Cultural Biases and Psychedelic Experiences: Western Scientific Perspectives about Amazonian Mestizo Therapeutic Traditions

Summary

Western researchers may struggle to understand different cultural realities in psychedelic therapy due to their own epistemic and ethical foundations. The article examines how these conflicts hinder the integration of Western therapeutic practices with traditional Amazonian psychedelic traditions. By analyzing various research cases, it highlights the biases and limitations that can arise from a strictly scientific perspective, emphasizing the need for awareness of these issues in therapeutic and research contexts.

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Abstract

This article aims to analyze how Western researchers can be influenced by their epistemic and ethical foundations, which are also expressed through a culturally shared idea of therapy, and how this influence can significantly hinder the understanding of a different cultural reality and its resources in terms of knowledge and practices. While examining a collection of research cases in the field of psychedelic therapy, the present paper focuses on the obstacles created by ethical and epistemic conflicts in the mind of researchers with Western scientific training and their consequent difficulty in exploring the situations induced by psychedelic substances in a context of articulation and integration between their therapeutic know-how and that of a spiritual hundreds-year-old psychedelic tradition like Amazonian mestizo vegetalismo. Such obstacles may offer a chance to increase awareness of the cultural bias and limitations of the scientific gaze and highlight the importance of therapeutic and research contexts in which declared independence, neutrality and effectiveness of human alert thinking as undebatable ethical and epistemic value are under discussion.

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