Global Ayahuasca: Wondrous Visions and Modern Worlds. By Alex K. Gearin. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2024. 296pp. $30 (paperback or e- book), $120 (hardcover).
Challenge To Civilization: Indigenous Wisdom and the Future. By Blair Stonechild. 2023. Regina, SK: University of Regina Press. 210pp. $89 (hardcover), $29.95 (paperback).
I adapt Michel Foucault’s notion of technologies of the self to carry out a comparative analysis of two ethnographic cases of contemporary South American shamanisms. In these cases, their cosmological and ritual frameworks display ontological thresholds acceded through specific technologies of the self that contest current assumptions about both the Christian and the scientific hegemonic...