Global Ayahuasca

Anthropologist Alex K. Gearin examines how ayahuasca drinking practices in Peru, Australia, and China produce diverse visionary experiences shaped by local social and economic realities, rather than a single universal truth. Based on ethnographic research with Shipibo healers in remote Peru, alternative medicine groups in urban Australia, and entrepreneurs in mainland China, the book shows that ayahuasca visions range from urban disenchantment and capitalist mastery to competitive sorcery and ecological harmony. These plant-induced visions embody different attitudes toward capitalist modernity, revealing tensions, fears, and hopes of everyday modern life.

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Abstract

Surveying contemporary networks and practices in Peru, Australia, and China, anthropologist Alex K. Gearin explores the visionary marvels, wonders, and diversity of ayahuasca drinking today. Ceremonies of drinking the psychoactive brew ayahuasca have flourished across the planet in recent decades. Emerging from Indigenous roots in the Amazon rainforest, the brew is now envisaged by many as the spiritual gateway to archaic and primordial worlds, with reports of healing, spiritual insight, and awe-inspiring visions placing ayahuasca among the burgeoning field of psychedelic medicines. Astonished and allured by descriptions of ayahuasca experiences, researchers in psychology, anthropology, and philosophy have attempted to define the shared properties of the visions. In this book, Alex Gearin challenges this simplified obsession with universal truth and explores the embodied practices of contemporary ayahuasca drinkers to reveal how the brew has conjured contradictory experiences across the globe. These range from urban disenchantment and capitalist mastery to competitive sorcery and ecological harmony, wherein the plant-induced visions embody different attitudes towards capitalist modernity. Based upon ethnographic research among Shipibo healers in remote Peru, alternative medicine groups in urban Australia, and entrepreneurs and corporate managers in mainland China, Global Ayahuasca examines how the wondrous visions of ayahuasca are entangled within the social and economic realities that they illuminate, revealing different tensions, fears, and hopes of everyday modern life.