Chamanism today is a multipolar landscape shaped by regular movements of ritual experts and practitioners, and by the mobility and constant reconfiguration of ritual practices. These transcontinental journeys and stays transform local communities, leading them to reformulate their own internal or regional rituals. Transcontinental shamanism is structured along an organizational continuum at various scales that opens, frames, and reproduces itineraries linking territories of so-called 'ethnic' shamanism with urban recompositions at national and international levels. This continuum sits at the intersection of national and international 'urban shamanisms' built around the dual figure of the 'indigenous' and the 'jungle' as revalued symbolic resources. The text analyzes the central role of shamanic capacity, reclassified as 'knowledge', in rethinking symbolic hierarchies of national and international validity established during colonization.
Beyond its local and regional uses, ayahuasca now functions in globalized networks as both a diacritical sign and a core site for negotiating and distributing meaning and legitimacy, symbolically reconfiguring relationships among actors at the new interface between local Indigenous groups and the urban, Latin American, or international world. Understanding ayahuasca's contemporary success requires grasping the dynamic between continuity and emerging cultural and social creations that constitute the historical and present web of contacts and mutual adaptations among diverse Amazonian peoples and between the Amazonian world and its visitors, representatives of successive external powers.