Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (67 page)

This description captures the rhetoric of many ayahuasca tourists: they
speak of healing, spiritual growth, and transformation of all sorts-personal,
planetary, psychological, and sacred transformation; ayahuasca ceremonies
that are deeply, seriously, spiritually, or totally transformative.z1

Ayahuasca tourists are primarily white, urban, relatively wealthy, well educated, and spiritually eclectic outsiders. In almost every case, the experience
takes place outside the context of any long-term involvement with the struggles of the indigenous community from which the shaman comes-indeed,
almost always without any involvement at all. And in almost every case, the
goal is not an increased intellectual or scholarly understanding of the indigenous culture but, rather, personal spiritual growth, healing, and transformative experience. Anthropologist Michael Winkelman interviewed fifteen
ayahuasca tourists in Manaus and found them to be seeking spiritual relations, personal spiritual development, personal self-awareness, emotional
healing, and access to deeper levels of the self.29

Perhaps as important, they come to the shaman with their own set of etiological and nosological concepts, rooted primarily in popular psychology and
the vocabulary of self-help. These clients come to the shamans to be transformed, to heal their inner wounds, to achieve some form of cathartic and
redemptive insight. And they make related assumptions about the nature of
shamans. "I thought I was going to be meeting spiritual, loving, wise shamans," lamented one such tourist in his journal, "but I haven't found any yet."3° These concepts have two effects: they downplay the importance of the
traditional shamanic interventions, such as sucking and blowing tobacco
smoke; and they view ayahuasca as autonomously healing, as providing insight, cathartic realization, not unlike the empathy- or insight-producing psychotropics, the empathogens and entheogens the clients may be used to.

This concern for personal transformation over cultural understanding
means that ayahuasca tourists may wind up paying for ceremonies that are
far from traditional, incorporating, for example, mud baths, nude bathing,
and acupuncture.31 Anthropologist Marlene Dobkin de Rios, one of the first
investigators of ayahuasca shamanism among the mestizos in Iquitos, is
particularly bitter about such transactions. She castigates both sides of what
she calls an "evil and exploitative enterprise," both the "upscale, well-to-do,
prominent" tourists on their never-ending search for self-actualization, and
the unscrupulous practitioners who exploit them-middle-class men, she
says, who "become instant traditional healers," fight among themselves, and
make far too much money.32

On the other hand, anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna, another early investigator of mestizo shamanism, has become a healer himself, a "neoayahuasquero," having founded the Wasiwaska Research Center for the
Study of Psychointegrator Plants, Visionary Art, and Consciousness, located
in southern Brazil. Here he provides "a secure and supportive environment
for intense internal exploration," including ayahuasca sessions, holotropic
breathwork, artistic expression workshops, lectures, and rain forest excursions. "I have had both mestizo and indigenous teachers," he says, "whom I
now honor by doing my own work. 1133

In a wry and self-deprecating article, anthropologist Donald Joralemon
discusses his reaction to the "commercialization" of traditional healer Eduardo Calderon by psychologist Alberto Villoldo, who conducts "spiritual tours"
for outsiders to meet and practice with the shaman. Confronted with Calderon's embarrassing incorporation of New Age themes into his shamanic performance, Joralemon ironically writes, "I am a serious student of culture, not
a two week tourist pilgrim. I know TRADITION when I see it.... My shaman
informant never led any tour groups!"34

Joralemon finally takes a more nuanced view. Issues over "tradition" are
negotiable. Calderon dealt with his local Peruvian clients in one context and
with spiritual tourists in another, mediating between his own tradition and the
expectations and understanding of outsiders, adapting to new social and cultural circumstances.

Still, the dilemma for traditional healers can be profound. Tourist dollars
could allow shamans to support themselves while continuing to treat their
community for little or nothing; but it could just as easily allow a privileged
few to abandon their communities for a more affluent life in tourist towns or
jungle lodges. A shaman can earn hundreds of dollars per month from shamanism students and $30 or more per person for onetime ceremonies, while
others in the same area sell handicrafts for pennies. A shaman who has studied for years has to compete with tour guides who have learned to make ayahuasca, memorized enough icaros to get through a ceremony, and become, in
the words of performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena, "a hyper-exoticized
curio shop shaman for spiritual tourists. 1135

In response to accusations of selling out, one shaman said, "I am an innovator, adding to my ancestral knowledge." He says his people, the Shipibo,
need to grow and change: "We can't just stay the same so that tourists can
stare at the naked Indians in feathers and the anthropologists can treat us like
a living museum. 1131 Yet if shamans are too busy entertaining tourists to help
their communities, the tradition will have become an empty commercial venture of the type condemned by Dobkin de Rios.

One example of a successful integration of these concerns is Howard
Lawler's El Tigre Journeys.37 The organization seeks out traditional mestizo
shamans and provides them with additional income for performing periodic
healing ceremonies for foreign tourists. Groups are limited to twelve participants, and those who drink ayahuasca must observe traditional dietary restrictions. Participation includes trips to such ethnobotanical resources as the
Alpahuayo-Mishana rain forest reserve and field station, operated by the wellrespected Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonia Peruana. The shamans
work part time and continue to serve their own communities. Ayahuasca healing sessions for tourists are also open, for free, to people who live in the local area. Especially important, ayahuasca tourism dollars are used to sponsor
community development projects for nearby Bora, Yagua, and Huitoto villages
-a building for a community medical clinic, a twelve-meter wooden-hulled
boat and motor, a facility for a village-owned cooperative general store, and a
community chicken farming project.

THE CONTROLLED SUBSTANCES ACT

While it is apparently legal in the United States to possess the ayahuasca vine
and its 9-carboline constituents, it is clearly illegal to possess DMT or any
plants, such as chacruna, that contain DIM. Under Chapter 13 of the Controlled Substances Act, DIM is classified as a Schedule I drug, meaning that
the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has found that it has a high potential for abuse, has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the
United States, and lacks accepted safety for use under medical supervision., A
person who manufactures, distributes, or dispenses DIM, or possesses DIM
with intent to manufacture, distribute, or dispense it, "shall be sentenced to a
term of imprisonment of not more than 20 years."2

Both the plant chacruna and the ayahuasca drink that contains chacruna
would seem to fall within the scope of this prohibition. Under the Controlled
Substances Act, if DIM is a Schedule I hallucinogenic substance, then so is
"any material, compound, mixture, or preparation which contains any quantity" Of DMT.3 Since chacruna and the ayahuasca drink are materials that contain some quantity of DIM, they are, by a plain reading of the statute, also
Schedule I substances. Under this provision, it has generally been assumed
that listing a major psychoactive component of a plant also lists the plant of
which it is a part;4 for example, the Drug Enforcement Administration notes
that, in listing the active ingredient cathinone in Schedule I, any material that
contains cathinone, including its source plant khat, is automatically listed
along with it.5

CRIMINAL PROSECUTIONS IN THE UNITED STATES

The Peyote Precedents

On November 9, 1924, a Native American of the Crow Tribe named Big Sheep
was charged with the crime of unlawfully having peyote in his possession.'
The court refused to allow him to testify in his defense that he was a member in good standing of the Native American Church, or that members of that
church used peyote "for sacramental purposes only in the worship of God according to their belief and interpretation of the Holy Bible, and according to
the dictates of their conscience." The Supreme Court of Montana remanded
the case for further proceedings at the trial level, noting that, while the Montana Constitution guaranteed the "free exercise and enjoyment of religious
profession and worship," it also provided that the liberty of conscience thus
secured did not "justify practices inconsistent with the good order, peace, or
safety of the state, or opposed to the civil authority 117

There was absolutely nothing remarkable about that observation. The religion clause of the First Amendment reads, "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof." Yet legislatures make laws all the time that can, under some circumstances, burden the free exercise of religion-laws against murder, for
example, that implicitly prohibit human sacrifice. At the time of Big Sheep, the
leading precedent in this area was Reynolds v. United States (1878), in which the
U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that the Mormon religious practice of polygamy was not protected by the free exercise clause of the First Amendment-indeed, that the First Amendment offered no protection to any religious act that
contravened generally applicable legislation.' While Mormons were free to
believe that polygamy was a religious duty, they just could not practice it-not
because they were Mormons but because no one could practice it.

This line of reasoning continued to be the model for First Amendment free
exercise jurisprudence. In Prince v. Massachusetts (1944), the Court held that a
woman was subject to prosecution for violating the child labor laws when she
brought her nine-year-old niece with her to sell religious literature on a street
corner;9 in Braunfeld v. Brown (1g61), the Court upheld Sunday closing laws as
applied to Orthodox Jewish businessmen who closed their shops on Saturday,
rejecting the argument that forcing them to close their shops on a second day
unduly burdened their religious practice.'°

However, beginning in 1963, the Court signaled a new approach to First
Amendment religious issues. In Sherbert v. Verner (1963), the Court held that a state could not simply deny unemployment compensation to a person whose
unavailability for Saturday employment was religiously motivated. Rather, the
state had to show a "compelling state interest" for its refusal to grant a religious exception to the regulation. The Court said that "no showing merely of
a rational relationship to some colorable state interest would suffice." Only
the gravest abuses, endangering "paramount interests," would allow the state
substantially to infringe the free exercise of religion." And the Court followed
up this new approach in Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), holding that the state interest in compulsory education was not sufficient to justify the state forcing
Amish families, against their religious principles, to educate their children
beyond the eighth grade.12

This new model of interpretation was first applied to peyote, by a state
court, in People v. Woody (1964).13 The California Supreme Court, following the
1963 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, overturned the conviction of several
Navajo members of the Native American Church for possession of peyote. The
court found that the state had not met its burden of demonstrating a "compelling state interest" to justify refusing a religious exemption to its drug laws.

The effect of this case was predictable. Soon people were lined up at the
courthouse doors seeking religious exemptions for drug use-the NeoAmerican Church, the Church of the Awakening, the Native American Church
of New York, and a whole slew of criminal defendants claiming that the marijuana for which they had been arrested was for use in their religious practice.14