All of the women that I worked with operated in urban areas or close to the city. Their area of activity was clearly shaped by their surroundings. The women’s clientele was made up of mainly non-indigenous people, namely mestizos and tourists. This could also be connected with the fact that this group of people might be less prejudiced against female healers: In the mestizo as well as in the touristic surroundings people are familiar with the concept of female healers. Outside of the family surroundings of the observed woman, there were only a few Shipibo who are treated by the female healers or let themselves be treated by them. In times of an increased dependency on economic income (this also being related with their surroundings), the female healers preferred putting their focus on patients and clients like mestizos or tourists who are financially more secure than others. Their main focus seemed to center around the financial benefits their activity would bring them. Looking at their statements about the motives to become a shaman, it becomes evident that four of the six women were driven by an urgent economic need. This in many cases included providing for their family in times of crisis and sickness: Since access to both modern/Western and traditional/shamanic medicine is limited to many of the women due to lack of financial means, training to be a shaman could be understood in many cases as a sort of self-help initiative. Furthermore, the concentration on solvent patients outside of one’s own family can be, following Wallis, interpreted as a “transformation of indigenous practices in response to challenging social circumstances” (2003:207). Other motives such as a calling, for example after overcoming an illness, or line of succession were mentioned, too, but were less frequent. Under the previously mentioned criteria, only three of the six women I worked with fulfilled the requirements to be called shamanic healers. The effective and competent use of ayahuasca, key characteristic of a shaman, and needed for healing treatments, was not present with the other three women. Instead, their activities are proof of the mechanisms of adaptation developed and employed by indigenous people in their handling of the western and mestizo culture. The work the respective women did was to exploit a new source of income created and supported by a spiritual tourism which receives women shamans especially positively. The female shamanism that I concentrated on in this essay, up to this point still a marginal phenomenon, needs to be considered bearing in mind its geographic and ideational closeness to the tourism of its urban surroundings; in certain cases it could have been brought about by it. At the same time it illustrates the increasing dependency of urban Shipibo on the external market, and as a consequence, the increased financial needs that for both genders makes necessary the opening up of new sources of income.