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Paper short abstract

Drawing on interviews with Western participants engaging with iboga, this paper examines visionary encounters that transform consciousness while resisting biomedical, therapeutic, and spiritual closure. Iboga emerges as a site where polarised epistemologies persist rather than resolve.

Paper long abstract

In the context of the so-called psychedelic renaissance, visionary substances increasingly circulate across therapeutic, spiritual, and informal ritual settings, generating new configurations of meaning, authority, and experience. This paper draws on interviews with Western participants engaging with iboga in ritual and therapeutic contexts linked to Gabon to examine how visionary encounters transform consciousness while resisting stabilisation within any single explanatory framework.

Participants consistently describe iboga as producing profound shifts in perception, memory, ethical orientation, and self-relation. Yet these transformations are rarely articulated as discrete experiences that can be fully integrated or explained. Instead, iboga is described as a persistent presence or agent that exceeds chemical, psychological, and symbolic accounts, continuing to act beyond the moment of ingestion or ceremony. In this sense, healing and belonging emerge not as resolution or closure, but as ongoing processes marked by obligation, discipline, and uncertainty.

Analytically, the paper approaches iboga as a site where polarised epistemologies—biomedical and experiential, therapeutic and visionary, secular and sacred—are not reconciled but held in tension. Rather than treating this indeterminacy as a problem to be solved, I argue that it invites an anthropological stance of epistemic hesitation: a refusal of premature translation that allows multiple, incommensurable ways of knowing to coexist. By attending to visionary experience as an ethnographic and epistemic event, the paper contributes to broader debates on how anthropology might engage polarisation with care, restraint, and methodological openness in a fractured yet interconnected world.