Deconstructing the “Psychedelic” and its Sciences from Latin America

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

“Deconstructing the ‘Psychedelic’ and its Sciences from Latin America” contributes to and complicates the existing and emerging scholarship on so-called “global psychedelics,” by calling into question whether “psychedelic” is itself a global phenomenon. Alongside the resurgence scientific studies of psychedelics in the North America and Europe, there has been growing historical attention paid to the history of psychedelic sciences (Dyck 2008; Langlitz 2013; Oram 2018; Richert 2019); with a few exceptions (Breen 2022; Jay 2019), much of this historical scholarship has remained focused on North America and Europe and has yet to fully consider whether and how the “psychedelic” exists in the Global South. Collectively, these three papers center Latin America as a crucial site in which knowledge of and relations to the “psychedelic” have been forged, contested, and rendered multiple (Mol 2002).

The panel begins in the mid-nineteenth century, where Marco A. Ramos begins his reconstruction of how botanists, anthropologists, and psychiatrists encountered ayahuasca in the Amazon. Drawing from recent work in Indigenous studies and biomedical sciences, Ramos explores how twentieth-century scientists’ claims to a shared Indigenous past were built on ongoing harm towards Amazonian communities, ecologies, and knowledges. Taylor E. Dysart picks up in the Brazilian Amazon where Ramos ends, in the late twentieth century where researchers undertook studies of hoasca, commonly referred to as a Portuguese translation of ayahuasca. Inspired by post-colonial science studies, Dysart takes the case study of the “Hoasca Project” to demonstrate how hoasca was variously co-constituted by an asymmetric network of human and non-human actors, practices, and knowledges. The panel ends in the field with Estrella V. Castillo, whose work demonstrates that the lingering history of the “psychedelic” is one that never gained traction amongst Indigenous and xicanx imbibers of peyote. Her research compellingly invites scholars to consider what is lost in the process of “psychedelization”? Gabriela Soto Laveaga, a Professor of the History of Science and Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico at Harvard University, will provide commentary.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Taylor Elizabeth Dysart, University of Pennsylvania

Commentator

• Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Harvard University

Individual Presentations

• Ayahuasca, Whiteness and the History of Psychedelic Science - Marco A. Ramos, Yale University

• How Hoasca Makes: The União do Vegetal and the Hoasca Project in the Brazilian Amazon - Taylor Elizabeth Dysart, University of Pennsylvania

• The Psychedelicization of Peyote: Contextualizing and Complicating Calls to Decolonize Research on Psychedelics - Estrella V. Castillo, Yale University

Session Organizer

• Taylor Elizabeth Dysart, University of Pennsylvania