Purging and the body in the therapeutic use of ayahuasca.

Ayahuasca is a psychoactive plant mixture used in ceremonial contexts throughout Western Amazonia. Its use has expanded globally in recent decades and become popular among westerners who travel to the Peruvian Amazon in increasing numbers to experience its reportedly healing effects. Through a review of relevant literature on Amazonian shamanism, combined with the authors’ ethnographic data from shamanic tourism contexts of the Peruvian Amazon and neo-shamanic networks in Australia (collected between 2003 and 2015 - with a total of 227 people interviewed or surveyed, including healers and participants), we demonstrate that purging has been integral to the therapeutic use of ayahuasca across and beyond Amazonia. Therapeutic approaches to ayahuasca point to combined modulations of the gut and the mind, and the bodily and the social, that are expressed through discourse about healing and the body. Relating ethnographic evidence to recent scientific studies that connect the gut to emotional health, we do not approach the gut as merely biological ground on which cultural meanings are imposed, but rather as simultaneously physical and cultural. Based upon our analysis, we argue that ayahuasca purging should not be dismissed as a drug side effect or irrational belief but reconsidered for its potential therapeutic effects

Purging and the body in the therapeutic use of ayahuasca

Abstract(#br)Ayahuasca is a psychoactive plant mixture used in ceremonial contexts throughout Western Amazonia. Its use has expanded globally in recent decades and become popular among westerners who travel to the Peruvian Amazon in increasing numbers to experience its reportedly healing effects. Through a review of relevant literature on Amazonian shamanism, combined with the authors’ ethnographic data from shamanic tourism contexts of the Peruvian Amazon and neo-shamanic networks in Australia (collected between 2003 and 2015 – with a total of 227 people interviewed or surveyed, including healers and participants), we demonstrate that purging has been integral to the therapeutic use of ayahuasca across and beyond Amazonia. Therapeutic approaches to ayahuasca point to combined modulations of the gut and the mind, and the bodily and the social, that are expressed through discourse about healing and the body. Relating ethnographic evidence to recent scientific studies that connect the gut to emotional health, we do not approach the gut as merely biological ground on which cultural meanings are imposed, but rather as simultaneously physical and cultural. Based upon our analysis, we argue that ayahuasca purging should not be dismissed as a drug side effect or irrational belief but reconsidered for its potential therapeutic effects

Senses of Self, Society, and Cosmos

The pervasiveness of ayahuasca use in lowland South America, alongside its rising global diaspora spurred by ayahuasca tour-ism, religious movements, and the psychedelic renaissance, makes Gearin and Calavia Sáez’s critical scholarship particularly welcome. The authors’ comparative attention to visualise and individualism across“glocal” contexts of ayahuasca practices, namely, neoshamanic uses in Australia and indigenous practices in Amazonia, is compelling. They invite us to focus on diverging notions of property and personhood to understand ayahuasca visualism as an expression of divergent cultural viewpoints. I concur with their proposal that ayahuasca visions are sites of equivocation whose interpretations are rendered meaningful by particular socialities. They view the Australian neoshamanic individual as a product of the philosophical Enlightenmentwho becomes the center of the ayahuasca experience, interpretation, and outcome, while for“Amazonians,” the centrality of the individual is a product of animistic and perspectival ontologies and is therefore by default fractal and more broadly connected to larger social worlds

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

"Whatever you want to believe': kaleidoscopic individualism and ayahuasca healing in Australia

Over the last fifteen years the use of the indigenous Amazonian psychoactive beverage ayahuasca has been reimagined in alternative healing circles of Western countries. This paper explores the practice of ayahuasca neoshamanism in Australia and examines ways in which acts of vomiting and ecstatic trance-visions involve heightened affective states and moral projects of healing. Aspects of everyday life are purged, rearticulated, and reconstituted in rituals where codes of conduct and discursive exchange encourage practices of personal evaluation and reflexivity that appear to index ideologies of individualism. Through exploring social and discursive prohibitions and forms of sensory organisation, the practice of drinking ayahuasca in Australia is shown to be constituted by ritual conventions that define the individual as autonomous and responsible in relation to ecstatic trance and articulations of wellbeing

Good Mother Nature: ayahuasca neoshamanism as cultural critique in Australia

This chapter investigates the practice of ayahuasca neoshamanism in Australia and the ways in which narrative accounts of ecstatic healing are inscribed with forms of “cultural critique” (Marcus & Fischer, 1986) against urbanization, materialism, environmental destruction, and consumer capitalism. The ecstatic healing practices are centered upon ritualized styles of consuming the indigenous Amazonian psychoactive beverage ayahuasca. While a variety of groups, networks, and individuals drink the beverage in Australia, this paper circumvents the Australianbased diasporas of the Brazilian ayahuasca religions (Santo Daime and União do Vegetal) and focuses on Australian-based ayahuasca neoshamanism.2 By “neoshamanism,” I refer to what Atkinson (1992, p. 322) calls the “new shamanism,” which emerged in the middle classes of European, North American, and other societies among people associated with the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.3 Neoshamanism traditionally traces its lineage to indigenous practices and cosmologies, and tends to be defined by its practitioners as a “spiritual path for personal empowerment” (Wallis, 1999, p. 42). Grounded in a Euro-American history, it involves a cosmology aligned “at once with Nature and the primordial Other, [and] in opposition to institutionalized Western religions and indeed Western political and economic order” (Atkinson, 1992, p. 322). This chapter demonstrates that, in the context of Australia, ayahuasca neoshamanism represents a novel extension and reinvention of earlier types of neoshamanism with regard to an ethos of cultural opposition

The world Ayahuasca Diaspora: Reinventions and controversies

Ayahuasca is a psychoactive substance that has long been associated with indigenous Amazonian shamanic practices. The recent rise of the drink's visibility in the media and popular culture, and its rapidly advancing inroads into international awareness, mean that the field of ayahuasca is quickly expanding. This expansion brings with it legal problems, economic inequalities, new forms of ritual and belief, cultural misunderstandings, and other controversies and reinventions. In The World Ayahuasca Diaspora, leading scholars, including established academics and new voices in anthropology, religious studies, and law fuse case-study ethnographies with evaluations of relevant legal and anthropological knowledge. They explore how the substance has impacted indigenous communities, new urban religiosities, ritual healing, international drug policy, religious persecution, and recreational drug milieus. This unique book presents classic and contemporary issues in social science and the humanities, providing rich material on the bourgeoning expansion of ayahuasca use around the globe

Evolution of genes and genomes on the Drosophila phylogeny

Comparative analysis of multiple genomes in a phylogenetic framework dramatically improves the precision and sensitivity of evolutionary inference, producing more robust results than single-genome analyses can provide. The genomes of 12 Drosophila species, ten of which are presented here for the first time (sechellia, simulans, yakuba, erecta, ananassae, persimilis, willistoni, mojavensis, virilis and grimshawi), illustrate how rates and patterns of sequence divergence across taxa can illuminate evolutionary processes on a genomic scale. These genome sequences augment the formidable genetic tools that have made Drosophila melanogaster a pre-eminent model for animal genetics, and will further catalyse fundamental research on mechanisms of development, cell biology, genetics, disease, neurobiology, behaviour, physiology and evolution. Despite remarkable similarities among these Drosophila species, we identified many putatively non-neutral changes in protein-coding genes, non-coding RNA genes, and cis-regulatory regions. These may prove to underlie differences in the ecology and behaviour of these diverse species