Disentangling the ayahuasca boom: local impacts in Western Peruvian Amazonia

Ayahuasca, a psychoactive beverage made from the ayahuasca vine and other plants, has been central to social life for indigenous and mestizo peoples in the western Peruvian Amazon since the early colonial period. Traditionally used for healing, divination, and sorcery, its contemporary global spread began with Jesuit missions in 1638 and intensified after the rubber boom. Since the 1970s, shamanic tourism—primarily from the United States, England, and France—has fueled a multimillion-dollar industry in urban centers like Iquitos and Tarapoto. This diaspora has created local controversies and commodified ayahuasca shamanism, a phenomenon termed the "ayahuasca boom," comparable to historical Amazonian commodity booms.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Since at least the early colonial period, ayahuasca has been crucial to social life for both mestizo and indigenous peoples throughout the western Peruvian Amazon. This psychoactive beverage, containing the ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) and usually other admixtures, especially chacruna (Psychotria viridis), is traditionally utilized by Amazonian peoples for curing numerous ailments, seeing the future, ensuring prosperity in business or love, and divining sources of illness or wrongdoing. Likewise, it takes a central position in the practice of dark shamanism or brujería (sorcery or witchcraft), which is often understood as one of the main sources of illness – especially among indigenous peoples (see Whitehead & White, 2004). Its contemporary configuration, stimulated through the Jesuit missionization of Amazonia beginning in 1638, and, later, as a response to the terrors perpetuated against indigenous peoples during the rubber boom, has emerged as a global phenomenon as it has moved out of the Amazon in a diaspora of practices, knowledge, and peoples (Maroni, 1740/1988; Taussig, 1987; Gow, 1996; Brabec de Mori, 2011; Labate & Cavnar, 2014). This diaspora, in turn, has created new controversies locally in Amazonian urban, peri-urban, and rural communities. This movement has in part been fueled by shamanic tourism throughout the region since at least the early 1970s, with primarily those tourists from Western countries such as the United States, England, and France traveling to the Amazon to partake in the psychedelic brew.2 Today, in urban centers such as Iquitos and Tarapoto, ayahuasca is central to a multimillion-dollar industry that has greatly affected the social lives and economic prosperity of many individuals throughout the Peruvian Amazon. Moreover, ayahuasca shamanism itself has been dislocated from its Amazonian roots through the commodification of its core components, the propagation of its knowledge via the Internet and other media, and the proliferation of ayahuasca sessions in non-Amazonian locales. To refer to these interconnected phenomena – the exponential increase of shamanic tourism focused on the consumption of ayahuasca and the diaspora of ayahuasca shamanism from Amazonia – I utilize the notion of the "ayahuasca boom," situating it within the context of other historical economic booms related to commodity extraction in Amazonia.