Western Culture and Psychedelics

individualist and medicalizing discourses on psychedelics:

they erase the traditions from which these substances were appropriated, rendering native traditions to romantic stereotypes of noble savages,
they cause us to miss important lessons that could potentially transform the way we do science .
Anthropologists also challenge the universality of psychedelic experiences and caution that we might be imposing western concepts on Indigenous traditions. (This too contributes to the erasure of Indigenous shamanisms and the accompanying ontologies and epistemologies).

psychedelics create powerful religious feelings in people cross-culturally is considered unlikely to be coincidental.

psychedelics do not merely cause temporary “psychoses” or “mere hallucinations” in people but instead work with existing, adaptive mechanisms in the brain for generating ASCs that can be used constructively.
Today, the term “entheogen” – meaning “bringing forth the divine within” – is preferred by some and indicates a shift to sacramental use of some of these substances.

However, the psychological paradigm tends to dominate discourse, as most westerners will pursue psychedelic plant medicines for psychological healing.

decolonizing psychedelic science:

stop approaching Indigenous ethnomedical systems as subjective, symbolic, and constructed, and biomedicine as objective and factual but rather as another ethnomedical system among others with its own culture
acknowledge the limitations of scientific knowledge. All knowledge is “situated” – arising from a certain viewpoint – and is intimately connected to power structures

Claiming objectivity and universality obscures the positionality of scientific knowledge
Should be engaging with local ontologies and epistemologies in our research projects
Westerners tend to approach ayahuasca as a psychological tool, while the vast majority of evidence we have on Indigenous use indicates that ayahuasca and accompanying plants are used in very different manners, specifically to modify the body
The separation between physical, emotional, and spiritual is a western artifact and largely absent in Indigenous knowledge systems. Indigenous knowledge systems depend on an empiricist deductive approach as much as science

knowledge about spirits and spiritual matters is experiential and often mediated through the body, which is in turn manipulated using plants

In Amazonian cosmologies, where humans, animals, and plants are all people, plants can be powerful subjects with the ability to influence human society in profound ways.

plants and human relationships rely on a fundamental shared humanity
In most cultural settings where ayahuasca is used, it is seen as an intentional agent, indeed a “plant teacher” , something that cannot easily be reconciled with scientific epistemology without broadening our lens.

“to describe ayahuasca as a hallucinogenic or a drug is to invoke Western histories of repressing people and substances. It would ignore the visceral role the body plays in experiencing ayahuasca poetry.”

drunken states are seen positively, as a means of attaining knowledge - there is a relationship between knowledge and health, showing on the one hand that among the same substances and experiences that can be transformed into knowledge may also become illness-causing agents, and on the other hand that “illness can be understood as a disturbance in the body’s capacity to know.”

When it comes to healing, the notion that a specific treatment should be applied to specific diseases is unique to biomedicine.

Healing in other medical systems, including those that use psychedelics, is a more holistic affair.
Indigenous rituals involve all the senses through a variety of elements including music, smell, language, and touch to such a degree that it is difficult to isolate the effects of one element versus another. It is more likely that all the elements work together to bring about healing.
Scientific approaches tend to isolate alkaloids and although “set and setting” are recognized to be important- our models tend to medicalize psychedelic plant medicines.

A more holistic approach would also mean the recognition that social and structural solutions - communal rituals where the community comes together to heal individuals as well as relationships are important in most indigenous healing systems.

Biomedicine seems to aim for a cure – as in elimination of disease – while many traditional systems seek to heal.
What complicates things further is that healing – as in alleviation of suffering – can happen without curing a disease.

Last but not least, it is important to reflect and find concrete ways that psychedelic plant medicines can be used to benefit and empower the populations from which we appropriated them.

Indigenous peoples are not a-historical others but historical agents here and now.
Superficial representations of Indigenous peoples and their knowledge systems only cause further trauma. When using plants that have been previously used by Indigenous peoples, at the very least they should be consulted about respectful ways of using them.

WPOHFall2021