powerful psychoactive and emetic effects, is most often used for initiatory, therapeutic, or divinatory purposes and is a central tool of Amazonian shamanisms. In 1930, the Santo Daime, a syncretic religion...
Journal de la Société des Américanistes
January 1, 2025
Françoise Barbira Freedman, Stephen Hugh‐jones
Ayahuasca shamanism is well studied, but the medicinal plant gardens commonly found at ayahuasca centers have received less attention. This paper provides detailed mapping and commentary on one such garden, identifying a relatively stable set of plants typical of Amazonian vegetalismo that defines shamans' gardens as a genre. Visitors develop personal relationships with plants, while shamans adopt biomedical and psychotherapeutic vocabulary. These ethnobotanical gardens become sites of constructive equivocation, where contrasting cultural assumptions find partial accommodation.
Journal de la Société des Américanistes
February 5, 2025
William F. Hanks
In Yucatec Maya communities of the Sierra region of Yucatán during the late twentieth century, multiple systems of temporal reckoning and orientation operate together in daily practice. Most cyclicity in contemporary Yucatec Maya arises from natural or social processes; in rituals, cyclicity results from translating spatial arrangements into temporal sequences. The paper tracks varieties of cyclic and spiral time measurement across domains: the field of co-presence in utterance, the diurnal cycle, agricultural and forest cycles, domestic space with age and generational relations, and ritual time in shamanic practice.
Journal de la Société des Américanistes
February 5, 2025
Christopher Ball
In a Wauja (Xingu Arawak) ritual called 'bringing spirits,' a sick person converses with the spirit-monsters afflicting him, aiming to transform them from pathogenic into guardian spirits. Village representatives agree to speak as these spirits, entering a lifelong contractual exchange with the sick person and the spirits, with obligations spanning sickness and health. Despite the gravity and weighty obligations, this ritual interaction is surprisingly simple and quotidian compared to Wauja esoteric shamanic practices and elaborate collective rituals with music and dance. Wauja cultural ideologies of illness, language, and cosmology emerge in such interactive texts, highlighting how multiple agencies of persons and spirits are linked through texts that construct social reality.