While studies of indigenous use of the psychotropic drink ayahuasca (or yajé) in the Spanish-speaking countries of the Amazon region have resulted in an impressive bibliography over the past few decades, relatively little has been published to date about equivalent practices in Brazil. This gap has now been filled by an anthology in Portuguese of 26 essays by a variety of Brazilian and foreign investigators, entitled O Uso Ritual da Ayahuasca (“The Ritual Use of Ayahuasca”) and edited by the Brazilian anthropologists Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Wladimyr Sena Araújo. It is an outgrowth of a congress on the subject held in 1997 by the Unicamp University of Campinas, São Paulo State which, aiming for a multidisciplinary approach, invited social scientists, doctors, psychologists and government officials to discuss the multiple dimensions of the substance’s ritual use.