Global ayahuasca: an entrepreneurial ecosystem

Entrepreneurial efforts to standardize transparency, efficacy, and safety in ayahuasca sessions, both locally and globally, are examined critically. These initiatives aim to identify legitimate authorities and criteria, yet they operate amid stark disjunctures between spoken, visible realms and unspoken, invisible worlds marked by great inequality. While such market-based measures may appear rational from a business standpoint, they prove ill-suited to the broader social, political, and cultural contexts in which ayahuasca practitioners actually live and work.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This chapter examines issues surrounding the viability and desirability of recent entrepreneurs and entrepreneurships aiming to create effective measures of 'transparency' 'efficacy' and 'safety' with regards to the increasing participation in the ayahuasca sessions that take place in local and global settings. It raises critical questions about the methods through which such initiatives seek to identify those legitimate authorities, actors, voices and criteria or can in turn deem certain practices and actors legitimate and others not. This takes place in environments where there are marked disjunctures between what transpires in the spoken, visible and unspoken, invisible worlds particularly amidst great inequality. Whereas such enterprises may make sense from a market perspective, they make little sense within the broader social, political and cultural contexts in which ayahuasca practitioners live and operate.