Paper Short Abstract:

Amazonian pusangas, or shamanic love potions, embody more than romantic attraction; they reflect young Amazonians' negotiations with belonging, modernity, and ancestral traditions. This paper explores the tensions of desire, affect, and urban identity through pusangas, revealing hidden power dynamics and ambivalent yearnings.

Paper Abstract:

In the urban landscapes of the Peruvian Amazon, pusangas—shamanic love potions crafted from aromatic plants and imbued with spiritual energies—serve as powerful mediators of desire, identity, and belonging. While these potions promise lust and love, they also carry deeper implications for understanding the affective and social realities of young indigenous Amazonians.

This paper examines how pusangas are not merely tools of attraction but complex affective artifacts, reflecting the aspirations and anxieties of indigenous youth as they navigate urban modernity. Rooted in ancestral knowledge, these potions illuminate the paradoxical space of the city: a realm of freedom and possibility but also of alienation and precarity. In their search for love and connection, young people use pusangas to reimagine traditional practices, crafting new cultural meanings that both contest and sustain power dynamics, gender relations, and socio-emotional boundaries.

By contextualizing pusangas within the broader framework of sexual folklore, this analysis engages with the ambivalence of erotic and affective traditions. It explores how love potions unsettle dichotomies of shame and desire, power and vulnerability, tradition and innovation. Drawing on ethnographic research, the paper highlights how these practices both reflect and resist historical and social tensions, offering a deeper understanding of how folklore mediates the intersections of pleasure, fear, and cultural reinvention in urban Amazonian life.