« Ayahuasca sans ayahuasca »
Drogues santé et société January 1, 2025 José López Sánchez, Silvia Mesturini Cappo
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.