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Between the Western and the Indian. : Ethnography of the roads of the Ayahuasca Shamanism between Europe and Americas.


Web link: www.cairn.info/revue-aut...

Pages: 93-110

Abstract

Between the “Occidental” and the “Indian”. An ethnography of the ayahuasca shamanism itineraries binding Europe and America. The following text explores a particular aspect of religious practice and migration. Shamanism presents itself today as a multi-sited landscape, painted by regular movements of ritual experts and practitioners and by the continuous diffusion and reconfiguration of practice. These transcontinental travels and settlements influence the local communities and lead them to rethink and adapt their own practices of internal and regional use. The transcontinental version of shamanism presents an organizational continuum that withholds, allows and reproduces a set of itineraries that binds, on a national and international scale, the territories of the socalled “ethnical” shamanism and its urban adaptations. In fact, this continuum rests on the encounter of national and international “urban shamanisms” that structure themselves by looking at the “indigenous” as a revalued and ultimate resource-location. By addressing the shamanic expertise classified as “knowledge” in this particular context, we shall question its influence on the national and international social hierarchies that originated from colonization.