At an ayahuasca tourism centre in Peru, Shipibo healing practices of curing and sorcery have adapted to international clients seeking primitivist healing. Sorcery does not target clients but operates among healers who capitalize on guests’ rejection of modern life while working in conditions of economic scarcity and poverty. Ayahuasca tourists generally do not believe in sorcery, yet their presence both generates and negates the local moral economy of sorcery in new ways. The article reveals a paradox: guests purge anxious desires for capital accumulation, the very desires healers fulfill when curing them.
Spiritualist mediums simultaneously claim and disclaim responsibility for their actions by foregrounding and backgrounding their own agency and that of spirits. They take credit for producing words, healings, writings, and paintings, yet attribute these expressions to sources in the spirit world. This dual pattern has persisted historically, even as mediums' voices shifted from imitating spirit speakers to a casual, non-imitative conversational style. Examining how agency moves metaphorically in relation to mediums' expressive actions reveals how they cultivate in audiences the sense that they are not truly the speakers, yet no one else could speak as they do.