Honoring The Plant Nations: Recovery of Ancestral Knowledge in Sacred Scholarship (original) (raw)
Related papers
Plant Medicines, Healing and Psychedelic Science, 2018
The ayahuasca research community is familiar with the concept of plant intelligences; however, they have yet to be adequately accounted for by commonly used research practices. This chapter is a call to examine the ontological and epistemological assumptions that underlie research practices and how these practices and assumptions may reinforce hierarchies of knowledge and animacy. The first part of this chapter describes some absences created by following a " methods as usual " approach when researching ayahuasca, based on ethnographic fieldwork at the World Ayahuasca Conference in 2016 (AYA2016). This highlights the need for researchers to acknowledge the methodological, disciplinary, and identity-based limitations on our abilities to produce and represent certain knowledges. Secondly, this chapter is a call to seriously and humbly engage with Indigenous sciences and epistemologies. This requires an honest reckoning with how research has contributed to colonial appropriation and marginalization of Indigenous knowledges. Indigenous ways of knowing have precedent for collaborating with teacher plants in producing knowledge and have much to contribute to discourse on multispecies perspectives. Lastly, I discuss possibilities for including multispecies sensibilities and Indigenous standpoints in research practices to create more collaborative and decolonial knowledges. *This is just the abstract of the paper - send me a private message if you'd like a copy of the full paper - I'm not allowed to post it freely for download, but can share for non-commercial purposes*
Indigenous Knowledge, Spiritualities, and Science: An Ongoing Discussion.pdf
The central themes discussed in this issue 1 are intrinsically related. Indigenous Knowledge and its transmission is a key issue for both the indigenous and the scientic communities. It behooves the latter to decolonize its methodology and worldview in order to understand indigenous ecologies and their views of Western development in the name of science. Indigenous spiritualities are in the domain of the elders, many of whom have left warnings of imminent eco-catastrophes resulting from hyper-industrialization and offerings of spiritual hope for their followers and for all of humankind. Knowledge and spirituality together, then, address broader questions such as the future of humans in nature.
Plants & Pathways: More-than-Human Worlds of Power, Knowledge, and Healing
Dissertation, 2020
This dissertation investigates the pathways and consequences of the commodification of ayahuasca, an Indigenous psychoactive and medicinal Amazonian plant brew, and the Shipibo healing rituals associated with its use. The “ayahuasca complex” is an assemblage of socionatural boundary beings, more-than-human relations, and interspecies and Indigenous practices that produce ayahuasca as a global commodity. I argue that the ayahuasca complex produces worlds in which both plant beings and humans participate, and which create ontological openings toward life. Providing healing services to outsiders is one way that Shipibo communities in the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon have responded to the conditions of globalization and regional histories of colonial violence, racism, and resource extractivism; but these communities are still living in great poverty. This dissertation unfolds in response to four guiding research questions: (1) how does the commodification of ayahuasca differ, if at all, from the socioeconomic and socioecological relations that have defined the extraction of other resources in Ucayali?; (2) how do Shipibo communities and healers benefit from ayahuasca tourism and what are the limitations on their ability to benefit?; (3) how does the adoption of Shipibo healing practices by outsiders affect relationships between humans and plant beings?; and (4) how can outsiders and researchers like myself work in Shipibo communities in ways that are not exploitative and extractive? My findings are based on fourteen months of ethnographic research in Ucayali, Peru (over five years), in which I conducted interviews, ecological studies, focus groups, and participant-observation of practices associated with ayahuasca, including harvesting, cooking, and healing. I also lived and worked in Shipibo communities and became involved in NGO projects and a community-based forest management project. My work dwells at the intersection of political ecology, STS (Science, Technology, and Society), environmental history, and environmental anthropology while also emphasizing decolonial approaches and introducing feminist and multispecies lenses to this topic. I use a political ecology framework to show that although the ayahuasca boom may appear similar to other extractive frontiers, the plants used to make ayahuasca also resist commodification in certain ways and create their own particular economic pathways that do not conform to usual commodity circuits. Nonetheless, as with other extractive economies, resources flow northward to rich countries through the growing ayahuasca commodity web. Although the commodification of ayahuasca does open up channels for resources to flow back to Shipibo communities, benefits and power continue to be concentrated in the North, and Shipibo communities are constrained by ongoing structural racism from capitalizing on the commodification of ayahuasca. I find that a legacy of colonial exploitation and extractivism still structures racialized hierarchies in Ucayali and globally, which constrain Shipibo healers’ ability to benefit from capitalist/colonial systems of power. However, ayahuasca’s particular relationships with humans, both material and cultural, causes it to behave unusually as a commodity. This dissertation reveals that plants themselves are important actors in commodity networks. I argue that as the ayahuasca complex moves through capitalist and reductionist frameworks, plant-human relations are altered in such a way that plant agency is constricted. My work draws from the literature on political ontology to understand relational practices as constitutive of worlds. Ayahuasca’s relationship with humans, therefore, is constituted through specific practices that shift as they move through different ontological framings and take on new meanings, values, and configurations of power. I focus on power, knowledge, and healing, as three attributes that are associated with ayahuasca, and use this as an analytic to show that these attributes become unraveled and humanized as ayahuasca is recontextualized. However, new articulations and openings are also created as plants and humans, Shipibo healers and outsiders engage in new types of collaborative worldmaking practices.
The Western Antropological Construction of Shamanism. Reflections from the Notebook. Personal view.
Don Bosco Media Communication Kep Province, 2024
Today the term Shamanism is popular and attracts a lot of attention, especially in relation with Indigenous communities. But the topic is vast, and it includes the western anthropological construction of the concept, the influence it has in contemporary indigenous communities and their challenges to defend their own culture and identity, the intervention of new spiritualities and systems such as new age, neo-colonialism and western research in psychedelic plants and how indigenous communities are left behind and no recognized. It explores also the way of missionaries approaching indigenous communities through the history of colonialism and the reflection that the church is doing currently to a change of paradigms.
Indigenous perspectives (on psychedelics)
Indigenous perspectives (on psychedelics). An invited symposium for Breaking Convention: 5th International Conference on Psychedelic Consciousness, 16th-18th August, 2019, University of Greenwich, London. Chair: David Luke 14:30 Hikuri (Peyote) and the Wixarika Way Don Eugenio & Eusebio Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQqoTdZ\_4Fc 15:00 Iboga and Bwiti Nzambe Divanga Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5nICIlikg8 15:30 Entheogenic Medicine in Canada: Healing a Marginalized Population – Jazmin Romaniuk Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl1YJ8YMYzs 16:00 Ayahuasca and the Capanahua Francisco Monte Shuna Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDIzKCetdJo Extended panel discussion with Don Eugenio & Eusebio, Nzambe Divanga, Jazmin Romaniuk, and Francisco Monte Shuna - Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p3jwvnHgKY
Indigenous Philosophies and the "Psychedelic Renaissance"
Journal Anthropology of Conscousness, 2022
The Western world is experiencing a resurgence of interest in the therapeutic potential of psychedelics, most of which are derived from plants or fungi with a history of Indigenous ceremonial use. Recent research has revealed that psychedelic compounds have the potential to address treatment-resistant depression and anxiety, as well as post-traumatic stress disorder and addictions. These findings have contributed to the decriminalization of psychedelics in some jurisdictions and their legalization in others. Despite psychedelics’ opaque legal status, numerous companies and individuals are profiting from speculative investments with few, if any, benefits accruing to Indigenous Peoples. In this paper, we suggest that the aptly named “psychedelic renaissance,” like the European Renaissance, is made possible by colonial extractivism. We further suggest that Indigenous philosophical traditions offer alternative approaches to reorient the “psychedelic renaissance” towards a more equitable future for Indigenous Peoples, psychedelic medicines, and all our relations.