Global Ayahuasca: Wondrous Visions and Modern Worlds

by Alex K. Gearin

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 the simplified obsession with universal or primordial truth that has pervaded inquiries into ayahuasca experiences, and explores the practices of contemporary ayahuasca drinkers to reveal how the brew has conjured contradictory visions 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 enterprising individuals in mainland China, Global Ayahuasca examines how the wondrous visions of ayahuasca are entangled within the social and economic realities that they illuminate, revealing tensions, fears, and hopes of everyday modern life.

296 pages, Paperback

Published August 6, 2024

Reviews

[John Blochberger · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did not read through every section of this book but really enjoyed hearing about human experiences with ayahuasca. The effect was similar to being present at an integration circle listening to peers who courageously went through this intense experience and as a result had incredibly meaningful personal insights to share. This book has a great section explaining the history of ayahuasca. This book helped me understand the diverse motivations people have for going through the experience. It gives me hope for the potential of psychedelic therapy and potential to provide people who are seeking these medical/spiritual experiences structure to do so safely and effectively. For me, some passages were filled with psychology related jargon or just technical descriptions of psychedelic related phenomena that I found hard to follow.

[Nicholas]

On the cover of Gearin's wonderful book is a drawing of one of Pablo Amaringo's paintings of an ayahuasca vision. A flying saucer is prominently displayed. It's an apt detail, as Gearin's book compellingly argues that the plant medicine traditions of the Upper Amazon, and in particular the Shipibo, have always existed in relation to other "modern" cultures, from conquistadors to rubber barons to the Shining Path to 21st century ayahuasca pilgrims/tourists. It's inaccurate to imagine them as a ahistorical "primitives" living in a pristine state of nature; they've integrated other spiritual imaginaries and have interacted with other economies.

What's more, then, as Gearin argues, it's not enough to imagine that there's a single, pure cosmology that ayahuasca itself transports us to. While I've often parroted the conventional wisdom that ayahuasca uncannily produces visions of anacondas and jaguars no matter who's drinking it, this book has made me more careful: while that is still true and still uncanny (and largely undiscussed in these pages), it's not the whole picture, as ayahuasca interacts just as powerfully with the lifeworld of the user when producing its visions and lessons. While I most appreciated the book's early chapters on the complexities of the contemporary social and economic situation of the Shipibo, the later case studies of Australian neoshamanism and Chinese corporate ayahuasca retreats illustrated Gearin's thesis beautifully.

[Oliver Lenzner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed the ethnographic approach. Nice to see some anthropological chat about this subject.