To browse Academia. The paper explores the historical and cultural significance of ayahuasca, a traditional psychoactive brew from the Amazon, tracing its usage from indigenous practices to its reception in Western science. It highlights the initial European disdain towards such psychotropic plants, noting how they were perceived through a lens of superstition and fear. The emergence of modern psychopharmacology brought attention back to ayahuasca, culminating in its recognition for therapeutic potential in treating conditions like Parkinson's disease.
The chapters present a diversity of notions and practices relative to the use of such plants, highlighting the contexts of indigenous and non-indigenous uses, as well as intermediations and complex fluxes between them. The contributions discuss various themes, such as shamanism, agency, indigenous thought, gender, and performance.
The different types of consumption of these substances, made by local and transnational populations, allow us to rethink classic anthropological categories such as ritual, sacred and profane, and healing. Pointing to the complexity of the contexts in which the uses of these psychoactive plants occur, this books also sheds light on the debate about the need for drug policy reform. Knowledge exchange related to these substances implied significant inter-caste interaction and influence, to the dismay of the missionary mendicant orders and the Holy Office of the Inquisition.
The perpetuation of pre-Columbian forms of hallucinogen use exacerbated the efforts of the Catholic Church to eradicate remnants of Indian idolatry. The primary hindrance faced by Spanish colonial authorities regarding hallucinogen use was that colonizers generally failed to recognize the scope and importance of sacred hallucinogenic plants for Nahua peoples.
The process of recognition took nearly a century, between the conquest of and the official publication of the edict against peyote in European alcoholcentrism and the weight of Renaissance demonology in the European imagination obscured the ability to perceive and eradicate hallucinogen use amongst surviving Indian communities during the earliest decades of the Spanish colonial enterprise.
