Drogues santé et société
November 13, 2017
Sébastien Baud
7 citations
The article presents and analyzes the internationalized Peruvian shamanic landscape shaped by what the author calls 'shamanic reappropriations.' These result from encounters between new European, South and North American spiritualities and local neo-shamanisms, among those who travel to meet shamans and the shamans themselves. This evolving landscape is attested since ancient times, evidenced by the circulation of ritual, medicinal, and psychotropic plants and their names. So-called 'shamanic tourism' is not the origin but participates in a diffuse process.
Drogues santé et société
November 13, 2017
Graham St John
4 citations
DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine) is a short-acting tryptamine that has grown in popularity independently of ayahuasca. Known for inducing out-of-body experiences and profound changes in perception, mood, and thought, it inspires an underground community that praises its entheogenic virtues. Drawing on user reports from online repositories like Erowid and DMT-Nexus, this article describes the DMT breakthrough event or hyperspace. Depicted as a gnostic event sometimes compared to a near-death experience, the DMT experience often involves contact with entities and visual communication. The accounts highlight the substance's fundamental manifestation and help understand the liminal phenomenology of DMT and other tryptamines.
Drogues santé et société
January 21, 2010
Anne‐marie Colpron
4 citations
The idea of healing through a psychotropic substance seems inconceivable to a Western observer. Yet this practice is observed among the Shipibo-Conibo indigenous people in western Amazonia and is explained by their particular cosmology. Most entities in the environment (trees, rivers, celestial bodies) are considered microcosms, housing unique populations with specific knowledge, such as the ability to heal. In a mythical past, the Shipibo-Conibo could interact with these beings and benefit from their expertise, but today they can only glimpse them, especially in dreams.
Drogues santé et société
November 13, 2017
Christian Ghasarian
2 citations
This article examines representations, discourses, and practices surrounding several psychoactive plants originally used in shamanic contexts worldwide and now reappropriated in a quest for self. After briefly reviewing the sociocultural circumstances and individual reasons for this investment in postindustrial societies—reconnection with nature, self-work, personal development, search for intense experiences, and a valued relationship with the unknown—it presents a particular current within contemporary alternative spiritualities: the neo-shamanic approach, with action models inspired by shamanisms but reformulated for an audience lacking their common sense.
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.