The Expanding World Ayahuasca Diaspora

Appropriation, Integration and Legislation

Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Clancy Cavnar, Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Clancy Cavnar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351854672
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión étnica y tribal

During its expansion from the Amazon jungle to Western societies, ayahuasca use has encountered different legal and cultural responses. Following on from theearlier edited collection, The Expanding World Ayahuasca Diaspora continues to explore how certain alternative global religious groups, shamanic tourism industries and recreational drug milieus grounded in the consumption of the traditionally Amazonian psychoactive drink ayahuasca embody various challenges associated with modern societies.

Each contributor explores the symbolic effects of a "bureaucratization of enchantment" in religious practice, and the "sanitizing" of indigenous rituals for tourist markets. Chapters include ethnographic investigations of ritual practice, transnational religious ideology, the politics of healing and the invention of tradition. Larger questions on the commodification of ayahuasca and the categories of sacred and profane are also addressed.

Exploring classic and contemporary issues in social science and the humanities, this book provides rich material on the bourgeoning expansion of ayahuasca use around the globe. As such, it will appeal to students and academics in religious studies, anthropology, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, biology, ecology, law and conservation.

1 A critical review of the literature on the diaspora of Brazilian ayahuasca religions¹

Beatriz Caiuby Labate² and Glauber Loures de Assis³

Introduction

In the complex and vibrant religious panorama of contemporary Brazil, a number of spiritual movements born in this country have spread beyond its borders and crossed the oceans to all inhabited continents. This is the case, for example, of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus) and of Umbanda. Less known, but no less fascinating, are the Brazilian ayahuasca religions.

Originating in the rubber tapper culture of the Brazilian Amazon in the twentieth century, Barquinha, Santo Daime, and the União do Vegetal (UDV) remained geographically confined to the north of the country until the 1980s. Thereafter, though, they started to become known to a wider public. Santo Daime and the UDV, in particular, expanded significantly, reaching all regions of Brazil and stimulating the production of a sizeable literature on the ritual and religious use of ayahuasca; documented, for example, in the book Ayahuasca Religions: A Comprehensive Bibliography & Critical Essays (Labate et al., 2009).⁴

Today, the Santo Daime and the UDV diaspora has grown large indeed and involves transnational networks and alliances, raising intriguing questions about cultural tradition, language, and religious diasporas. Santo Daime⁵ has spread to at least 43 countries on all the inhabited continents (Labate & Assis, 2016), while the UDV is present in the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Holland, and Australia. This process of internationalization has, in turn, stimulated its own literary output, issuing from places as far apart as Ireland, Australia, and the United States. Although this intellectual production is expanding yearly, it remains somewhat dispersed and diffuse, posing difficulties to researchers and other interested people wishing to access this field of studies and preventing deeper analytic inquiry into the phenomenon.

Here, then, we look to unite and critically evaluate literature worldwide on the internationalization of the Brazilian ayahuasca religions. This includes articles, master’s theses, and doctoral dissertations in Portuguese, Spanish, and English, both published and unpublished, along with practitioners’ publications that engage with the theme of internationalization.

Due to space limitations, and the ever-increasing number of works on the theme, it is impossible for us to include all of this intellectual production. Various texts have been omitted from our discussion, therefore, without implying that we consider these to be less valuable. The present chapter is not intended, therefore, to comprise all texts published on the topic, but to be a general guide that signposts various paths for lay readers and researchers interested in this universe, acting as a catalyst for the development of future research. With this aim in mind, we have divided the article into five sections: Social Sciences; the Ayahuasca Diaspora; Legal Issues and Regulation of Ayahuasca; Biomedicine, Psychology and Public Health;⁶ and Native Literature and Religious Texts.

Social sciences

Although the earliest reports of ayahuasca religious rituals being performed outside Brazil’s borders date from the 1980s, studies of the internationalization of these groups only began to be produced years later. Despite expanding research in the areas of biomedicine, health, law, and public policies, the most fertile area so far has been the social sciences, especially anthropology. Here, we start by assessing the extensive bibliography on Santo Daime, beginning with the inaugural texts, followed by publications according to the regions where studies have been conducted, before turning to works written by foreign authors in Brazil. Next, we examine the research on UDV, and, finally, we turn to ethnomusicological studies.

Among the inaugural works, we can cite the doctoral dissertation by Alberto Groisman at the University of London (2000), the first ethnography on ayahuasca religions conducted outside of Brazil. In this work, based on short-term field research, the author studies the Santo Daime groups in Holland, pursuing an exploratory and descriptive approach. In subsequent years, Groisman continued to study the internationalization of Santo Daime, including its expansion to Europe in one article (2009) and the legal aspects of its expansion in the United States in his postdoctoral work, published in a chapter in the collected volume Ayahuasca y Salud (2013a). He has also written about the “creative appropriation” of elements of the Santo Daime doctrine in the Dutch context (2013b). Another early contribution was Carsten Balzer’s work (2004; 2005). Along with its innovation, his work provides an important account of the informal and mostly non-institutional beginnings of Santo Daime’s internationalization, a phase during which ceremonies were mainly held in the context of weekend workshops until more structured rituals gradually began to gain ground.

The British scholar Andrew Dawson was one of the first to produce a full-length book on the internationalization of Santo Daime (2012) published in Europe. The author looks to comprehend the internationalization and transformations of the religion at a theoretical level, constructing a distinctive conceptual framework. He situates Santo Daime within the wider circuits of New Age religiosity and the contemporary religious consumer market, something he had already done in a more wide-ranging publication on the New Age movement that touched on the theme of ayahuasca religions (2007). His theoretical analysis, informed by a conceptual originality, is limited, however, by the lack of solid ethnographic data and long-term field research. This leads the author to take regional and contextual aspects of the religion, such as possession trance, as general features of Santo Daime (2011). On the other hand, the doctoral dissertation by Marc Blainey (2013) examines Santo Daime in Belgium. It includes details on the religious context in general, Belgian colonization in Africa, and also some quantitative data on Santo Daime in Europe. His main thesis is similar to Dawson’s, namely, that the religion is not opposed to contemporary “secular” society, but embedded within it, comprising a technology, a tool, and a mystical solution to the problems faced by the modern self.

Gilliam Watt presents a pioneering master’s thesis on Santo Daime in Ireland (2013) that adds fresh data on the religion in this location, such as the description of hymns evoking pre-Celtic deities. Writing about the situation in Holland, Judith Sudholter (2012), in her master’s thesis, provides a close account of the way in which Dutch followers experience Santo Daime rituals and transform them into narratives. For his part, the German psychologist Jan Weinhold (2007) sets out to explore ritual “mistakes and failures” in the European context, problematizing the question of the ritual efficacy of ayahuasca and Santo Daime in a sociocultural context exogenous to Brazil; an approach that, as we had occasion to witness personally, elicited protests among the German Santo Daime community.

Heading from Europe to North America, the researcher Kenneth Tupper has produced the only doctoral dissertation existing at present on the expansion of ayahuasca to Canada (2011). Based on the case study of a Canadian Santo Daime church, the Céu do Montreal, the author embarks on a discussion of drug policies, emphasizing the role of stereotypes and the choice of language in narratives concerning tradition in Canadian public opinion and in the establishment of policies on psychoactive drug use. This text, along with others by Tupper (2008; 2009; 2016), exemplifies a new line of studies on ayahuasca that examines public polices and drug policies, an approach that has burgeoned over recent years. In the United States, the master’s thesis by Alfonso Matas (2014) describes the Céu da Lua Cheia, a Santo Daime church in Miami, and the difficulties of adapting to the North American context, discussing at a more superficial level theoretical issues already explored by Dawson and Blainey, such as Santo Daime’s entry into a religious market. Still on the North American continent, Guzmán (2013, 2015) sketches a historical overview and a contemporary panorama of Santo Daime in Mexico, as well as preliminary observations on legal questions, the incorporation of Mexican religious elements into Santo Daime rituals, and the presence of Santo Daime in alternative therapy networks.

One topic that remains little explored is the spread of Santo Daime in Mercosur countries. Juan Scuro looks to fill this lacuna in his master’s thesis on Santo Daime’s arrival in Uruguay (2012a) in the 1990s, as well as subsequent articles on the same topic (2012b, 2012c), where he identifies the “Uruguayan ayahuasca field” (see also Scuro & Apud, 2015). Lavazza (2007, 2014), in turn, examines the trajectory of Santo Daime in Argentina, setting out from an ethnography of a group from Buenos Aires and the negotiations between their local social reality and the imaginary of Brazilian Amazonia. In 2015, the anthropologist Valentina Zelada completed her monograph on Santo Daime in Santiago, Chile. Her investigation, which contains a generic description of the rituals already available elsewhere, relates the process of construction, internal crises, and institutional affiliation of this church to ICEFLU. It is valuable for its examination of a country home to various ayahuasca groups that have been little studied so far.

It is worth remembering that Santo Daime is also present in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. However, the literary output in English concerning these contexts is virtually non-existent. An exception is the article by Sobiecki (2013), which describes his personal experience in a Santo Daime ritual in Johannesburg through a discussion of healing and “spiritual medicine.”

In Brazil, the expansion and internationalization of Santo Daime has been addressed by Assis (2013), who observes the presence of Santo Daime in contexts as distinct as Minas Gerais, the Netherlands, and Germany, looking to insert the religion within the wider field of studies of the sociology of religion and the contemporary global religious panorama. On the other side, the article by Labate and Assis (2016) contextualizes the expansion of Santo Daime within the diaspora of Brazilian religions as a whole, analyzing this expansion in terms of the particular structural features of this religion, defined by the authors as its miscibility and psychoactivity.

In recent years, there has also been a considerable output of works by foreign researchers on Santo Daime groups in Brazil and abroad. Sulla (2005) wrote a master’s thesis in psychology on the ideas of residents of Céu do Mapiá (the headquarters village of ICEFLU in the Amazon) concerning the question of healing in the religion and the healing system used in the community. Another master’s thesis on Céu do Mapiá is by Lowell (2013), who examines the transformations experienced by the community during Santo Daime’s expansion and internationalization, a topic also covered by another article co-authored by Lowell & Adams(2016). There is also a text by Barnard (2014) that provides a wide-ranging and generic examination of the use of entheogens in religious contexts based on the case of Santo Daime and a work by Schmidt (2007) that contemplates Santo Daime as an eco-religious movement.

Dawson (2010) presents a field report of his visit to Céu do Mapiá, and also a description (Dawson, 2013) of the feitio ritual performed to make the beverage, extremely important in the religious life of Santo Daime, yet little studied. Similarly, Blocksom (2015) describes the Santo Daime community of Fortaleza, on the outskirts of Rio Branco in Acre State. Meyer (2014), in turn, produces one of the most analytically interesting works on Alto Santo, based on a dense ethnography. This group is more hermetic than ICEFLU, and the author has been one of few academics to have been granted permission to carry out research. Henman (1986; 2009) deserves mention for writing about the União do Vegetal and the earliest phase of its expansion in Brazil.

As we can observe, the low level of institutionalization and bureaucratization of ICEFLU/Santo Daime, along with its intense exchange with diverse other forms of religiosity, makes it easier to research its global spread. Hence, the most abundant, fragmented, and dispersed literature on the internationalization of Brazilian ayahuasca groups is dedicated to the study of Santo Daime. By contrast, there is a widely recognized lack of research on the UDV in international contexts compared to Santo Daime, reflecting the difficulty that scholars from diverse areas of knowledge have faced in studying the UDV. While the institutionalization and bureaucratization of this religion has enabled a consistent output of native publications, its secretive and closed nature has tended to block autonomous research from being conducted by people not belonging to the group.

The only monograph written in English dedicated entirely to the UDV was authored by Anderson (2007) and discusses the environmental values in the group’s religious life. Patrícia Lima published an article (2014) and presented a doctoral dissertation in Portuguese (2016) on UDV’s presence in Europe, especially in Portugal. She argues that in UDV rituals, the acoustic dimension is very important in the subjective perception of the participants, who may have very distinctly different experiences of the plant within the same acoustic setting. We have also learned of other research projects being conducted with the UDV that have, however, remained unfinished or are unpublished, due in part to the legal situation of the UDV and ayahuasca in diverse countries.

In relation to the musical aspects of the ayahuasca religions, one emerging area of studies is ethnomusicology, a field that already has a reasonable number of publications. One of the most wide-ranging is the doctoral dissertation by Lucas Kastrup Rehen (2011). Based on the author’s short-term field experience in a Santo Daime church in Holland, it examines the question of music in the ritual and its relation to emotions and discusses the divinely inspired quality of authentic hymns compared to normal musical compositions. Labate, Assis, and Cavnar wrote a chapter on the expansion of Santo Daime from a musical perspective (2016), seeking to analyze the way in which its hymns are interpreted, sung, imbued with new meanings, and translated outside of Brazil. This is one of the few studies to explore the question of language and the establishment of transnational networks in the Santo Daime religion.

The ayahuasca diaspora

Internationally, we find a combination of ayahuasca religions and other spiritual movements in a multitude of therapeutic, neoshamanic, and other modalities, making it difficult to analyze the internationalization of ayahuasca religions in isolation, that is, without contemplating the wider universe of alternative religiosity. Today, the ritual and therapeutic use of ayahuasca has become a global phenomenon – closely linked to New Age spirituality networks – diffused by indigenous peoples, vegetalistas, and diverse kinds of therapists and facilitators, especially in North America and Europe.

Losonczy and Mesturini (2010; 2011) seek to understand the reasons behind ayahuasca’s success as a plant of power in the Amazonian setting and also as a sacred substance in the international New Age circuit. Observing the history of the hallucinogenic brew’s spread, the authors identify ...