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Ethnopharmacologic search for psychoactive drugs - A Review


Web link: akjournals.com/view/jour...

Pages: 73 - 76

Abstract

This impressive publication turns the tide again towards a recognition of the importance of the ethnographic component of ethnopharmacology, a focus on the traditional knowledge bases that provide the accumulated centuries, if not millennium, of plant knowledge derived from direct use and phenomenological observation. As a number of papers in this volume show, the ethnographic context of this use, including an understanding of the cosmologies and animistic belief systems that are produced by these ethnopharmacological traditions, must be part of this inquiry. The ethnographic traditions provide phenomenological experiences and a worldview that shows the incompleteness of the materialist paradigm. It may be true, as materialist perspectives allege, that all we know of reality is mediated through the neurochemical actions at our receptors. But what this opens up is Pandora’s box of numerous neurochemically mediated realities. Those realities manifested under the influence of psychedelics manifest robust cross-cultural patterns and attest to a phenomenological reality. If this is not an indication of a transcendent noumena (Winkelman, 2018), it is nonetheless a neurophenomenological dynamic that should be explicated by neuropharmacology and ethnopharmacology (Winkelman, 2017).