The World Ayahuasca Diaspora ─ Reinventions and Controversies

Ayahuasca is a psychoactive substance that has long been associated with shamanic rituals and indigenous religions. The recent rise of the drink’s visibility in the media and popular culture, and its rapidly advancing inroads into international awareness, mean that the field of ayahuasca is quickly expanding. This expansion brings with it legal problems, economic inequalities, cultural misunderstandings, sexual abuse, and other controversies and challenges. In Ayahuasca Expansion in the Early 21st Century, leading scholars, including established academics and new voices in religious studies, anthropology and law fuse case-study ethnographies with evaluations of relevant legal and anthropological knowledge. They explore how the substance has impacted upon indigenous communities, new urban religiosities, ritual healing, international drug policy, religious persecution and recreational drug milieus. This unique book presents classic and contemporary issues in social science and the humanities, providing rich material on the bourgeoning expansion of ayahuasca use around the globe.

Beatriz Caiuby Labate has a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. Her main areas of interest are the study of psychoactive substances, drug policy, shamanism, ritual, and religion. She is Visiting Professor at the Center for Research and Post Graduate Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), in Guadalajara, and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Drug Policy Program of the Center for Economic Research and Education (CIDE) in Aguascalientes, Mexico. She is also co-founder of the Nucleus for Interdisciplinary Studies of Psychoactives (NEIP), and editor of NEIPa€?s website (http://www.neip.info). She is author, co-author, and co-editor of twelve books, one special-edition journal, and several peer-reviewed articles. For more information, see: http://bialabate.net/ . Clancy Cavnar recently completed her postdoctoral hours in clinical psychology at the Marin Treatment Center, a methadone clinic in San Rafael, California. In 2011, she received a doctorate in clinical psychology (PsyD) from John F. Kennedy University in Pleasant Hill, California, with a dissertation on gay and lesbian people's experiences with ayahuasca. She is Research Associate of the Nucleus for Interdisciplinary Studies of Psychoactives (NEIP), and co-editor, with Beatriz Caiuby Labate, of three books: The Therapeutic Use of Ayahuasca (2014); Prohibition, Religious Freedom, and Human Rights: Regulating Traditional Drug Use (2014) and Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond (2014). She is also author of peer-reviewed articles (at the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs and the International Journal of Drug Policy).