Tactics of Legitimation in the Psychedelic Sciences

Abstract

I argue that psychedelic substances served as a doorway through which spirituality entered the scientific laboratory to an unprecedented degree by making spirituality more accessible to scientific methodologies. From a feminist sociology of knowledge perspective, these controversial sciences represent a unique opportunity to investigate the politics of knowledge constituting these traditionally demarcated and historically hierarchical systems of knowledge. Using discourse analysis I found that psychedelic scientists utilized a range of what I call tactics of legitimation to justify the scientific study of these peculiar substances and the spirituality associated with them vis-à-vis dominant scientific knowledges. Drawing on feminist theories of science and knowledge, I analyze the attendant epistemological costs of this assimilation in relation to the intersecting politics of race, class and gender. More broadly, this project demonstrates how a feminist theoretical perspective on sociology of knowledge enhances politically essential analyses of the co-constitutive relationships between knowledge, power and consciousness.