Ayahuasca comes to the city!

Ayahuasca has spread from indigenous Amazonia to the industrialized world, in the form of ceremonies catering to Westerners, a corpus of academic studies and personal accounts and depictions of it in novels and films. Considering that its original users were zealous about revealing it to outsiders and their traditional cultures were being eroded by the mainstream’s society’s colonization, its very survival is a paradox, in that the native ayahuasqueros have been both the victims and beneficiaries of its globalization. Thus, this essay traces the dissemination of yajé (the Colombian name for ayahuasca) from the standpoint of the author, an early participant in the rituals which began to be held in Bogotá by a handful of taitas (indigenous healers) in the early 1990’s, whose number has since increased to at least fifty who regularly work in that and other Colombian cities. Then a set of closely related aspects are discuted: the disruptive socio-economic changes in the heartlands of yajé, like the Putumayo (especially the cocaine boom), which have impelled the traditional healers to seek new “markets” for their medicine; other focal points for its expansion; the clash between different healers about the ethics of providing their services to White men; the parallel establishment of ayahuasca “churches” in Brazil (with branches in Europe) which owe little to the indigenous tradition; the development of an “ayahuasca tourism” in Peru; and the legal status of the medicine in North America and Western Europe.