This article examines how the Yawanawa and Huni Kuin, Pano-speaking peoples in Acre, Brazil, engage with nawa ("whites"), particularly ayahuasca religions and (neo)shamanic movements. Some villages now host festivals to present their culture, receiving nawa with beauty and enthusiasm to celebrate and feel the forest's strength. The analysis focuses on expressive modes emerging from these encounters and their capacity to produce new arrangements. Festivals and ayahuasca are central to inventive cultural processes, evidencing translations between diverse worlds through multidirectional flows of understandings, categories, and festive-shamanic practices. The article traces the uses and transformations of the brew, referred to locally as "cipó"—in its ontological multiplicities as daime, uni, or nixi pae—through the diverse relationships Yawanawa and Huni Kuin establish with ayahuasca religions, especially Santo Daime.
This article reflects on a spiritual movement known as Sacred Fire, aiming to outline elements of this phenomenon by considering its ritual practices—including the use of tobacco, ayahuasca, saunas, dances, and fasting retreats—in terms of what Vargas (1998) calls "intensive bodies." According to Vargas, the search for experiences of intensive corporeality opposes the contemporary analgesic tendency of bodies. Drawing on fieldwork, the author uses Vargas's (2006) analysis of urban psychoactive use as "deep games," practices and modes of engagement that involve substances as mediators for producing "alter-actions" as "actions of others." The article delineates some of the meanings attributed to "medicines" in Sacred Fire, such as ayahuasca and tobacco, seeking elements to express how subjects relate to these "spirits" considered as beings endowed with action and intentionality.