“La Dieta” Ayahuasca and the Western reinvention of indigenous Amazonian food shamanism (original) (raw)

Dietary taboos exist across virtually all human societies and they play important roles in religious and spiritual practices worldwide. Whether Hindu restrictions on meat for Brahmin religious leaders (Dumont, 1966), or Jewish restrictions on consuming milk products with meat (Freidenreich, 2011) or the Orang Asli of Malaysia selectively restricting meat consumption of animals with " weak " spirits (Bolton, 1972), dietary regimes often have associated logics of spiritual reasoning and practice. Some researchers have argued that purely functionalist explanations can account for the significance of food restrictions in religious traditions. Undertaking a global analysis, Meyer-Rochow (2009) argued that religious food taboos function to either protect human health, sustain ecological systems , enforce inequalities among different populations, or strengthen identity or group-cohesion. In contrast to these type of explanations, Simoons (1994) argued that complex magico-religious beliefs and symbols are fundamental in trying to explain the significance of religious dietary restrictions around the world. The theoretical positions of both the functionalists and symbolists agree that understandings of the diversity of spiritual food taboos need to include consideration of the culturally or environmentally specific contexts of the restrictions. Restrictions on dietary and behavioral regimes in spiritual practices across different cultures can be so radically different from each other that comparative approaches may strike readers as more than odd. Yet, this diversity also indicates how remarkable it is when a cultural group adopts the spiritual dietary restrictions of a different culture. The recent emergence and popularity of the indigenous Amazonian psychoactive drink ayahuasca among members of Western societies provides an example of how spiritual dietary practices may become reimagined and adapted within just a few decades. Ayahuasca is a shamanic medicine and religious sacrament that typically induces vomiting and visions or other non-ordinary sensory experiences. The practice of drinking ayahuasca is accompanied by a diversity of dietary regimes and related behavioral taboos in its different contexts of use across indigenous Amazonia.