UC Riverside

Academic discussions of the globalization of the psychedelic brew ayahuasca have called attention to ayahuasca tourism and its tendencies toward exotification of Indigenous peoples, extraction of knowledge and resources, and the reshaping of ritual practices to appeal to market interests. These discussions tend toward fatalistic conclusions that ayahuasca tourism will inevitably result in the erasure of Amazonian lifeways. I draw on four years of hybrid ethnographic research in the Peruvian Amazon and in online discussion forums for ayahuasca and Amazonian shamanism to present the case of two Amazonian medicine centers who take an alternative approach to ayahuasca tourism, which I refer to as shamanic pilgrimage. By recontextualizing ayahuasca in its historical role as a support to other medicinal plants, Centro Takiwasi and Mushuk Pakarina leverage global interest in ayahuasca to access the economic advantages of the global tourism market while mediating against its deleterious effects. This is accomplished by requiring pilgrims who wish to drink ayahuasca to do so as part of a deeper practice of “being with plants.” This extended period of liminality forces engagement with Amazonian, animist epistemologies. I focus on the role that icaros (healing songs) play in structuring rituals and in facilitating relationality between pilgrims and non-human beings of the forest. Using Peircian semiotics, I analyze the process that healers go through to learn icaros, and I analyze the use of these songs in various medicine rituals that do and do not involve ayahuasca. I also employ semiotics to show that icaros carry the same types of meaning in ayahuasca ceremonies as they do in other rituals. However, they function differently as the synesthetic experiences that ayahuasca often induces collapse the typical order of semiotic processes, allowing healers to modulate the experiences and processes of healing of ayahuasca drinkers. I draw from neuroscientific studies of the past ten years, which show that psychedelic experiences can catalyze significant ideological shifts. In my research, pilgrims regularly reported encountering non-human entities during dietas and ayahuasca ceremonies. As a result of these experiences, pilgrims often became personally invested in the wellbeing of Amazonian peoples and the forest ecology.