Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond OXFORD RITUAL STUDIES Series Editors Ronald Grimes, Ritual Studies International Ute Hüsken, University of Oslo Barry Stephenson, Memorial University THE PROBLEM OF RITUAL EFFICACY LOOKING FOR MARY MAGDALENE Edited by William S. Sax, Johannes Quack, and Jan Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity at Weinhold Catholic Shrines in France Anna Fedele PERFORMING THE REFORMATION Public Ritual in the City of Luther THE DYSFUNCTION OF RITUAL IN EARLY Barry Stephenson CONFUCIANISM Michael David Kaulana Ing RITUAL, MEDIA, AND CONFLICT Edited by Ronald L. Grimes, Ute Hüsken, Udo A DIFFERENT MEDICINE Simon, and Eric Venbrux Postcolonial Healing in the Native American Church Joseph D. Calabrese KNOWING BODY, MOVING MIND Ritualizing and Learning at Two Buddhist Centers NARRATIVES OF SORROW Patricia Q. Campbell AND DIGNITY SUBVERSIVE SPIRITUALITIES Japanese Women, Pregnancy Loss, and Modern How Rituals Enact the World Rituals of Grieving Frédérique Apffel-Marglin Bardwell L. Smith NEGOTIATING RITES MAKING “THINGS” BETTER Edited by Ute Hüsken and Frank Neubert A Workbook on Property and Environmental Behavior A. David Napier THE DANCING DEAD Ritual and Religion among the Kapsiki/Higi of North AYAHUASCA SHAMANISM IN THE Cameroon and Northeastern Nigeria AMAZON AND BEYOND Walter E. A. van Beek Edited by Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Clancy Cavnar Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond EDITED BY BEATRIZ CAIUBY LABATE AND CLANCY CAVNAR 1 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Oxford University Press 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ayahuasca shamanism in the Amazon and beyond / [edited by] Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Clancy Cavnar. p. cm. (Oxford ritual studies) ISBN 978-0-19-934120-7 (pbk.)—ISBN 978-0-19-934119-1 (hardcover)— ISBN 978-0-19-934121-4 (ebook) 1. Ayahuasca ceremony—Cross-cultural studies. 2. Shamanism—Cross-cultural studies. 3. Hallucinogenic drugs and religious experience—Cross-cultural studies. I. Labate, Beatriz Caiuby. GN472.4.A93 2014 201ʹ.44—dc23 2013039105 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Dedicated to Steven Rubenstein (in memoriam) CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Contributors xi List of Illustrations xvii Foreword: Authentic Ayahuasca by Oscar Calavia Saéz xix Notes on the Expansion and Reinvention of Ayahuasca Shamanism 3 BEATRIZ CAIUBY LABATE, CLANCY CAVNAR, AND FRANÇOISE BARBIRA FREEDMAN 1. Will the Real Shaman Please Stand Up? The Recent Adoption of Ayahuasca Among Indigenous Groups of the Peruvian Amazon 16 GLENN H. SHEPARD, JR. 2. Kuntanawa: Ayahuasca, Ethnicity, and Culture 40 MARIANA CIAVATTA PANTOJA 3. Materializing Alliances: Ayahuasca Shamanism in and Beyond Western Amazonian Indigenous Communities 59 PIRJO KRISTIINA VIRTANEN 4. Medicine Alliance: Contemporary Shamanic Networks in Brazil 81 ESTHER JEAN LANGDON AND ISABEL SANTANA DE ROSE 5. Ritualized Misunderstanding Between Uncertainty, Agreement, and Rupture: Communication Patterns in Euro-American Ayahuasca Ritual Interactions 105 ANNE-MARIE LOSONCZY AND SILVIA MESTURINI CAPPO viii Contents 6. Shamans’ Networks in Western Amazonia: The Iquitos-Nauta Road 130 FRANÇOISE BARBIRA FREEDMAN 7. On the Uneasiness of Tourism: Considerations on Shamanic Tourism in Western Amazonia 159 EVGENIA FOTIOU 8. The Internationalization of Peruvian Vegetalismo 182 BEATRIZ CAIUBY LABATE 9. From the Native’s Point of View: How Shipibo-Konibo Experience and Interpret Ayahuasca Drinking with “Gringos” 206 BERND BRABEC DE MORI 10. Ayahuasca’s Attractions and Distractions: Examining Sexual Seduction in Shaman-Participant Interactions 231 DANIELA PELUSO 11. Yage-Related Neo-Shamanism in Colombian Urban Contexts 256 ALHENA CAICEDO FERNÁNDEZ Index 277 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We wish to thank the German Research Council (DFG) and the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) Ritual Dynamics—Socio-Cultural Processes from a Historical and Culturally Comparative Perspective, for their support for the Amazon Conference: Amazonian Shamanism, Psychoactive Plants and Ritual Reinvention, which took place in the Institute of Medical Psychology, Heidel- berg University, in December 2011. We thank Prof. Dr. Rolf Verres for his avid support of the conference, and Alexandra Heidle for her help in organizing it. We thank Anton Bilton, Giancarlo Canavesio, Kathleen Harrison, Robert J. Barnhart, Botanical Dimensions, and MAPS for their support for this book. We thank all the authors of this book for their contributions. We thank Françoise Barbira Freedman for her contributions to the introduc- tion of the book and Oscar Calavia Saéz for writing the foreword. We thank Andrew Dawson, Kenneth Tupper, Matthew Meyer, Renato Sztut- man, Brian Anderson, and Tiago Coutinho for their dialogues during the pro- duction of this book. We also thank Alessandro Meiguins, Lou Gold, Thiago Martins e Silva, Ana Gretel Echazú Böschemeir, Claude Guislain, Frankneile Silva, Billy Fequis, Luana Almeida, Stephen Hugh-Jones, Pierre Urban, Sydney Solizonquehua, and Miguel Alexiades for their permission to use photos and drawings they pro- vided. Finally, we offer our grateful thanks to Ute Hüsken, Roland Grimes, and Oxford University Press for their consideration of this important topic. ix CONTRIBUTORS Bernd Brabec de Mori is an ethnomusicologist specializing in indigenous music from the Ucayali valley in Eastern Peru. He spent some years in the field and was integrated into the indigenous group Shipibo-Konibo. He now lives in Austria and has been working at the audiovisual archive Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, at the Centre for Systematic Musicology (University of Graz), and as a senior scientist at the Institute of Ethnomusi- cology, University of Music and Dramatic Arts Graz. His publications address the fields of Western Amazonian indigenous music, arts, and history as well as the complex of music, ritual, and altered states. Alhena Caicedo Fernandez received her Ph.D. in social anthropology and ethnology from Ecole de Hautes Etudes Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. She teaches in the department of anthropology at Los Andes University, Colom- bia, and is a member of the Centro de Pensamiento Latinoamericano Raiz.AL (“Raiz.AL” Center of Latin American Thought). Her doctoral thesis, entitled “The New Places of Shamanism in Colombia,” explored the changing dynamics in the field of yage consumption in that country and examined the processes of urbanization and eliticization on ritual consumption. Clancy Cavnar is currently completing her postdoctoral hours in clinical psy- chology at the Marin Treatment Center, a methadone clinic in San Rafael, Cali- fornia. In 2011 she received a doctorate in clinical psychology (Psy.D.) from John F. Kennedy University in Pleasant Hill, California, with a dissertation on gay and lesbian people’s experiences with ayahuasca. She attended New College of the University of South Florida and completed an undergraduate degree in liberal arts in 1982. She attended the San Francisco Art Institute and graduated with a Master of Fine Art in painting in 1985. In 1993, she received a certificate in substance abuse counseling from the extension program of the University of California at Berkeley, and in 1997 she graduated with a master’s in counseling xi xii Contributors from San Francisco State University. In that same year, she got in touch with the Santo Daime in the United States, and has traveled several times to Brazil since then. She is also co-editor, with Beatriz Caiuby Labate, of two books: Prohibi- tion, Religious Freedom, and Human Rights: Regulating Traditional Drug Use (2014) and The Therapeutic Use of Ayahuasca (2014). Mariana Ciavatta Pantoja graduated from the social sciences program at Uni- versidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in 1985. She moved to the state of Acre in 1993, spending two years in the Alto Juruá Extractivist Reserve engaged in political consulting and academic research. In 2001, she defended her doc- toral dissertation in social sciences at UNICAMP, which was published as Os Milton: Cem Anos de História nos Seringais [The Milton: One Hundred Years of History of the Rubber Tappers Camp] (2nd edition 2008). Since 2004, she has lectured at the Federal University of Acre, where