Hispanic American Historical Review
February 1, 2015
Alexander Dawson
16 citations
This essay introduces Salvador Roquet, an iconoclastic psychiatrist who collaborated with the famed Mazatec curandera María Sabina, and argues that their work together exemplifies a cross-cultural collaboration in psychedelic psychiatry. Roquet developed a therapeutic method partly from Sabina's teachings, and both shared a disdain for jipis (hippies). Their partnership offers an alternative history of psychedelic drugs in Mexico, where local, naturally occurring psychedelics like psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, datura, and ololiuqui were seen as powerful medicines requiring respect, expert handling, and careful prescription, with the counterculture acting as a foil to this view.
Social History of Medicine
March 28, 2024
Alexander Dawson
A review of the edited volume Expanding Mindscapes: A Global History of Psychedelics, which argues that the history of psychedelics extends beyond a Western narrative centered on the 1960s counterculture. The book presents a global perspective, examining the use of psychedelics in diverse cultural, medical, and scientific contexts across different time periods and regions. It challenges the assumption that psychedelics were primarily a Western phenomenon and explores their roles in indigenous traditions, colonial encounters, and modern scientific research.
University of Toronto quarterly
August 1, 2018
Alexander Dawson
A historian discovered an unpublished 1950s manuscript by journalist Fannie Kahan that sympathetically portrayed Indigenous peyotism on the Canadian Prairies and advocated for the Native American Church of Canada, then under state pressure. The text, co-authored with scientists, combined journalism, anthropology, and psychology to critique racist federal Indian policy and the restriction of peyote. Its failure to find a publisher likely stemmed from its prescient, angry attack on government racism, which contradicted nationalist narratives. The historian argues the work should be read both as a lost scholarly contribution and as a period artefact, noting its ethnographic richness and early seeds of later residential-school critiques.