7 papers in the library · publishing 2018
Peyote Effect September 4, 2018 Alexander S. Dawson
This chapter turns to the white shamans. This is not a term of endearment, as it is often linked to notions of charlatanism, foolishness, and more lately, cultural appropriation. Beginning with Carlos Castaneda, several generations of white shamans have deployed images tied to Wixárika peyotism in order to authorize their special wisdom. Resisting the temptation to dismiss them in a wholesale...
Peyote Effect September 4, 2018 Alexander S. Dawson
Chastened by how close a national ban of peyote came to passing in early 1918, the following October a group of Native American peyotists gathered in El Reno, Oklahoma, in order to found the Native American Church. This chapter explores this remarkable moment of political activism, along with the histories of peyotism in the United States that led to this initiative. The deep history of...
Peyote Effect September 4, 2018 Alexander S. Dawson
The 1972 Vienna Convention on Psychotropic Drugs created frameworks both for an effort to control the international trade in psychedelic drugs and for an exemption for communities (imagined exclusively as indigenous) where those drugs were used for traditional religious purposes in a largely unadulterated state. The exemption was well suited to the legal environment in the United States but...
Peyote Effect September 4, 2018 Alexander S. Dawson
We return to Mexico in this chapter, exploring the particular fallout for the psychiatrist Salvador Roquet after peyote was outlawed in Mexico in 1971. This ban grew out of circumstances that mirrored those in the United States: a growing fear among conservatives that non-indigenous youths were increasingly consuming drugs, as well as a sense that this marked a civilizational crisis. Hippy...
Peyote Effect September 4, 2018 Alexander S. Dawson
After several decades in which scientists produced a slow trickle of scholarship on the potential uses of peyote/mescaline for mental health afflictions, in the 1950s this genre of psychiatric research into hallucinogens expanded significantly. Mexico remained a relative backwater for this type of work until 1957, when Dr. José Rodríguez at the Sanatorio Psiquiatrico Santiago Ramírez Moreno in...
Peyote Effect September 4, 2018 Alexander S. Dawson
In this chapter, we consider the moment when European and American scientists “discovered” peyote. John Briggs was one of the first Americans to write about peyote (in 1887), followed shortly by James Mooney, who recounted his experiences among the Kiowa of Oklahoma at the Anthropological Association in Washington DC in 1891. Around this time, the German scientist Louis Lewin encountered peyote...
Peyote Effect September 4, 2018 Alexander S. Dawson
While research on peyote accelerated in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany during the last decade of the nineteenth century, Mexican scientists remained largely ignorant of the properties of the cactus. This changed when Mexico’s Instituto Médico Nacional (IMN) sponsored a series of peyote studies at the turn of the century. In part, those studies relied on historical accounts and...