An Amazonian shamanic brew in Australia: ayahuasca healing and individualism
OpenAlex – November 20, 2015
Source: OpenAlex
Summary
Ayahuasca drinkers in Australia experience profound transformations in their sense of self, with 80% reporting significant healing and wisdom during ecstatic trance states. Ethnographic insights reveal how these individuals navigate cultural ideals through both dividual and individual personhood. Participants engage in practices that intertwine human and nonhuman relations, reshaping their narratives and ethical frameworks. This exploration highlights how neoshamanic practices challenge conventional individualism, offering a critical lens on personhood within the context of contemporary Australian society and its capitalist structures.
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.