Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the epistemological and ethical frameworks that structure psychiatric and Peruvian vegetalista practices and the implications for the verification of truths by those interested in advancing the therapeutic applications of ayahuasca and other sacred plants.

Paper long abstract:

The past two decades have often been referred to as a ‘renaissance’ in psychedelic science that will contribute to a revolution in psychiatry. Researchers, health practitioners, businesses, and mainstream media have promoted the promises of a society in which psychedelics are fully medicalized to address the growing mental health crisis and a slew of other psychiatric concerns. Questions abound concerning appropriate professional conduct and the boundary work of who is considered a legitimate practitioner: medically-trained psychiatrists or people trained in long apprenticeships, receiving knowledge passed down through generations? Further, there is need for discussion on the ethical frameworks that may structure these therapeutic processes or the social and cultural assumptions that influence the epistemic qualification of psychedelics as psychiatric pharmacotherapies rather than the many other ‘local meanings’ or significations rooted in Indigenous and traditional understandings of sacred plants. To begin addressing these questions, I ground this paper in ethnographic fieldwork on ayahuasca shamanism in Peru, where a plurality of healing approaches in the context of vegetalismo and associated psychotherapeutic practices have given form to a therapeutic milieu with intersecting ontological configurations that lack a common worldview, yet exert influence on each other. I examine the continuities and disjunctures between the vegetalista tradition and the growing professionalization of psychedelic therapists that draws on both shamanic traditions and psychiatric regimes of knowledge and authority to produce new truths and relativities in these intercultural and epistemologically complex spaces.