Beyond its local and regional uses, ayahuasca now functions in globalized networks as both a diacritical sign and a core site for negotiating and distributing meaning and legitimacy, symbolically reconfiguring relationships among actors at the new interface between local Indigenous groups and the urban, Latin American, or international world. Understanding ayahuasca's contemporary success requires grasping the dynamic between continuity and emerging cultural and social creations that constitute the historical and present web of contacts and mutual adaptations among diverse Amazonian peoples and between the Amazonian world and its visitors, representatives of successive external powers.
The article discusses the symbolic elaboration of the ayahuasca effect, called burracheira, within the União do Vegetal, a trance guided by the spirit of the doctrine's founding Master, consubstantiated in the drink. The constitution of this entity in the sacrament is interpreted through the reading of UDV myth and rite via metaphors and metonymies expressive of organic, emotional, and moral processes that reveal the hierarchical relationship between enchantment and discipline, effective and legitimizing elements of the institutionalization of religious practice. The author problematizes the hierarchical relations between enchantment and discipline in the notion of the person, symbolically constructed, as a potential for transforming individual behavior.