The Trees are Human: Psychoactive Plants, the Subjectivity of Nature, and an Engagement with Modernity in the Napo Runa Kichwa Culture of Ecuador. Master Thesis in Latin American Studies. University of Gainsville (project do be completed by 2013). .
This thesis is an exploration of the intersection of three distinct areas of inquiry: the experience – shamanic, religious, mystical, or ecstatic – of psychoactive plants; worldviews that recognize and affirm subjectivity and agency in the other-than-human-persons of plants, animals, and places; and how such worldviews engage with, resist, integrate, and transform the worldviews of techno-scientific modernity. In following a set of concepts put forward by Ralph Metzner among others, this work suggests that unique responses to the ecological and psycho-social devastation currently facing the techno-scientific, capitalist-industrialist “modern” world may very well be found in the link between so-called “animist” worldviews and psychoactive plants. This thesis presents an effort to understand how Napo Runa people, and their use of psychoactive plants, are able to hold seemingly contradictory – techno-scientific and “animist” – worldviews in tension, without forcing a false dialectical synthesis. By focusing on specific ethnographic research, an effort is made to see these worldviews in context with one another as they are being actively lived and negotiated. This research focuses on understanding and communicating the complexity of lived worldviews through stories, histories, and the relating of experiences of both Napo Runa Kichwa people near Tena, Ecuador and mestizo people in and around Iquitos, Peru. This ethnographic research is done in an attempt to ascertain how psychoactive plants and “animist” worldviews are in dialogue with one another, and thereby mutually informing. Embedded within such an effort is a questioning of whether or not the “tensions” that might be perceived between seemingly conflicting worldviews present themselves as such for Runa people, or if such tensions are a product of putatively Western and, perhaps more explicitly, academic, categories. Shaping the aims of this research is the question of how people, both shamans and non-shamans, characterize their experience with psychoactive plants, what they draw from these experiences as personally meaningful, and how these experiences have translated into action in, and understanding of, the world. An effort is made to ensure that the immediate and personal experiences of people stand side by side with discussions of urbanization and techno-scientific “modernity,” such that categorical contrasts are neither ignored nor erected without immediate grounding in lived experience. The scope of this research is extended to include the more urban ayahuasca shamans in Iquitos, Peru, especially as they might be compared to the more rural ayahuasca shamans in the field site near Tena, Ecuador. Because these sites are historically and culturally related, they offer an interesting potential for comparison, as they are both in the process of dynamically defining and redefining the nature of “shamanic tradition” in cultural and religious terms. This extension of the investigation specifically engages with how different socio-economic situations and underlying cultural realities mark different ways of conceiving of and engaging with the “natural” world, and what forms of discourse dominate such shamanic activity in each case – especially in terms of spirituality, healing, envidia, and brujeria – as these are related to the process of urbanization and the integration of, and resistance to, techno-scientific and neo-liberal capitalist worldviews.