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"The Light from the Forest: The Ritual Use of Ayahuasca in Brazil" by BC Labate and E MacRae (Eds) - Book Review


Web link: openurl.ingenta.com/content/x...

Pages: 361 - 364

Abstract

Dated 2006, officially published in 2008, and finally released in 2010, this special edition of the academic journal Fieldwork in Religion gives English-speakers access to eight articles previously available only in Portuguese, if they were published at all. They deal with the ritual use of ayahuasca in Brazil, although their focus is confined to the three largest Brazilian religions that make sacramental use of the drug—Santo Daime, Unio do Vegetal (UDV), and Barquinha—and there is little about the seventy-two indigenous groups who use ayahuasca in the Western Amazon region, except when these introduce the psychedelic brew to the three main groups. Nevertheless, for Anglophone scholars this is an invaluable cultural history and ethnography of ritual among the main non-indigenous religious ayahuasca groups in Brazil. All but one of the eight authors are based in the country, so that they give academic perspectives from and on Brazil to the rapidly expanding English-language community of ayahuasca researchers.