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Beyong the Sacred Valley: Ayahuasca Pilgrimage in Peru


Web link: www.neip.i...

Abstract

This dissertation employs the concept of ‘ayahuasca pilgrimage’ to examine ritual healing practices and aspects of everyday social life for spiritual seekers residing in the town of Pisac, in the Sacred Valley of the Peruvian Andes. Ayahuasca is a plant medicine ‘brew’ with origins in the shamanic traditions of Indigenous and mestizo people of the Amazon. In recent decades, ‘ayahuasca tourism’ has attracted increasing numbers of foreigners to Peru, who travel there in search of spiritual and deeply personal healing experiences. Ayahuasca has expanded outside of the Amazon, as exemplified in the town of Pisac that has become a place of pilgrimage for those interested in ayahuasca, as well as Inca heritage, local ‘mystical tourism’, and numerous New Age healing modalities. Such practices, and the emergence of the transient ‘gringo community’ that has developed around them, raise critically entwined issues of cultural appropriation and social inequality, particularly in relation to the local population, examined through themes of ‘contestation’ addressed in this work. As explored here, ayahuasca pilgrimage encompasses liminal ritual events including qualities of communitas that are oriented around personal healing and transformation. Participants also view healing as entailing a process of ‘integration’ that bridges ritual and everyday life, requiring individual responsibility towards enacting change. While including deeply meaningful and often efficacious experiences for those involved, such journeys entail tensions arising through perceived social inequalities and cultural differences with locals, that members of the ‘gringo community’ contend with yet have few solutions to. On these terms, ayahuasca pilgrims inhabit an ambivalent position as outsiders. This thesis provides anthropological insights into the formations of spiritual tourism and the ‘gringo community’ in Pisac. This work contributes to scholarship on ayahuasca, pilgrimage, tourism, and lifestyle migration ethnography.