November 5, 2024
Girish Prayag, Paolo Mura, Colin Michael Hall et al.
This study critically evaluates the complex inter space of spirituality, drugs, and tourism through tourists’ and shamans’ accounts of ayahuasca tourism in Iquitos, Peru. Ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic beverage traditionally consumed for spiritual and health purposes. Using micro-ethnography, one of the researchers was immersed for one month in the tourism experience of ayahuasca. The findings...
BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies
November 4, 2024
Nolwenn Marie, Yannick Lafon, Aminata Bicego et al.
13 citations
Shamanism is a spiritual tradition in which trance practitioners deliberately modify their state of consciousness to seemingly interact with an invisible world to resolve their community members' problems. This review aims to provide a multidisciplinary overview of scientific research on shamanic trance. The search was performed using PubMed and Google Scholar databases. Twenty-seven articles...
Medical Anthropology
October 2, 2024
Alex K. Gearin
1 citation
Shamans, neo-shamans, atheists, and others describe gaining special knowledge from drinking ayahuasca, supporting the cross-cultural idea of ayahuasca as a plant teacher. While secular enthusiasts interpret this metaphorically, animists and others take it literally. This article examines ontological collisions at a healing retreat in the Peruvian Amazon, considering Shipibo shamans and their...
University of Chicago
August 1, 2024
Lorna Hadlock
A hallucinogenic brew called ayahuasca has increasingly played a role in drawing people from around the world to the Peruvian Amazon. They come seeking healing and spiritual encounters. As ayahuasca tourism has grown, it has exceeded its designation as mere tourism. Some of the foreigners (mostly Westerners) who come to the jungle for ayahuasca engage in long-term shamanic training with local...
Sanat Tarihi Dergisi
August 1, 2024
Murat Ateşli, Burcu Nur Cengiz
Wild Man is a kind of archetype and a wild symbolic figure arising from the unbreakable bond of art with society and belief systems, and continues to appear both in cultural festivals and in the field of art with changing images and costumes in various societies and different cultures from past to present. Assuming the role of shaman or pagan, Wild Man’s costumes and symbolic language are...
Preprints.org
June 27, 2024
Konstantinos Zorbas
1 citation
preprint
Alleged practices of magical assault and vampirism are a recurrent feature of popular explanations of misfortune in Tuva Republic, South Siberia. Based on a field study of healing practices in an “Association of Shamans”, this article analyses rituals of countercursing one’s antagonists in a context of Russian political domination. A central purpose of this discussion is to foreground the...
Religions
March 27, 2024
Christine S. Vanpool
Medio Period (AD 1200 to 1450) Casas Grandes shamans used tobacco and possibly other entheogens to initiate trance states that allowed their spirits to travel across the cosmos. These trance experiences involved a sense of vertigo and soul flight that is cross-culturally common and occurs with tobacco-based nicotine intoxication. The Medio Period shamans also relied on and interacted with...
Human Nature
March 1, 2024
Ronald J Planer, Kim Sterelny
2 citations
In many traditional, small-scale societies, death and other misfortunes are commonly explained as a result of others' malign occult agency. Here, we call this family of epistemic tendencies "the agential view of misfortune." After reviewing several ethnographic case studies that illustrate this view, we argue that its origins and stability are puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. Not only...
Qeios
January 17, 2024
Ana María Rosso
1 citation
The purpose of this article is to study the 'sacred' plants, diverse from those exclusively medicinal but with an unquestionable ethnobotanical value because, added to their healing properties, they develop mystical experiences and altered states of consciousness analogous to the ecstatic trance. _Psychoactive_ plants have played an important role in medicine, religion, _ritual_ life, and...
Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry
November 30, 2023
Tanya M Luhrmann, John Dulin, Vivian Dzokoto
8 citations
This paper presents evidence that some-but not all-religious experts in a particular faith may have a schizophrenia-like psychotic process which is managed or mitigated by their religious practice, in that they are able to function effectively and are not identified by their community as ill. We conducted careful phenomenological interviews, in conjunction with a novel probe, with okomfo,...