The Kuntanawa, a tribe of the Pano linguistic branch in Brazil's Acre state, were thought extinct by the early 1900s due to rubber production. By the 2000s, descendants of a Kuntanawa woman, previously identified as mestizo rubber tappers, began a process of ethnic self-recognition and territorial struggle. Ritualized ayahuasca use is central to this cultural reinvention, acting as a subjectivity operator and ethnic identifier in interethnic relations. The text offers ethnographic and theoretical reflections on ethnicity and culture.
Ayahuasca, known locally as cipó, was introduced among rubber tappers in the Alto Juruá region of the Brazilian Amazon through interactions with indigenous populations and their shamans. Some rubber tappers became apprentices and later renowned healers. Beginning in the 1980s, ayahuasca use became intertwined with the rubber tappers' political struggle against rubber bosses, merging ayahuasca mysticism with political conflict. New syntheses emerged with the incorporation of elements from the Santo Daime religious doctrine. The article is co-authored by an anthropologist and a rubber tapper whose initiation into ayahuasca combined non-indigenous and indigenous elements, resulting in an original synthesis narrated in first-person.