Altered vision: Ayahuasca shamanism and sensory individualism

Abstract

Notions of visualism and individualism have long been employed to elucidate the contours of Western subjectivity. It is therefore not surprising to find the indigenous Amazonian shamanic brew ayahuasca being adopted by Australian neoshamanic practitioners as a medicine that provides personalized visions delivering unambiguous moral import. While this adoption represents a radically new style of its practice, ayahuasca drinking emerged from indigenous societies characterized by robust forms of individualism and visualism of a different kind. Indigenous approaches to ayahuasca drinking have emphasized synesthetic and socially partible configurations of personhood while entangling the visionary content of inebriation in a morally ambiguous field of everyday life. In this article, we argue that the individual of ayahuasca neoshamanism reproduces European Enlightenment modes of property ownership by integrating visions into the self as inalienable objects of healing. The article illustrates how ayahuasca vision is a marker of divergent forms of individualism among indigenous Amazonian and Australian neoshamanic groups.