It’s all you! Australian ayahuasca drinking, spiritual development, and immunitary individualism
Abstract
<jats:p> Ayahuasca, a psychoactive plant decoction, has spread from indigenous communities
in South America to urban areas in the Americas, Europe, and Australia where it is
used in neoshamanic rituals. This paper draws on ethnography of Australian ayahuasca
ceremonies to examine the ways that individualism shapes the structure of ayahuasca
rituals, the interpretation of visionary experiences, and notions of spiritual development.
I show how the metaphors that Australian drinkers involved in this study use to understand
their ayahuasca experiences and spiritual development reflect a form of immunitary
individualism, which is premised on the negation of difference and relationality.
Secular disenchantment and a culture of narcissism may drive people to seek ayahuasca,
but transcendence is interpreted in terms of an expansive, non-relational self. In
this sense, neoshamanic ayahuasca culture may be an escape from and reproduction of
the culture of narcissism associated with the malaise of modernity. </jats:p>
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/22355Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1177/0308275x18775818Publication Info
Rodd, R (2018). It’s all you! Australian ayahuasca drinking, spiritual development, and immunitary
individualism. Critique of Anthropology, 38(3). pp. 325-345. 10.1177/0308275x18775818. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/22355.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Robin Hudson Rodd
Associate Professor of Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University
I began my career as an anthropologist studying with Piaroa communities in southern
Venezuela, where I was interested in the use of psychoactive plants, local theories
and practices of knowledge, mind, power, and health. I focused on the ways that consciousness
practices associated with the consumption of yopo snuff and Banisteriopsis caapi were
socially transmitted and integrated into everyday community life. I have since examined
the ritual practices and theories of selfhood

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