“La dieta”: Ayahuasca and the western reinvention of indigenous Amazonian food shamanism

Abstract

This chapter undertakes an unorthodox approach and investigate dietary and behavioural restrictions in the practice of Western ayahuasca drinking in comparison to indigenous Amazonian practices of dieting often believed to be the source of the “Western ayahuasca dieta.” Combining readings of Amazonian ethnography with the authors’ ethnographic research in neoshamanic contexts of ayahuasca drinking in Australia, the United States, and Peru, the authors consider how the practice of ayahuasca dieting has become detached from indigenous cosmologies and sanitized into a series of techniques that Westerners employ in the hope of attaining certain psychological and spiritual traits. The authors consider the dislocation of ayahuasca from indigenous cosmologies of reciprocity and predation - where issues of human-environment relations are sanctioned and produced via shamanism - to a Western practice where “plant spirits” or “plant medicines” from an indigenous “tradition” meet the demands of the individual’s self-healing and personal development. This is explored by analysing key examples of indigenous food shamanism among indigenous Amazonian cultures in contrast to Western neoshamanic explanatory models of dieting, prescriptions to drink ayahuasca, and to the emic concept of “integration.” The comparison suggests how contradictions and limitations may occur when spiritual beliefs grounded in radically different social, economic, and cosmological environments are appropriated and reinvented.