Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how the indigenous encounter with tourists in a Shipibo ayahuasca healing lodge in Pucallpa involves the making of boundaries of otherness aimed at containing and vitalizing healing potencies associated with a primitivist approach.

Paper long abstract:

Many ayahuasca tourist lodges in Peru heavily restrict tourist interactions with the indigenous healers that conduct the main elements of the service. Engaging Rupert Stasch's notion of "dramas of otherness", this paper examines how the indigenous encounter with tourists in a Shipibo ayahuasca healing lodge in Pucallpa involves the making of boundaries of otherness aimed at containing and vitalizing healing potencies associated with a primitivist approach. The tourist perspective makes little space for notions of sorcery, moral ambiguities, and the exchange theories of health, illness, and personhood that have constituted indigenous Amazonian approaches to drinking ayahuasca. Considering ceremonial practices in the lodge that mediate tourist perceptions of the familiar and the strange, the paper examines how the Shipibo healers value tourist understandings of the healthy body and the inebriated senses.