The Carceral Ethic and the Spirit of Ayahuasca

Abstract

This text is an ethnographic exploration of a carceral healing NGO inside of Porto Velho, Rondônia’s state prison system. Acuda was founded as a dream of ayahuasca’s, an indigenous plant medicine that became central to Brazil’s Catholicized ayahuasca religions in the mid-20th century, but also by way of a state-directed collaboration for filling employment quotas for the recently incarcerated. Acuda—technically an acronym, describing an association for “culturally” resocializing prisoners as workers—also draws on an antiquated language for spiritual rescue. Its work since 2002 has sought to marry the prerogatives of making people workable within a state economy with spiritually rescuing those lost inside of the state prison body. Its call to save people from that which it institutionally reproduces is the basis for a wide range of instances—those which plentifully compose this ethnography—where transformation is made to stay in place, or the “quantic healing” of prisoners augurs to fix liberation within stationary enclosures. This includes the NGO’s work to train prisoners as healers, which has the more common effect of gaining them employment, upon release, either inside the NGO itself or in political bureaus, including those that oversee the state Justice. The specific impetus for this effort in spiritual resocialization is work, which is also the term the ayahuasca religions give to the ritual where the plants are consecrated: trabalhos. For three years, and in a program with an ongoing afterlife, the NGO gained both state permission and “astral authorization” to furlough over 150 prisoners to the Barquinha ayahuasca-religious church in the south of the state. The work in your hands is an attempt to make sense of two years of ethnographic research I conducted, trailing these ongoing movements of stasis and expansion, release and incarceration, work and freedom, among the tenuous travels of political and spiritual bodies across ambivalent sovereignties where Rondônia’s state prisons enter into extraordinary entanglement with Spiritualist traditions. Throughout the text, we explore the paradoxical ways that spiritual healing, including what I call ayahuasca’s medicine of death, is used to rehabilitate prisoners within a site of social death and as a means of remaking the deepening carceral project in Brazil. It spans a wide range of concepts and cosmologies, including mediumship (mediunidade), time, labor, ritual, control, power, sexuality, gender, race, and religion. It focuses particularly on the ayahuasca religions of Santo Daime and the Barquinha, the French-descended Spiritist tradition known as Kardecism, and the Afro-Brazilian-descended religion of Umbanda, which has emerged in Rondônia in a new form involving ayahuasca in a hybrid called Umbandaime. As a whole, the text explores how spiritualized rituals of labor confine the forces they seek to control so as to “heal” a social order whose will is to expand this work eternally.