Ayahuasca is increasingly recognized as a sentient being with agency and intention, acting as a healing and teaching spirit and an ethical entity in ecological and cultural struggles. Based on multi-sited fieldwork since 2004 among shamanic networks in the Peruvian Amazon and European cities, the paper argues that accepting Ayahuasca as an entity distinguishes drug tourists from long-term practitioners. As Ayahuasca becomes a "presence," it shifts from an exceptional experience to a regular, extraordinary practice. For Western secularized audiences, interacting with her requires rethinking relationships. The authors propose the "hypothesis of an entangled Ayahuasca," where numerous beings and relations constitute her aliveness and desires.
A Shipibo onanya (healer) working in ayahuasca tourism perceives, narrates, and resists the instrumentalization of his practice. Maintaining the ethics of his knowledge and role requires reconfiguring practices and adapting discourses to meet international clients' projections and expectations while transforming them into patients. This shift from client to patient allows the healer to remain faithful to his apprenticeship, integrity, and "diet" (sama). Rather than reproducing tradition, he updates it amid commodification and commercialization. His healing practice connects to socio-economic and political asymmetries inherited from colonization, perpetuated by globalized neoliberal economics. Defending an ayahuasca with a "mother" against a "orphan" drug-like ayahuasca, he proposes therapeutic sessions without patients ingesting ayahuasca—an "ayahuasca without ayahuasca." This reconfigures expectations and opens perspectives beyond this context.