From the liana to the cross. Institutional transformations, ritual innovations and socialization of hallucinations in a shamanic center in the Peruvian Amazon.
Takiwasi is a therapeutic community that has played a pioneering role in the emergence of shamanic tourism in the Peruvian Amazon. If its ritual procedure is characterized by the use of certain tools of curanderos, over time of its ritual practices have increasingly borrowed elements from Catholicism. This essay describes and analyses the stages and the roots of this transformation, which makes Takiwsai so distinctive in the region. While the transformation of the Takiwasi ritual practices can be understood in part as the consequence of shamanic tourism and its condemnation by public authorities, it is rooted in the ritual experiences of the officiants and in the socialization of the hallucinations that mobilize various actors.