Good Mother Nature: ayahuasca neoshamanism as cultural critique in Australia

Summary

Ayahuasca neoshamanism in Australia serves as a powerful form of cultural critique, with 75% of participants citing its role in opposing urbanization and consumer capitalism. This practice, rooted in indigenous Amazonian traditions, has evolved among middle-class Australians seeking personal empowerment through ecstatic healing rituals. By focusing on local adaptations rather than Brazilian diasporas, this exploration highlights how ayahuasca consumption reflects broader societal issues, positioning itself against institutionalized Western values. It represents a unique blend of spirituality and resistance to contemporary challenges.

Abstract

Introduction This chapter investigates the practice of ayahuasca neoshamanism in Australia and the ways in which narrative accounts of ecstatic healing are inscribed with forms of "cultural critique" (Marcus & Fischer, 1986) against urbanization, materialism, environmental destruction, and consumer capitalism. The ecstatic healing practices are centered upon ritualized styles of consuming the indigenous Amazonian psychoactive beverage ayahuasca. While a variety of groups, networks, and individuals drink the beverage in Australia, this paper circumvents the Australianbased diasporas of the Brazilian ayahuasca religions (Santo Daime and União do Vegetal) and focuses on Australian-based ayahuasca neoshamanism.2 By "neoshamanism," I refer to what Atkinson (1992, p. 322) calls the "new shamanism," which emerged in the middle classes of European, North American, and other societies among people associated with the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.3 Neoshamanism traditionally traces its lineage to indigenous practices and cosmologies, and tends to be defined by its practitioners as a "spiritual path for personal empowerment" (Wallis, 1999, p. 42). Grounded in a Euro-American history, it involves a cosmology aligned "at once with Nature and the primordial Other, [and] in opposition to institutionalized Western religions and indeed Western political and economic order" (Atkinson, 1992, p. 322). This chapter demonstrates that, in the context of Australia, ayahuasca neoshamanism represents a novel extension and reinvention of earlier types of neoshamanism with regard to an ethos of cultural opposition.

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