An Amazonian shamanic brew in Australia: ayahuasca healing and individualism

Neoshamanic ayahuasca drinkers in Australia experience trance as a radical reconfiguration of the senses and body, which enables them to reshape cultural ideals and everyday ethical practices. The ethnographic research shows that during trance, participants' sense of self shifts between dividual and individual modes of personhood, where the 'I' is constituted by human and nonhuman persons. These experiences of healing and wisdom are embedded in a critical cosmology that is overdetermined by Western individualism, revealing how relational personhood operates within capitalist society.

Study at a glance

Abstract

In this thesis, I examine how dividual and individual modes of personhood enable neoshamanic ayahuasca drinkers in Australia to reconfigure cultural ideals and everyday ethical practices. My ethnographic fieldwork allowed me to trace social conventions of drinking ayahuasca, participants’ techniques of the ecstatic body and senses, and narrative styles of codifying ecstatic trance, to determine key means by which Australian ayahuasca drinkers achieve “healing” and “wisdom” from their practices. During the heights of trance, drinkers experience radical changes to the senses and the body. These are analysed in terms of configurations of personhood and how the “I” of the drinker in narrative accounts of trance may be constituted by human and nonhuman persons and critical relations to broader Australian society. The thesis engages with anthropological literature on trance and with notions of the person in order to examine this form of relational personhood in capitalist society. I illustrate how the critical cosmology of ayahuasca neoshamanism is embedded in healing experiences of dividual personhood that are over determined by the individual in ways reminiscent of Western social organisation.