This text is based on the premise that the ayahuasca beverage passed from local and regional use to circulation in a globalized network and argues that it now works as a diacritical sign and plays a critical part in negociating and re-allocating meaning and legitimacy. Thus relationships between actors, in the new interface between local indigenous societies and Latin American and international worlds, are symbolically recomposed. To understand the contemporary success of ayahuasca implies grasping the dynamics between continuity and emerging cultural and social creations, which make up the web of historical and present-day contacts and adaptations between the diverse Amazonian peoples as well as between Amazonian peoples and successive external visitors and powers.