Skip to content

An Amazonian shamanic brew in Australia: ayahuasca healing and individualism

Alexander Gearin

The University of Queensland November 20, 2015 DOI: 10.14264/uql.2015.1038 (opens in new tab)

Relevant Not relevant

Study at a glance

AI-extracted from the abstract
Characteristics Ethnography Peer reviewed
Population Neoshamanic ayahuasca drinkers in Australia
Topics Ayahuasca Shamanism
Keywords Personhood Trance Narrative Aesthetics Ethnography Individualism Anthropology
Citations 6
Key findings Ayahuasca drinkers in Australia achieve healing and wisdom through trance experiences that reconfigure personhood between dividual and individual modes, shaped by both human and nonhuman relations and broader societal individualism.

Abstract

In this thesis, I examine how dividual and individual modes of personhood enable neoshamanic ayahuasca drinkers in Australia to reconfigure cultural ideals and everyday ethical practices. My ethnographic fieldwork allowed me to trace social conventions of drinking ayahuasca, participants’ techniques of the ecstatic body and senses, and narrative styles of codifying ecstatic trance, to determine key means by which Australian ayahuasca drinkers achieve “healing” and “wisdom” from their practices. During the heights of trance, drinkers experience radical changes to the senses and the body. These are analysed in terms of configurations of personhood and how the “I” of the drinker in narrative accounts of trance may be constituted by human and nonhuman persons and critical relations to broader Australian society. The thesis engages with anthropological literature on trance and with notions of the person in order to examine this form of relational personhood in capitalist society. I illustrate how the critical cosmology of ayahuasca neoshamanism is embedded in healing experiences of dividual personhood that are over determined by the individual in ways reminiscent of Western social organisation.

Comparable studies

Other qualitative studies on shamanism, most cited first.

Study Year Design Participants
"Plantas con madre": plants that teach and guide in the shamanic initiation process in the East-Central Peruvian Amazon. Curanderos, apprentices, and herbalists in East-Central Peru, including Mestizo,... 2011 Qualitative study n = 36
Purging and the body in the therapeutic use of ayahuasca Healers and participants in shamanic tourism contexts of the Peruvian Amazon and... 2019 Ethnography with literature review n = 227
The Globalization of Ayahuasca Shamanism and the Erasure of Indigenous Shamanism Western tourists and indigenous peoples in Iquitos, Peru 2016 Ethnography
Shamanism and Rock Art in Far Western North America Historic hunter-gatherer cultures of California and the Great Basin 1992 Ethnographic review and analysis
Working with “La Medicina”: Elements of Healing in Contemporary Ayahuasca Rituals Ayahuasqueros and Western participants in shamanic tourism in Iquitos, Peru 2012 Ethnography

Citations in the library

Cited by 6

and 1 more in the library

Cites 5

Related reading

Explore topics

Ayahuasca Shamanism