Abstract The Kuntanawa are a tribe that belongs to the Pano linguistic branch, who, by the early decades of the twentieth century, were assumed to have been exterminated owing to the expansion of rubber production in the upper reaches of Amazonian tributaries, and in particular in the state of Acre in Brazil. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, descendants of a Kuntanawa woman, who had...
Abstract This chapter examines the cultural constructions of ayahuasca and shamanism, their manifestations in the Western imagination and experience, and their localized experience in the city of Iquitos, Peru, in the context of the phenomenon of shamanic tourism. The chapter argues that shamanic tourism is not an anomaly but is consistent with the nature of shamanism, which has historically...
Abstract This chapter charts the expansion, diversification, and internationalization of Peruvian vegetalismo. Outsiders traveling to Peru in search of ayahuasca, gringos who themselves became curanderos, and Peruvian ayahuasqueros who travel to hold workshops for urban middle-class clients abroad are considered. The study identifies contours of transnational networks and the circuits that...
Abstract The experience of indigenous people in their confrontation with the growing interest of people from northern countries in drinking ayahuasca has hitherto received little attention. First a brief historical summary is presented in order to show how the use of ayahuasca had already changed its meaning and value among Shipibo-Konibo around the 1960s. Observing that visitors' interests...
El objetivo de esta revisión consiste en exponer los principales avances en la investigación reciente con sustancias psicodélicas en las neurociencias y sus aplicaciones psioterapéuticas. La acción de la psilocibina, un agonista del receptor 5-HT2A, ha sido asociada a una desactivación en la Default Mode Network (activada durante la introspección y pensamientos auto-referentes), un mayor acceso...
Psychoactive plants which contain hallucinogenic molecules that induce a form of altered states of consciousness (H-ASC) have been widely used during the religious rituals of many cultures throughout the centuries, while the consumption of these plants for spiritual and religious purposes is as old as human history. Some of those cultures were shaman and pagan subcultures; African native...
The article by Icaza and Mashour1 is a very interesting article because it presents a topic of investigation that is currently attracting the attention of pharmacologists, neuroscientists, and biological psychiatrists around the globe: human research with psychedelic compounds. The text brings important information regarding the history and pharmacology of psychedelics but presents important...
The hallucinogens are a class of psychoactive drugs, either synthetic or plant products, that produce auditory and/or visual hallucinations as well as thought, mood, and perceptual changes. Depending on dosage, expectation (set), and environment (setting), they also can induce euphoria and a state similar to a transcendental experience. These hallucinations can be present as part of a delirium...
The “Brazilian ayahuasca religions,” as they have become known since the publication of the important collection edited by Labate and Araújo (2002), are a congeries of associations that emerged, in the mid‐to‐late 20th century, from the Brazilian experience of the Amazonian rubber boom. Since the 1970s, these groups have become increasingly present in nationwide Brazilian and international...
Journal of Natural ProductsMarch 28, 2014Marcos Marçal Ferreira Queiroz, Emerson Ferreira Queiroz, Maria Luiza Zeraik et al.
The secondary metabolite content of Tetrapterys mucronata, a poorly studied plant that is used occasionally in Brazil for the preparation of a psychotropic plant decoction called "Ayahuasca", was determined to establish its chemical composition and to search for acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibitors. The ethanolic extract of the bark of T. mucronata exhibited in vitro AChE inhibition in a TLC...