This unique collection of chapters focuses on the recent expansion of ayahuasca shamanism both within and outside Amazonia and on the issues that this expansion raises for the study of Amazonian shamanism more generally. In this book we discuss how indigenous, mestizo, and cosmopolitan cultures together have engaged in shaping and staging a wide variety of shamanic rituals in which the consumption of psychoactive ayahuasca brews is a central part. All authors draw on firsthand observations of the creation and expansion of these new forms of rituals, as well as on a variety of other sources. Ayahuasca is a psychoactive mixture typically made from the Amazonian vine Banisteriopsis caapi combined with the leaves of the bush Psychotria viridis, among other possible admixtures. The beverage contains dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a controlled substance subject to national and international drug laws. Ayahuasca was first used by indigenous Amazonian peoples within a shamanic complex that included both individual and group therapeutic functions, particularly in the areas of hunting magic, warfare, and collective rituals associated with social reproduction. Though little is yet known about the origins and spread of ayahuasca in pre-Hispanic contexts, its use in colonial missions and frontier posts of the Upper Amazon was reported in historical sources before accounts of its wider dissemination in the Amazonian lowlands at the turn of the twentieth century as a result of the social, ethnic, and economic upheavals associated with the Rubber Boom. Like previous transformations of shamanism in Amazonia since the Hispanic conquest, the recent process of dissemination of ayahuasca has been dialogic among forest people and newcomers in the region. The extent of this transformation of Amerindian epistemology and ontology, involving not only shamanic traditions in Amazonia but also ways of living in the rainforest that are now threatened, is discussed in several chapters in this volume. In fact, some of the current developments and practices described are still evolving. The influence not only of New Age ideas favored by spiritual pilgrims who flock to the Amazon in search of life-transforming experiences but also of dynamic ongoing interethnic contacts and exchanges is a main theme in the book. The chapters herein highlight the regional and transnational developments that have contributed to this new spread of shamanic ayahuasca rituals, now worldwide, and to what we claim is a “reinvention” of Amazonian shamanism. There is, indeed, a reinvention taking place, encompassing the diverse meanings of this polysemic concept: the ethnographies collectively reveal both a makeover of shamanic rituals with a new or more intensive use of ayahuasca to fit a more diversified audience with differing expectations, and a recasting of elements of ritual considered as traditional in new versions with a style all their own. In the Amazon, both displaced indigenous people and mestizo rubber tappers are engaged in a syncretic creation of rituals that help build ethnic alliances and political strategies for their marginalized positions. Reinvention also points to the recovery of aspects of indigenous cultures that are brought back into salience in ayahuasca shamanism with the objective of reclaiming native heritage. Reinventing authenticity is instrumental to what some authors have called the “cultural revival of indigenous traditions,” as well as to the emergence of new ethnic identities. Although the central place of shamanism in cultural revival has already been documented in Siberia and Central Asia, it has been relatively ignored in Amazonia. This volume opens new possibilities for stimulating comparisons. Reinvention does not occur in a historical or social vacuum. The emerging rituals are inseparable from tensions arising from the expansion of ecotourism and ethnic tourism, and from more widespread trends in the commodification of indigenous cultures in posttraditional and postcolonial contexts. Ayahuasca shamanism has also gained increasing popularity within a network of services combining alternative healthcare, psychological well-being, and spiritual development, both locally and internationally. Though both anthropologists and some local shamans have criticized the provision of these related services, this development needs to be examined at the point of its cultural emergence in its historical, social, and economic context. This is one of the aims of the contributors to this volume. Concepts of souls and spirits are fundamental to indigenous ontologies in South America. Humans have souls, and so do spirits, animals, plants, and inanimate substances. Also significant and animate are sacred sites such as trees, mountains, caves, waterfalls, springs, and underground rivers. All communication necessitates knowledge of soul and spirit essences and substances. Ritual—a system of stylized behavior only partially encoded in indigenous exegesis and performance—is the primary vehicle of popular religious instantiation in Amazonia. Music, rhythm, poetry, and aesthetic imagery are all integral components of shamanic performative dramatic art. During indigenous ritual enactment, the cosmology opens up to include all people in the universe, living and dead, Indian and non-Indian, together with animal spirits and souls. The visionary qualities of ayahuasca offer infinite scope for a dynamic assemblage of symbols and interpretive performances. This book advocates an understanding of the relationships between postcolonial Amazonian cultures as a process of “transculturation,” a concept that emphasizes the often-ignored impact of the peripheral culture on the one that assumes dominance. Far from decontextualizing Amazonian shamanism from its various cosmological and ritual dimensions, this volume allows reflection on a multiplicity of aspects involving the transforming practices, ontologies, and cosmologies of intermixing indigenous and colonist Amazonian populations in a globalizing world. This volume has its origins in the Amazon Conference: Amazonian Shamanism, Psychoactive Plants, and Ritual Reinvention, organized by Beatriz Caiuby Labate at the Institute of Medical Psychology of Heidelberg University, December 6 and 7, 2010. This conference was part of the subproject Ritual Dynamics and Salutogenesis in the Use and Misuse of Psychoactive Substances (RISA), within the larger framework of the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) Ritual Dynamics: Socio-Cultural Processes from a Historical and Culturally Comparative Perspective, which Labate was a member of from 2009 to 2011. The conference included presenters from a variety of disciplines and discussed the contemporary expansion of Amazonian shamanism and the Brazilian Ayahuasca religions, the Santo Daime and the União do Vegetal (UDV), into urban centers in Brazil, Europe, and North America. Cavnar presented a paper on psychological aspects of perception of sexual orientation related to the consumption of ayahuasca in different contexts. 1 For this book, we have chosen to exclude the topic of the overseas expansion of the Brazilian ayahuasca religions and their diverse interfaces. Labate and Jungaberle (2011) 2 have addressed the internationalization of ayahuasca in a recent collection; our aim is to fill a gap in the literature regarding the part played by ayahuasca in current dynamic trends in Amazonian shamanism. We also decided to privilege the anthropological discipline over the original interdisciplinary scope of the conference in order to concentrate on ethnographic insights based on contributors’ long-term fieldwork. To complement this focus, we invited scholars who were not present at the conference to participate in this collection. The resulting volume includes contributions from Brazil, Finland, England, France, Austria, Colombia, the United States, Greece, and Belgium. All chapters are previously unpublished, and draw on fresh ethnographic data. Barbira Freedman, an anthropologist with a comprehensive understanding of shamanism in Western Amazonia, who was also present in the conference and is author of a chapter, was invited to contribute to this Introduction, helping to situate current changes in Amazonian shamanism in broader perspectives of social and cultural reinvention. Our use of the term Amazonian shamanism encompasses the cosmologies and shamanic practices of indigenous and mixed colonist communities in the Amazon regions of Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru. We deliberately avoid an artificial separation between indigenous Amazonia and the mixed majority of forest dwellers. Whereas this volume concentrates on activities that are taking place in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, these activities are also present in the other Amazonian countries, and outside South America, as discussed in some of the chapters in this volume. Amazonian shamanism is widely diverse, and may include the use of several psychoactive plants, or, relatively infrequently, be independent of them. Taking distance from both academic and popular literature on ayahuasca that privilege “altered states of consciousness,” this volume situates ayahuasca in the social creation of Amazonian shamanism. Like other shamans around the world, Amazonian shamans perform complex sets of transformative interactions between human and nonhuman agents on the basis of specific knowledge practices that they have acquired in relation to particular constituencies, either local or more remote. Since early colonial encounters, ayahuasca rituals were demonized in an attempt to eradicate shamanism in the Christianization of pacified Amazonian indigenous people. Yet not only were these rituals retained, hidden from probing inquisitors, but they also spread into areas of mixed settlement through the agency of non-indigenous shamans who had learned native shamanic crafts. Those new rituals, developed within mixed urban populations, were then disseminated by being exported back to the forest. This historical process, yet to be documented fully, 3 culminates in the current reshaping of Amazonian shamanism that we address in this volume. Various reinvented traditions straddling indigenous and mixed cultural heritage receive special attention in our collective analysis. Vegetalismo, an urban healing tradition based on indigenous ayahuasca shamanism in Western Amazonia, spread among mixed forest and urban populations around the main Peruvian Amazonian towns of Iquitos, Tarapoto, and Pucallpa throughout the twentieth century. It is now being remodeled to accommodate social and cultural changes within the wider political economy. In rubber camps of the Brazilian Amazon, indigenous and mestizo ayahuasca rituals became further entangled with diverse Afro-Brazilian and Christian religious traditions, resulting in the founding of several organized religions in which ayahuasca is the principal sacrament, notably Santo Daime and the União do Vegetal (UDV). In Colombia, indigenous uses of ayahuasca still prevail, though rural mestizo forms of ayahuasca shamanism have also spread throughout the country. The rise of ayahuasca tourism invites special consideration in relation to shamanic reinvention. Inspired by scholarly publications of prominent anthropologists and ethnobotanists about Amazonian shamanic rituals involving the use of ayahuasca, North American and European adventurers in the 1970s began seeking out ayahuasca shamans for novel experiences. This flurry of interest resulted in a mix of research and popular literature that in turn stimulated the local staging of ayahuasca rituals for foreign visitors. By the 1990s, this demand had blossomed into the small-scale industry of “ayahuasca tourism,” providing a major nexus for the internationalization of ayahuasca. Today, ayahuasca tourism is a complex and flourishing business that consists of transnational networks of visitors and both foreign and local agents across several Amazonian countries. These networks are activated in organized tours of ayahuasca shamans in the United States and Canada, in various European countries, in Africa, and in Asia, who offer talks and perform rituals that may or may not include the use of ayahuasca. Some of the touring shamans are clearly not indigenous, while others assert authentic indigenous roots. Shamans of mixed blood have to position themselves with constructed images that are of interest to their audience in the multiple recasting of identities presented in this volume. The emergence of Western adepts and apprentices of local shamans—so-called gringo shamanswho frequently act as mediators for foreign visitors seeking spiritual insights, medical cures or psychonautic experiences, adds to the complex panorama of contemporary agents in ayahuasca shamanism. Local shamanism, cosmopolitan biomedicine and psychology, alternative therapies, New Age spirituality, and the tourism service industry have blended in intricate and fascinating ways that challenge traditional ethnographic notions of authenticity, ethnicity, tradition, and place. Indeed, in many cases anthropologists have participated directly in these activities by publicizing and defending ayahuasca use, and sometimes even benefiting themselves economically as they turn into “facilitators” for gringo-oriented shamanic workshops and retreats. The simultaneous expansion of local and transregional forms of ayahuasca shamanism, compounded by the recent development of ayahuasca tourism, has fueled a rising interest in ayahuasca; yet ayahuasca shamanism has been poorly addressed in the anthropological literature. This is in part because of the essentialist bias implicit in notions of authenticity and indigeneity, along with the relative paucity of studies on mixed forest people in Amazonia. Many anthropologists want to work with “authentic” Amazonian shamans, not tourist-pandering “charlatans”; the chapters in this book explore this territory. The authors give insight into who chooses to become a shaman, what kind of shaman, and why shamanism has become so popular. Shamans act as the intermediaries between worlds that they have always been: either interpreting native tradition for the tourists while navigating the world of gringos, or traveling into the invisible world and back dialoguing with other Indians. At the same time, these contemporary shamans attempt to maintain community and local social ties. The majority of the chapters address how the meaning and purpose of rituals are translated to outsiders and echo back in native contexts. The role of ritual in mediating the encounter between indigenous traditions and modernity is also considered. Grassroots Amazonian shamans have to contend with an uneasy transition from traditional ayahuasca shamanism, including divination, sorcery, and curing sorcery-inflicted wounds, to using ayahuasca for self-exploration and to cater to Westerners’ hopes of healing both physical and emotional ailments. Simultaneously, they are also involved, either directly or indirectly, in local interethnic exchanges among indigenous groups. We argue that ayahuasca shamanism provides a uniquely rich platform to discuss the complexity of interrelations between Indians and non-Indians, neo-shamans and traditional healers, local people and outsiders, as well as interrelations among indigenous Amazonians. All these actors are involved in ayahuasca shamanism from differing perspectives. Contributors to this volume offer an unprecedented grasp of overall trends in Amazonian shamanism through multifaceted analyses that are based on detailed local ethnographies of ayahuasca rituals. Collectively, the chapters address indigenous and mestizo networks of exchange and alliance that are deeply rooted in the history of the various ethnic groups of the Amazon and in a shared popular cosmology and shamanic culture. Glenn Shepard, Jr., a North American ethnobotanist and anthropologist who lives in northern Brazil and has done extensive fieldwork in Peru, opens the book. He observes and reflects on the recent introduction of Psychotria leaves, one of the most common components of the ayahuasca brew, to the Matsigenka, and the adoption in the late eighties of ayahuasca by the Yora in the Manu river region in Peru. He notes the participation of a charismatic indigenous politician in the spread of the use of the brew, and the ironic role of missionaries in the proliferation of local variations of ayahuasca shamanism. Apart from the historical account, Shepard gives a detailed description of the varieties of plants and ideas associated with them. This chapter introduces new ethnographic data and challenges the stereotypes of ayahuasca shamanism as uniform, static, and millennial that currently circulate throughout the Internet and in the advertising materials of contemporary ayahuasca retreat centers in the Amazon. It attests to diversity and dynamism in indigenous identity, belief, and ritual practices. His chapter invites a relativization of the essentialist conceptions present in models for regulation of the use of psychoactive substances in Western societies. The Matsigenka and Yora’s recent adoption of a certain kind of ayahuasca shamanism provokes reflection on the processes through which governments have made legal and cultural exceptions for psychoactive drug use for specific cultural groups associated with a certain “tradition,” designated by particular geographic boundaries and temporality. The next chapter is written by the Brazilian anthropologist Mariana Pantoja, who has been able to observe from the privileged position of her house in the city of Rio Branco, in Acre, new effervescent developments taking place in this area and also in the remote Alto Juruá, in the Brazilian Amazon. Her contribution describes the recent ethnic self-identification of the Kuntanawa people, individuals who were previously known as mestizo rubber tappers and who are reestablishing their indigenous origins as part of a process of local leadership disputes and struggles for territorial rights. She notes the role of ayahuasca rituals in this process of reinvention of ethnic and cultural identity. Interestingly, the Kuntanawa’s historical use of ayahuasca has been influenced by the Santo Daime religious movement, alongside indigenous and mestizo references. Pantoja observes that the Kuntanawa have joined other indigenous groups in the promotion of a pan Pano-ethnic alliance through the institution of common festivals. In these, the Indians exchange knowledge, perform rituals, and “share their culture” with an external audience. These events can be placed within larger contemporary processes of objectification of culture, as discussed in the contemporary literature on this topic. The Kuntanawa identity is controversial, with criticisms stemming from both local ideas on indigeneity and traditional anthropological concepts of “culture” as some sort of fixed and coherent unity. It is not by chance that their ethnic (re)construction is done in dialogue with anthropologists (such as the one who writes the chapter) and is highly reflexive. Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen’s chapter follows, continuing the topic of the role of ayahuasca in establishing interethnic alliances in the Brazilian Amazon. This Finnish anthropologist has done fieldwork in Brazil with the lesser-known Manchineri group, and also at the pan-indigenous meetings that currently take place in the city of Rio Branco. She recounts her own experiences as a visitor to ceremonies where alliances are created among indigenous peoples from diverse ethnic groups. This exchange takes place on the intersecting planes of bodies and ritual poetics, which includes the chanting and music that are central to many ritual contexts described in this book. These hybrid spaces where histories and mythologies are communicated allow Indians who live in the cities to learn and affirm their ethnicity, and also to create alliances with non-Indian associates. Virtanen also describes the expansion of these rituals beyond Acre, where ayahuasca rituals seem to be privileged spaces for the communication of an Amazonian indigeneity. Further, she reflects on how traveling shamans and their presumed wealth are viewed—not without controversy—in their own communities. This chapter also adds to the comprehension of classic topics of shamanism, such as the role of ritual in establishing controlled spaces for interaction with dangerous forces, as well as the creation of knowledge as a bodily, collective, and cosmic enterprise. Esther Jean Langdon and Isabel Santana de Rose are based in the Department of Anthropology of the University of Florianópolis, known to have a rich nucleus for the study of shamanism. Their chapter registers a unique ritual combination of indigenous Guarani Indians from Brazil, the Santo Daime ayahuasca church, and an international neo-shamanic group. The authors reflect on the dialogues established in this dynamic network shaped by multidirectional flows of people, substances, and knowledge. Shared ritual elements of ayahuasca ceremonies and mutually agreed-on concepts are subject to constant change with the introduction of new actors or information. Langdon and Rose argue that contemporary shamanism is dialogical: it cannot be understood as a philosophy or logic in itself, independent of specific social, political, and historical contexts. This case is a great empirical example of multiple exchanges and translations between city and forest; reappropriations that occur throughout diverse spaces and times. On the one hand, the distant northern Amazonian brew helps the southern Indians to “remind them of things from their past, their cultural traditions and history,” and, on the other, it contributes to the establishment of ayahuasca as a symbol of a pan-indigenous universal spirituality for an urban, New Age population. Again, the process of cultural revitalization is entangled with tensions and dispute. Continuing reflections on the transnational circuit, Anne-Marie Losonczy and Silvia Mesturini Cappo’s chapter appears next. On the basis of their fieldwork experiences in Peru and Colombia, these French-speaking researchers address what they name “urban and transcontinental shamanism,” a phenomenon centered on mobility and networks. The authors identify the genesis of the creation of categories such as “ayahuasca shamanism,” and relate it to others such as “altered states of consciousness.” In this chapter, they analyze the pattern of communication that is the foundation of the relationships between indigenous people and the Western spiritual seekers who interact with them in the context of ayahuasca rituals. Each party, the foreigners and the ritual experts (indigenous or mestizo shamans), seems to interpret the other to mean ideas that are culturally familiar to them, but sometimes very different from what the speaker intended, thus allowing these parties to communicate and achieve common goals while maintaining unchallenged concepts used ordinarily for structuring their worlds. In other words, they argue that these divergent logics may still allow communication through a certain degree of mutual misunderstandings, creating the perception of a shared agreement, and allowing both parties to meet their goals. Needless to say, this paradigm is not without conflict. By addressing the role of ayahuasca as a mediator in the world of the West and its Other, or in interethnic relationships, Losonczy and Mesturini Cappo situate the current transformations of Amazonian shamanism in the historical context of the colonization of the Americas. The next chapter was written by Françoise Barbira Freedman, a classic Cambridge anthropologist who draws on longitudinal observations as an eyewitness to the transformation of Peruvian vegetalismo since the seventies. She reports on the Iquitos-Nauta road located in Iquitos, Peru, a city that seems to have become the new, internationally known ayahuasca Mecca. In this environment, there is a high concentration of shamans of various ethnicities, backgrounds, and experience levels: a complex range of classification that includes, in her words, “indigenous, covert indigenous, mestizo, and gringo shamans.” Some have established lodges to give ayahuasca to seekers who live in the vicinity and who come from afar. She describes the explosive growth of these centers, and their main characteristics, along with their network of alliances and deadly disputes. These spaces are stimulated by the approval of paying foreigners—sometimes identified as “passengers” instead of “tourists”—who gravitate toward those centers, and shamans who vie to appear the most “authentic.” In this context, “indigeneity” seems to be the central currency of exchange. Barbira Freedman’s chapter is provocative as it addresses both the rich, creative, and dynamic aspects involved in the current internationalization, including the revitalization of aspects of vegetalismo, and its impending conflicts. Like other authors in this volume, she points to the low regard in which shamans who specialize in gringo rituals are sometimes held by communities who accuse them of greed. She also positions this expansion within the history and symbolism of regional shamanism, such as the geography of poles of power in the Upper Amazon. She argues that contemporary “road shamans” and their travels reflect classic motives of Amazonian shamanism, and link trajectories in a forest-urban continuum. The chapter by Evgenia Fotiou, a Greek anthropologist based in the United States, continues reflections on the activities around this capital of ayahuasca tourism, the city of Iquitos. She examines the motivations of gringos who travel to South America in search of ayahuasca ceremonies, a phenomenon she names “shamanic tourism,” characterized by “pilgrimages,” in contrast to the seeking of recreational use of drugs. Her work draws on a period of seventeen months of fieldwork in Iquitos. She examines the motivations of these tourists, and how what they find relates to what they had hoped to find, as shamans manage to reflexively tailor their presentation to the expectations of visitors. Furthermore, she identifies some “psychologizing processes” involved in the experiences of these foreigners, and their relationship to aspects such as witchcraft and the vegetalista diets. She also examines an idea popular among foreigners that ayahuasca is a feminine entity, and proposes a more nuanced interpretation in this regard, taking into account native gender concepts. Her balanced approach leads to a picture of shamanic tourism as consistent with the nature of Amazonian shamanism, which has historically involved exchange with the Other. Nevertheless, the danger that these activities further essentialize and marginalize indigenous cultures and their knowledge is pointed out. Beatriz Caiuby Labate’s chapter is the result of many years of this Brazilian anthropologist’s travels and research around South America, North America, and Europe, focusing on the relationship of foreigners to Peruvian vegetalismo. Her research gives special attention to ayahuasca use in Pucallpa, a less-touristic town than Iquitos. Labate looks at the activities of various ayahuasqueros, including indigenous, poor mestizo, and middle-class Peruvians, and gringos who themselves became leaders of sessions in Peru or in their home countries. She identifies and describes the main processes involved in the diversification and internationalization of Peruvian vegetalismo. This expansion is possible through creative translations performed on both sides, where the foreign references are dynamically incorporated and reappropriated under the logic of vegetalismo and vice versa. This chapter follows others in the collection that identify the contours of transnational networks and circuits that promote the migration and flux of people and “sacred technologies” on a global scale. The author argues that this phenomenon should not be understood as a mere commodification of indigenous spirituality, or neocolonialism, but as a product of deliberate local strategies to adapt to changing socioeconomic conditions. Nevertheless, she recognizes several conflicts and shortcomings. This is the only chapter in the book to address, even if laterally, regulation of the use of ayahuasca, which faces diverse legal challenges in, and outside South America. Bernd Brabec de Mori is an Austrian ethnomusicologist who speaks from the perspective of an “incorporated gringo” who has married a Shipibo woman and lived among the Shipibo of the Yarinacocha region of Pucallpa, Peru. By outlining six brief life stories, and dialoguing with the literature on Amerindian perspectivism (cf. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro), he attempts to provide an insider’s view of how the Shipibo interpret the foreigners who approach them for ayahuasca ceremonies. He echoes the ideas of Shepard in this volume, and authors elsewhere, who suggest that ayahuasca may have been a recent introduction to many of the indigenous groups who currently use it, which is perhaps especially ironic in terms of the reputation that the Shipibo have acquired as some sort of “masters of ayahuasca, the ancient Amazonian tradition” in Northern countries. Brabec de Mori describes the transition from the use of ayahuasca related to warfare, hunting, sorcery, and healing to its use in psychological self-exploration among Westerners, and transitions from the figures of the médicos (doctors) to the chamanes (shamans). He points out the uncomfortable issues present in this expansion, such as the observation that ayahuasca tourism frequently increases local economic inequalities and challenges the possibility of continuity of treatment for locals; and the fact that Indians, despite what some of us may wish, do not always distinguish clearly between characters such as an ayahuasca tourist, a gringo apprentice, and a researcher—all are identified as the Other. On the other hand, while pointing out the negotiations and mediations between both universes, he suggests that some rinko (gringo, foreigner) apprentices can be incorporated into local kinship relationships. He also explores how contemporary Westernoriented ayahuasca rituals might fit into Shipibo cosmology, which plays an important role in defining their positionality in the cosmos and in a globalized world. As has been shown in other chapters of this book, ayahuasca ceremonies are often related to ways of dealing with alterity. Daniela Peluso also offers a critical view on the expansion of Amazonian shamanism to larger audiences. She is an anthropologist currently based in the United Kingdom, and has worked with indigenous populations in Lowland South America for the last two decades, especially the Ese Eja. Focusing her research in Puerto Maldonado, Peru, she addresses one of the most controversial aspects of the expansion of ayahuasca use and its impact on local communities, one that is among the most feared and talked about, but less concretely researched; her chapter analyzes gender relationships, sex, and seduction between shamans and local and nonlocal women who participate in ceremonies with them. Peluso explains how Amerindians understand sexual abstinence in diets and ceremonies in light of the qualities ascribed to sexual relationships in Amazonia, both on the material plane and in the noncorporeal world. Indigenous practices and symbolism are contrasted with meanings attributed to sexual abstinence by Westerners, such as those informed by New Age ideas on spirituality and healing. Departing from local narratives and from those collected from the Internet, Peluso explores the typical relationships females have with shamans and looks at the factors that contribute to the high number of foreign women who have reported sexual advances by shamans either during or after sessions. Engaging with critical feminism, the author also reflects on the role of the male gaze in touristic settings, especially in those that represent greater economic inequalities. If the meeting of unfamiliar cultures brings up issues of exploitation, misunderstanding, and mistrust, this chapter shows that these are more complicated matters than they first appear to be, since some of these conflicts are historically embedded in shamanism. Peluso’s writing makes one wonder if there should be an effort to establish ethical codes of conduct for the interaction of shamans and clients that would be applicable cross-culturally, such as those that guide relationships between doctors and patients. In the final chapter, the young Colombian anthropologist Alhena Caicedo Fernández considers how the use of yage—the Colombian version of ayahuascahas spread in that country beyond its rural and urban folk origins. Unlike Peru, the expansion to a middle class and elite clientele in big cities seems to have arrived later, and mestizo shamanism seems less predominant. Yage here is combined with several urban references, such as New Age spirituality, including, for example, practices of North American Indians, holistic therapies, and varying degrees of popular Catholicism. In an environment of great shamanic experimentation that also encompasses, besides yage, the use of yopo, coca, and tobacco, yage remains connected to the images of the indigenous that predominate in national society. Non-indigenous Columbians and a few foreigners, who act as leaders or mediators to the leaders, establish their identity and legitimacy by being associated with a recognized taita, or ayahuasca elder, in the PutumayoCaquetá region. Caicedo Fernández also explores the term traditional indigenous medicine, which is part of both a scholarly tradition and this current expansion. As in other chapters of this book, the author shows how the introduction of new actors and forms into the rituals has created tensions among practitioners of competing malocas (structures built for drinking ayahuasca), including conflict over the production and distribution of the ayahuasca, a topic generally underrepresented in the literature on ayahuasca. This volume will be useful to anyone who wishes to understand the current trends of globalization of ayahuasca rituals as well as the contextualized transformations of shamanism in Amazonia that parallel, yet differ from, recent developments in Central Asia. Fueled by contradictions and historic continuities and discontinuities, ayahuasca shamanism has come to stay. This expansion cannot be reduced to some sort of Western cultural cannibalism or obsession with the substance’s effects. The versatile appropriation and use of ayahuasca by relatively isolated indigenous groups in Amazonia and by neo-indigenous shamans who are reinventing rituals in a pan-Amerindian cultural context outside Amazonia point to its complex associations with indigeneity. The former favor ayahuasca as a cultural medium of exchange with downriver mixed populations that have access to urban-based power; the latter integrate the brew in their rituals as a portal of power for tapping into deeper sources of indigeneity. In contrast, ayahuasca is a hallmark of syncretism in the new religious movements that have arisen around its use in Brazilian Amazonia. Whether it is a hunter’s tool, a sorcerer’s weapon, a doctor’s medicine, or a Daimista’s Eucharist, ayahuasca’s mysterious qualities seem to ennoble those who have mastered its power. Wherever it is introduced, the brew appears to elicit engagement with tradition and innovation, and with self and alterity, in ways that soon make it predominant in the contexts into which it is incorporated. Whether gringos opt for going native in Amazonia or choose to “do ayahuasca” with their own Celtic, Wiccan, Native North-American, or Eastern references, they are present in the transformational space of ayahuasca. At the same time, Amazonian indigenous and mestizo people make use of ayahuasca shamanism in novel forms to uphold reinvented traditions and emerging social identities, or to promote new ethnic and political alliances. As ever in the history of Amazonia, cultural transformation is dialogical, downstream and upriver, across towns and forests, inseparable from the cosmopolitan cultural trends enacted in the international political economy. Notes 1. This paper was based on her Ph.D. dissertation; see Clancy Cavnar, “The Effects of Participation in Ayahuasca Rituals on Gays’ and Lesbians’ Self Perception” (Psy.D. diss., John F. Kennedy University, 2011). 2. Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Henrik Jungaberle, eds., The Internationalization of Ayahuasca (Zurich: Lit Verlag, 2011). 3. For a historical overview of vegetalismo, see: Françoise Barbira Freedman, Tree Shamans of the Upper Amazon: Lamas in the Historical Emergence of Ayahuasca Shamanism (CAAAP: Lima, in press).