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drugo

Ayahuasca in Australia

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An anthropological talk I gave in Spain last year on ayahuasca in Australia has just been uploaded.

All thoughts, reflections, and critiques are very welcome! The Q & A time didn't make it to YouTube, i am not sure why, but people were particularly curious about the notions of "romanticism" and "exoticism" discussed in the paper.

 

 

Edited by drugo
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Well, i do like you, so i will say, honestly:

I think that by interpreting Aya through this academic jargon, you have done a disservice to this experience. I think you've tried to graft these ideas about a "radical political imaginary" onto the experience because you have an attachment to the way that using these ideas makes you look smart in the eyes of people from whom you want recognition. I find it hard to describe the talk as furthering any agenda other than the reification of your own attachment to being seen as [whoever you think you are] . It introduces nothing that I have not heard before, and I can pretty confidently say that there are 0 people that are going to think: "well, I'm really on the fence about the therapeutic applications of Ayahuasca, maybe I'll use this video to decide" .. in terms of your audience, you're knocking on the open door ..

Your verbosity obscures, rather than illuminates .. "Ayahuasca indexes robust forms of cultural critique" - it just sounds a bit rich, mate.

"not confined to critiques of unsustainable resources and anthropogenic ecological crises" - really! Wow!

"capitalism, materialism and consumerism are put on trial" - well h o l y s h i t !

(what does this putting on trial look like?)

Darpan's idea that consuming plants from the forests we're destroying will somehow stop people killing the forest is simply a joke. I've seen posts by YOu, in this very forum, confessing that you've drunk brews made from Northern Brother wattle. Didn't stop it from getting smashed to bits in the wild. there's also a member here who you may know, who has made a fair chunk of money out of holding Aya circles - but again, it didn't stop him from wantonly decimating wild obtusifolia populations on the north coast, and helping others to do the same. if you ask him he even has the audacity to say that they told him to do it.

Aya is not a truth syrum. you have distorted the experience by trying to make it fit into ideas that suit your own attachments.

The 'truths' of Aya are noetic. Those who speak, don't know; and those that know don't speak. I dig that you're into this, and you would probably be a fun dude to hang out with, but you put this out there to be judged, and i feel if i have anything to offer, it's through honesty rather than disingenuous praise.

Peace

Edited by Seldom
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Given the name of the talk was 'Ayahuasca in Australia', I expected something... different. Like possibly a focus on how Ayahuasca has been adapted to include Australian plants or a truely in-depth explanation of who is using Aya in Australia (I suspect you described a subset of people using Aya rather than the group as a whole).

I do appreciate your talk was focused on how the Australian experience of aya has blended with pop culture and green politics. I just think you overstretched and didn't include enough detail to show the audience what's actually happening down here.

Hope that didn't come across as catty, I still enjoyed the talk

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Thanks Seldom, i think.

In regards to saying that I squeezed the theory of "radical political imaginary onto the experience" because of some selfish agenda for recognition, I have to disagree, that is a strange left-field interpretation. I do think the act of drinking ayahuasca in Australia is political, not just in the sense of being illegal, but in the sense of what type of thoughts and actions the experiences help to generate in people.

It sounds like you have a bone to pick with anthropology in general. In term of, as you said, people asking the question: "well, I'm really on the fence about the therapeutic applications of Ayahuasca, maybe I'll use this video to decide", this is not my agenda. I am a social scientist, not a psychologist or a GP. We do things such as analyse how the notion of "therapy" so normal to Western societies actually doesn't necessarily fit, say, indigenous amazonian metaphysics and practices of ayahuasca, and thus expecting me to help "prove its application" in an anthropological talk misses the point. The question of etiology or different "healing systems" discussed at the end of the paper alludes to this diversity. Anthropology has a long history of learning and trying to account for a large diversity of culture and ways of living, cosmological and practical (including their indivisible nature), that is the type of thought that informs the research, not my perceptions of whether Darpan's comments are "bullshit", as you say. Turning the project of anthropology into a question of "attaching to people for recognition" is naive and silly.

By Northern Brother wattle, i am guessing you are referring to this thread about consuming the highly endangered Acacia species courtii, but you failed to mention that they were "harvested from fallen trees/branches" . Chill out mate!

You've got brains, i've really enjoyed your input and discussion on this forum over the years. It is a shame to see that the talk has evoked in you what seems like such a disdain towards the social sciences.

I'm intrigued by you last comment 'The 'truths' of Aya are noetic. Those who speak, don't know; and those that know don't speak. And I wonder what you think of the fact that typically all ayahuasca circles in Australia include a "sharing round" circle where people in the morning after a ceremony sit back down in the space and articulate and talk about their visions.

Peace,

Edited by drugo

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:) thanks for the response.

I don't 'disdain social sciences', i graduated from a degree in psychology in 2013, and I'm currently a post grad student . But the social scientific research that I value is of the empirical kind!. this is not a scientific paper. it's obfuscating the nature of the Aya experience by filtering it through trendy academic jargon about a 'radical political imaginary' .

I mean, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions that enable us to say 'ok, this act/event is political' within this context ? .. exactly what criterion is this indexed against?> sometimes when i take a dump i think about interpersonal relations, possible alternatives to capitalistic systems of exchange, etc etc - but that doesn't mean pumping a shit is a political act.

To rescue the discussion from the lofty heights of nebulous speculation, i'll just ask 3 questions:

1) What are the practical consequences of framing these experiences inside these flashy academic buzz-words ?

2) who benefits from you having done this work, and in what ways ?

3) if it indeed does exist in these circles, what does this 'radical political imaginary' look like? what does it do? what are the practical consequences that follow from it being in the world ?

Maybe it's just that I reserve the right to say that Huasca experiences are primarily personal, and that i think you should resist the indignity of trying to speak on behalf of all Australians who drink Aya by feigning to have some privileged access to 'the truth' of what they're doing.

I wonder what you think of the fact that typically all ayahuasca circles in Australia include a "sharing round" circle where people in the morning after a ceremony sit back down in the space and articulate and talk about their visions.

I think it's an excellent way to bring meaning to the experience, and to concretize new insights about what it is to be in the world that've been gained by enduring the experience. There are things (like Huasca, and things in general) that alter the structure of the way things are presented to awareness, and then there are words that try (often in vein in these instances) to express what these things have changed, what has caused the things that appear to appear in the manner that they did. These things are noetic. You can, and should try to bring meaning to the things they've contributed to your experience, for the reason that this helps to allow these experiences to exert lasting influence in your life. But the map is not the territory. Simply, meaning is superficial, whatever Huasca is, it's f'ing deep.

Edited by Seldom
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:lol:

Edited by LokStok

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sometimes when i take a dump i think about interpersonal relations, possible alternatives to capitalistic systems of exchange, etc etc - but that doesn't mean pumping a shit is a political act.

^ this is possibly the best sentence i have read this year..

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By thinking that an approach of synthesising large amounts of accounts of ayahuasca visions is "obfuscating the nature of the aya experience" you are totally missing what this type of anthropology is about and, it seems, wishing for some objective pure metaphysics of ayahuasca. What is "the nature" of "the ayahuasca experience" that i am obfuscating by analysing Australian ayahuasca trip reports and narratives of healing? I'm sure this is where you say that it is "ineffable". But around the edges of this ineffability, whether in the Amazon or Australia, social discourses are woven by drinkers, many different forms of social discourse that are relative to different forms of culture, language, history, politics, morality, or put simply, manifestations of the human condition. Anthropologists take these discourses seriously, as objects of science, by considering them in relation to different cultural contexts or cultural dimensions.

Among the hundreds of surveys and interviews and accounts of ayahuasca drinking I have accumulated in Australia are trends in ways that people conceptualise what is going on when they purge or experience some sort of profound vision or theophany. The examples provided in the talk indicate a type of political imagining that exists in these conceptualisations and metaphysics. I'm not going to repeat them or introduce the many more examples that are in the thesis.

In response to your methodological question that taking a shit and thinking about interpersonal relations or politics doesn't make taking a shit a political act, I would say if you approach this bodily practice as a means by which psychic toxins of interpersonal relations and toxins of society are healed and a deeper connection with nature is achieved, then yes, it would be a source or act of political imagining.

It does not matter whether i think there really are psychic toxins in society or interpersonal life that ayahuasca is healing (i.e. what you are calling it's "true nature"), the discourse that drinkers share is precisely this and the discourse represents a form of political imagining that is indexed in bodily processes and bodily states i.e. purging and visions.

I have gone to the effort to lay this out because, despite your rude psychologising of why I apparently do this type of anthropology, I value your conceptual thoughts and I really value people in this community getting into academia. We are a small breed. Thanks for being on board and exploring my work.

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I reckon you went pretty well. Apart from reading your stuff. I would've much preferred to hear where your presentation would've gone had you been relaxed enough to formulate it as you went. Very difficult to do, and pull off, in a tertiary setting, and unfortunately not the norm in my experience.

As far as the jargon goes, I felt it just comes with the territory. Of course you want to paint your baby in a positive light, and in academia that often translates to jargon-laden rhetoric to make your pretty obvious point. If what was being read was an academic piece then I would expect as much based simply on a word-count perspective. Completely forgivable in my book. Pretty confidently delivered, but i would've been very interested to hear the Q & A as well.

Well done. :)

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Thanks RC. Yeah, as a teenager, I always wrote rhymes and was never any good at freestyling. One day, i hope.

The Q&A discussion, from memory, was largely about the notions of romanticism and exoticism introduced in the paper, and about how Amazonian shamans are internalising Western perceptions and expectations of them in order to be competitive on the tourist circuits. Sorcery doesn't sell well in comparison to Gaia in these circuits! But perhaps this cultural reinvention is part of an older shamanic logic in Amazonia -- what might be called cosmopolitics -- in which shamans shapeshift into nonhumans and others to mediate relations between disparate and radically different social groups and domains.

Edited by drugo
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Hey Seldom, I hope you can find the time to read the paper when it comes out early next year, and my thesis later this year. It would be very interesting to hear your reflections. I think you will find the methodology particularly interesting. Here is a sample:

Mirroring the limits of knowing that social and cultural perspectives provide people with, the effects of ayahuasca are mysterious, ambiguous, powerful, and transcendent. An anthropological study that attempts to completely reduce the mysterious, ambiguous, powerful, and transcendent ‘effect’ of ayahuasca to epiphenomena of social and cultural conditions results in inevitable reductions in which the power that ayahuasca has at encompassing that which is beyond language, reason, and understanding, becomes diffused. While anthropologists can circle-around the ineffable experiences and pick-up the ‘markings, traces, paths, and ultimately, “evidence”’ (Blanes and Santos 2013) of the social and cultural in narrative accounts of ayahuasca trance and social action, the pronounced ineffability of ‘ayahuasca experiences’ may only ever be fully conquered by anthropologists at the expense of other modes of knowing that include, for example, nonverbal, aesthetic, and extracorporeal modes.

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Well done, I'd have been terrified to speak to a crowd :)

Just a thought though, RC made a good point about the jargon coming with the territory, but I also agree with Seldom "Your verbosity obscures, rather than illuminates".

Also given that your talk was about Aya in Aus, I don't think I heard much about all there is to talk about the consumption of Aya in Aus? I would've loved to hear of the varied usage here. I want to know what else is going on in this bigass country :)

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Hey Seldom, I hope you can find the time to read the paper when it comes out early next year, and my thesis later this year. It would be very interesting to hear your reflections. I think you will find the methodology particularly interesting. Here is a sample:

 

 

Mirroring the limits of knowing that social and cultural perspectives provide people with, the effects of ayahuasca are mysterious, ambiguous, powerful, and transcendent. An anthropological study that attempts to completely reduce the mysterious, ambiguous, powerful, and transcendent ‘effect’ of ayahuasca to epiphenomena of social and cultural conditions results in inevitable reductions in which the power that ayahuasca has at encompassing that which is beyond language, reason, and understanding, becomes diffused. While anthropologists can circle-around the ineffable experiences and pick-up the ‘markings, traces, paths, and ultimately, “evidence”’ (Blanes and Santos 2013) of the social and cultural in narrative accounts of ayahuasca trance and social action, the pronounced ineffability of ‘ayahuasca experiences’ may only ever be fully conquered by anthropologists at the expense of other modes of knowing that include, for example, nonverbal, aesthetic, and extracorporeal mode

 

 

 

sure, send it i'll will read it

 

 

i'm high but all i can say would be re. aya in Aus.

 

 

Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation ... No one knows this as well as the philosopher [drinker]. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry; but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy. - William James

 

 

 

Materialism is not a doctrine but an expedition, an alpine break-out from socially policed conviction. ... Exploring pre-categorical matter navigates thought as chance and matter as turbulence beyond all regulation. It yields no propositions to judge, but only paths to explore. - N L

 

 

 

And yes we definitely need higher infiltration of academia,

 

 

Good vibes to you drugo

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Thank You Drugo for your integrity on this subject. I have read all of your essays and in my experience your criticisms of this relatively nascent intersect of Aya into Western Cosmology are rare and will hopefully inspire a more critical segment in this story. I'm not trying to hijack this thread, but I have been ruminating on the general subjects of Aya and Shamanism, their popularity, and how they are used, in the West, since your original post on the subject last year. So I offer what I've worked out, with the hope that the big picture I present is not off-topic.



The basic issue is the differences in which markedly, profoundly, different cosmologies see a particular subject - in this case Aya. The cultural phenomenon in which one dominant culture takes items (land, material and cultural goods, and even DNA) from another seems to be a regular occurrence whenever two cultures intersect. The dominant justifies this co-option in a number of ways - religious, social, and cosmological. We've heard the orthodox mantra "God's Country," which justifies its Believers in the taking-over of the social, economics, and geography of the Other, with the duty of instruction/punishment/taming, ie inclusion of the Other. The offspring of this orthodoxy expresses the same basic social takeover in terms of "social justice," "non-racism," and other same-boatisms that altogether reflect this cultural genocide. Often the very concept of Culture in a respectful way is diminished to superficial symbols to which the dominant falsely postures an arse-forward prostration, with the precise purpose of equivocating the essential elements of the Other's culture - that is, the other is merely translatable. Put another way, the social grammar of the Judeo-Christian, among other sky-god cultures, is firmly cemented in the tokenized Noble Savage reduction of the identities that it ultimately perceives as less-than. The meek shall inherit the earth, the lamb becomes the lion. The Other is thus recruited to the Western Story. As I've said elsewhere, a perfect comparison is the use of the word ayahuasca - a qechuan word - to define a drink that in not originally Andean. In short, one culture will take and use items, material and cultural and cosmological, from another culture to fit its own story.



Were anyone to ask me of my favorite thinkers I would include Pendell and Davis, among others (Dickinson, anyone?), but I perceive in this question an unspoken presumption - especially in the sky-god mind in which information is passed down as opposed to experienced anew - and that presumption is that I am a follower of that thinker. In contrast, I tend to assume, just as I don't have another's face, that I wouldn't have another's thoughts and voice, and that does not diminish my respect for the other.



That brings me to the infamous characterization of the Western worldview as individualistic, and here I respectfully differ from many Western critics of Western Culture. I believe the individualism of Western culture masks and protects what is actually an inclusive homogenizing cultural force, and therefore not individualistic. I date this mindset, in the Judeo-Christian leg, to the breakdown of affluence towards the end of the Bronze Age in the world of the Eastern Mediterranean/ Egypt/ Levant/ Mesopotamia. The importance here of this ongoing cultural manner is that any potential expression of affluence - in language and in behavior - is severely punished, using words as weapons, and that translates to personal social and economic failure for anyone who might be perceived as a threat. Apes are not born dumb. Stupidity is a learned behavior. One is to strive to be a dumb, gross, Jack-Ass like prankster, for the specific purpose of appearing not-threatening and therefore dominating the world.



I was stalled for a few years, by the assertion of a thinker who I respect, that this superstitious, paranoid and wary manner was actually a tool that effectively created/is creating a 'New World' in which all people are equal and no one is king. Anything you say, they say. Anything you do, they do too - you're not better than them. I appreciate this stalling because otherwise I wouldn't have been prompted to formulate a critical response, which is in 2 parts: First, this social grammar was itself invented by a royal court, and one that was extremely affluent and abusive to its enemies. I am of course speaking of the royal courts of that Mobutu-esque figure King David and his Idiot Son. We're talking hundreds of 'wives,' what we would call POWs today, and since the age of marriage at that time and place was much younger than today, and since they wouldn't touch a woman who had been polluted by Goyim dick (evidently women in this misogynist culture didn't matter, ie Goyim didn't really refer to them), we are talking about very young women. This hyper-defensive mindset, then, was not really about challenging the idea of kingship, but rather about protecting their own king. The second part of my critique is more practicable: this social grammar of stupidity effectively privileges its own practitioners! This is expressed as a turning-of-the-tables, but the reality is they are in charge. The next time you are around David you will see it go down. If you obey, you are chosen. Again with the dismal tautology of Judeo-Christian Western culture.



The premises of this David & Goliath social weaponry are varied: I Fart Loudly, I Shit, Amazonians Have Flood Stories, You Use Such Big Words, I'm Insecure About My Looks (Age, Intelligence), I Am In Solidarity With All the Common Folk of the World, I'm Down-To-Earth, etc. But the conclusion is always the same: Therefore I Am Humble and In Charge. The bible tells me so. People are trained to be dumb, and since this is a racist and misogynist and really misanthropic (Original Sin) culture, any identity that appears non-threatening, including female and ethnic, is therefore raised. I don't mean to be obscure! The Humble Judeo-Christian often perceives itself as savior and protector of the very peoples that it conquers or demeans. That Other's cultural items, therefore, are parcel to a system of affirming Western Hegemony, and as such, Aya is used as yet another tool in the Messianic quest to 'save' the world.



In my own observations of a local Aya group, the memes that pop-up again and again are: the feminization of Aya (Earth is female in sky-god cultures, so Earth essences are female, and in this regard the female Aya is characterized as a domestic subduing of its evidently thunderous male imbibers); the 'healing' of Aya is equivocated with the healing of the Humble Judeo-Christian worldview in its purpose of establishing peace (sic) and equality (sic) in the world; participants express a feeling of having an open-heart (what was it before, you sinner); and upon return to town, imbibers are "vulnerable to attacks" from the wicked children that Aya has apparently chosen the imbibers to subdue. The "Shaman" who, like its counterpart the "Native American Sweat Lodge Leader," is usually a white Judeo-Christian, though sometimes they pay for an honored guest who is an "genuine (sic) Traditional (sic) Shaman (sic)." The reality is that this whole fiasco is a co-option of yet another item in the other that ultimately serves the Judeo-Christian Western messianic purpose.



Of course we Westerners love bashing Western culture, which is perhaps itself a Western tradition for such a renunciate world-view - so I am left with another thought of drugo's from another essay in which these criticisms that may be all-too easy (?) don't address the deeper malaise that causes Western Judeo-Christian flagellant culture to scramble in such panic and with such consequence for solutions for its own dismal identity. Though Patience speaks in terms of 'transitional' and 'progressive,' I prefer a rather quick sloughing-off of what has become a dead useless skin of an idea to which purposes have become obsolete. Existence is actually awesome. To observe a grammar gleaned from Aya, these points of light and identity do form a grouping pattern, but that edifice is not static, and often quickly dissipates in ones and twos to form an altogether new structure in that constant pulsing dynamical system. Additionally, there are always lights that do not participate in the pattern at all.


Edited by gwalchgwyn
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