“ayahuasca has become popular among Westerners who travel to the Peruvian Amazon in increasing numbers to experience its reportedly healing and transformative effects”
Biography
Cultural Anthropologist Dr. Evgenia Fotiou is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Kent State University and her research takes her to South America, her native Greece, and beyond. She has a PhD in cultural anthropology and Latin American studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she completed doctoral research on Amazonian shamanism in Peru and its transformation through globalization and the formation of transnational tourist networks. She is interested in health and healing in cross-cultural perspective and is currently completing a book on Amazonian sorcery while researching the revitalization of pre-Christian religion in modern Greece. She is on the board of directors for the Society of the Anthropology of Consciousness and the scientific committee of the International Society for the Academic Research on Shamanism. Dr. Fotiou is an expert in the anthropology of religion, shamanism, medical anthropology, Amazonian cultures and gender and teaches courses on these subjects.
Plant use and shamanic dietas in contemporary Ayahuasca shamanism in Peru.
Transcript abstract
Ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic plant mixture used in a ceremonial context throughout Western Amazonia and its use has expanded globally in recent decades. As part of this expansion, ayahuasca has become popular among Westerners who travel to the Peruvian Amazon in increasing numbers to experience its reportedly healing and transformative effects. In and around Iquitos, Peru, shamanism is reinvented as local shamanic practices converge with Western ideas of spirituality and healing and create a hybrid and highly dynamic practice, which I call shamanic tourism. I use this term because the experience often involves the participation to a shamanic dieta, which involves fasting and the ingestion of non-hallucinogenic plants. In addition, it is a common practice in this context to use a variety of plants for bodily and energetic cleansing in the form of purges and ritual baths. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in and around the area of Iquitos, Peru, the epicenter of shamanic tourism, this paper will focus on some of the plants that curanderos and ayahuasqueros use in the area alongside ayahuasca and the ways these are perceived by healers and participants. I will show that the use of plants in this manner is intricately connected with Amazonian conceptions of the body.
