The Many Worlds of Ayahuasca: An Interview with Alex Gearin

Anita: Your recently published book Global Ayahuasca: Wondrous Visions and Modern Worlds (Stanford University Press, 2024) is a comparative ethnography of ayahuasca use in Australia, Peru and China. Congratulations on such a lucid and nuanced analysis. To begin, I was wondering if you could share what initially drew you to study this field? 

Alex: I started to take psychedelics seriously as an object of anthropological study a long time ago. In 2008 or 2009, I did a project on Amazonian cosmogony as an undergraduate student in Melbourne. The professor had us read a paper by Ralph Metzner, a German-American psychologist. I’ve always remembered that with gratitude, that I was exposed to something so incredible. But I was also struck that we were asked to read a psychologist for an anthropology of religion class.

I’ve been wrestling with that recently because I sense that so much anthropology of psychedelics today is read around the world as a way for people to understand their own life predicaments, their own psyches, their own inner problems. But in fact, the project of anthropology is really trying to foreground other societies, other worlds, other possibilities, including within our own societies.

But in fact, the project of anthropology is really trying to foreground other societies, other worlds, other possibilities, including within our own societies.

So that’s been a productive tension that I’ve been forced to wrestle, where anthropologists of psychedelics have a wide readership across the humanities, across the sciences, across therapeutic approaches, given that psychedelics have been medicalising a lot in the last 10 years.

Another thing to add about what keeps me engaged in this field is that psychedelics attract different people from across different societies. It’s an incredible way to meet people who you otherwise might not encounter. In my 20s I was quite shy and used to struggle with some social anxiety. Participating in psychedelic retreats – whether I’m studying them or not – has been a way to widen my social bandwidth, to get to know people from really different backgrounds. Ayahuasca retreats can inspire a kind of ‘warm sociality’, as I call it in my book, where powerful emotions, like gratitude, honour, or respect, flow between people during the morning after a ceremony. Oh, and of course, wonder, plenty of wonder.  

Anita: I loved the cultural history aspect of Global Ayahuasca – it’s a rich account full of interesting details, like that DarPan was in The Divinyls. My favourite karaoke song is a Divinyls song, so I was very impressed.

Alex: Yeah, the other band he sung in was called Die Laughing – an ego death reference from his past life, I guess.  

Anita: Have you experienced ontological shock yourself? Is that something that informed your initial research?

Alex: To some degree, certainly. Psychedelic experiences tend to be magical and wondrous to people. That sense of not knowing what happened, but also, feeling a deep sense of meaning or truth. It’s called a ‘noetic’ quality in scientific literature. That could be understood as a kind of ontological shock or surprise.

To me, living in another culture with different value systems is a deeper ontological shock. As an anthropologist I’m continuously being exposed to different cultural viewpoints on living, history, the future, and everything in between. That has been a space of wonder for me personally. I see psychedelics as actually helping to reconcile the ontological shock of coming to terms with otherness.

I think part of the reason is that visionary plants can bring us into an encounter with a sense of other worlds that can be helpful to societies when they’re going through rapid change.

You see this in the colonial history of ayahuasca use in the Amazon during the 19th and 20th century. As Amazonian societies started to become  consumed by the colonial economy, by building boats or tapping rubber, we see a breakdown of institutions within their societies. Kinship structures, rites of passage, and hunting and cosmological understandings of the environment became eroded by a different economic way of life. However, there’s these examples of shamanism, including when it uses visionary plants, thriving and becoming more common during these periods of cultural turbulence and transformation. I think part of the reason is that visionary plants can bring us into an encounter with a sense of other worlds that can be helpful to societies when they’re going through rapid change. 

It makes me wonder about today. Maybe if the world wasn’t so crazy in 2025, psychedelics wouldn’t be as popular. But I don’t believe that is necessarily true. These are simply some of the questions anthropology can ask.  

Anita: Your ethnography reveals how diverse the practice of ayahuasca is – you show how it is coded by secular and religious use and the influence of modernism, colonialism and capitalism. From here you make a compelling argument against universalist or perennial assumptions, in favour of the particular. You write, ‘psychedelic experiences of a perennialist nature might turn out to be more healing for scientists than for others’. Can you talk about the allure of universalising as a tool for meaning making and why it is reductive or problematic, in this context? 

Alex: The intervention my book tries to make is to complexify or complicate these universalising tendencies within Western academic writing about psychedelics.

If you look at ayahuasca in Australia in the last 20 years, there is diversity there, but you have a lot of people seeking the brew to commune with a goddess deity, ‘Mother Ayahuasca’. La Madre, as she is also known, is usually all-benevolent, all-knowing, and has an affinity with the natural world, connecting us to the spirit of nature. The pioneers who first served ayahuasca across Australia said it helps to reconnect people with nature. That, in the routine and the mundane habits of daily life in urban society, we’ve become disconnected from a primordial nature that Mother Ayahuasca heals by bringing us into greater attunement with an invisible, ecological identity.

Mother Nature herself can be seen as a brand of perennialism, where the plants come to represent a biological universal deity of Nature. If we step back and contrast this with visionary plant use across Amazonia, we see a different cosmology at play, where the spirit beings that ayahuasca evokes are an array of non-humans, from jaguars and anacondas to parrots and shrubs that have this uncanny capacity to shapeshift. And it’s in this shape-shifting cosmology that you find both benevolence and malevolence, both good intentions and other intentions. And this ambiguity enables the problems and the hopes of society to penetrate the healing modality in a very different way to what you would see in somewhere like Australia.

I’ve been curious about how ayahuasca is being used in new and unexpected ways. In China, just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, I saw a very different approach to ayahuasca, where plant practices were being employed for performance enhancement, as well as a means of healing. Entrepreneurs and CEOs were seeking counsel from ayahuasca to improve their work and businesses.

This would look very strange and maybe even sacrilegious to an Australian ayahuasca drinker. I try to make the point that this novel use in China reflects a more utilitarian approach to visionary practices like what we see in Amazonia, where ayahuasca has been used to improve hunting, to study the stars and ecological movements, to understand problems of social welfare etc. etc.. So, we see this far more utilitarian application, what I call ‘world-mastery’ in Amazonia, transforming in Chinese neoliberal contexts to the demands of capitalism. 

I realise I didn’t directly address your question about scientists and perennialism. But it’s because perennialist thinking about psychedelics cuts across a lot of Western thinking, not just among scientists. Anthropology has shown just how diverse psychedelic experiences and practices can be in different cultural contexts. It urges us, in my reading, to take more seriously Indigenous cosmologies which can handle diverse beliefs without necessarily collapsing them into universalist frames.   

Anita: You quote a healer at Pachamama Temple in Peru who says ‘Being a chaman is easy… but curanderismo is very hard’. I don’t think many visitors are aware of the sorcery that’s happening around Shipibo ceremonies. Could you talk a little bit about that, and any other misconceptions that Westerners tend to have?

Alex: The word ‘sorcery’, as well as ‘witchcraft’ and ‘brujería’, have such a negative and scary tone when they’re translated into English. But it’s helpful to step back and think about Amazonian approaches to health and illness as being far more social to what we’re used to in the psychology models of a place like Australia.

Anthropologists have noted that across Amazonia, to generalize for a moment, many Indigenous groups have core values of tranquility and peace. When peace breaks down in a settlement, or a family, or an ecological environment, ayahuasca has been used to try and reinstill these values, to bring harmony back to a disharmonious world. Through that process you find a relational understanding of what we would call ‘mental health’ – where a person’s distress is understood in relational terms, not just as an individual problem, but as something that needs to be addressed relationally or environmentally. Therefore, it’s no surprise sorcery accusations can revolve around issues of power – things such as disputes over wealth and political struggles or gender tensions.

Shipibo healers would tell me it’s easier to provide ayahuasca for foreigners than it is for local Shipibo or others. Because when providing healing for locals, the curandero doesn’t have the ‘value neutrality’ that you find in psychology, thus they can be pulled into the social tensions and struggles that constitute the distress of the person.

Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once compared Amazonian shamans to psychoanalysts, where traditionally the analyst sits outside of the patient’s unconscious, and might guide the unconscious, or have a conversation with it, but essentially is undertaking an interpretive role. The Cuna Amazonian shaman, he said, doesn’t have that boundary, but in fact is implicated within a drama of the patient’s world, which is both a social and mythological drama. So, maybe they’re trying to retrieve the soul that’s being kidnapped or trying to fend off the malevolence that might have been harming a person. And, in doing so, the healer becomes part of the political or moral tensions of the patient’s distress.

The other thing is that, for some of the Shipibo healers I’ve spoken with, healing foreigners provided around 10 times more income than healing locals, because foreigners tend to come from very wealthy societies. However, despite the allure of much more capital from international retreats, local healers still respond to obligation relations within family and extended kin networks to provide care and visionary support. Ayahuasca is deeply entwined with concepts of kin or family in Amazonian cosmology. 

Even the local words for what we call a ‘shaman’ in Amazonia, such as paye or kumu, were traditionally less a profession than a relational term, more like what we call ‘brother’ or ‘cousin’. They indicated a relation between specific persons, whether between humans or even with animals and plants. Anthropologist Michael Harner helped make this point by showing that two-thirds of Shuar men were ‘shamans’ or knew how to use psychedelic plants for various purposes. Amazonian shamanism is less a ‘profession’, like medicine, education, or law, than it is a series of techniques and distributed relations.   

Even the local words for what we call a ‘shaman’ in Amazonia, such as paye or kumu, were traditionally less a profession than a relational term, more like what we call ‘brother’ or ‘cousin’. They indicated a relation between specific persons, whether between humans or even with animals and plants.

Anita: I was very sad to read that many Shipibo people feel their culture is undergoing a crisis. Can you discuss the impact of psychedelic tourism on Shipibo culture? What is happening with foreign investment in healing centres? 

Alex: Ayahuasca tourism is a somewhat controversial topic with Shipibo people. Austrian ethnomusicologist Bernd Brabec de Mori has written on the irony and criticism that some Shipibo launched towards healers that are transforming their tradition for global tourism.

At the same time, there are Shipibo families and healers actively pursuing the revitalisation of shamanic practices within these intercultural spaces. I think a major issue for the political economy of ayahuasca tourism is what you just referred to – the fact that most international lodges in Peru are owned by foreigners from places like France and Australia. This economic arrangement is not surprising to scholars of Latin American colonial history, where foreign capital has shaped industries, often in extractive ways.

It’s really challenging for Indigenous healers to create an English website, market to foreigners and attract customers to their healing ceremonies. The level of cultural and technical knowledge makes that challenging. In 2019 there were about 70 different retreat centers in Iquitos, a rainforest city in Peru, and almost all of them were owned by foreigners. That year there was roughly $17.5 million USD in retreat bookings alone. However, we don’t have a sense of how these economic arrangements are actually feeding into local communities. We need more research to get a better understanding of that.

Some Shipibo I met could sense an extraction when working in ayahuasca tourism. When I was there in 2019, there was a concern among healers that foreigners were taking photos of them, taking the photos back home to New York and Sydney and selling them for large amounts of money. So there’s this sense of a disproportionate value occurring. Canadian anthropologist Jeremy Narby pointed out that while some visitors get a life-changing transformation from an ayahuasca retreat, the Indigenous maestros who serve them usually don’t receive anything life changing in return.

In terms of a cultural crisis – some Shipibo youths feel embarrassed to speak Shipibo in public, or to wear traditional clothing. They have long received prejudices and racism from urban Peruvians. So, there’s some ambivalence and tension at play, where on the one hand, locally, your cultural identity can cause you to be the object of discrimination, whereas in the Ayahuasca tourism milieu, it can actually be a source of pride and cultural continuity and capital and opportunity.  

Anita: I love this quote from the Yarinacocha Declaration authored by ASOMASHK, union of Shipibo healers: ‘The work of healing and the struggle towards self-determination are not separable. They must move forward on the same path’. Another concerning extraction issue is supply and demand for the vine – can you speak to this?

Alex: There’s some debate about the sustainability of ayahuasca harvesting in the Amazon. Quite a lot of ayahuasca is being brewed up in Amazonia and posted around the world. Spanish ethnographer Carlos Suárez Álvarez has done some research on this in 2018. He reported that harvesters are having to go deeper and deeper into the rainforest to get the vine. 

There is some ayahuasca growing in Australia, in northern New South Wales and northern Queensland. And there are also alternative plant sources with the same or similar molecules as what you find in ayahuasca vine, in Eurasian/North African shrub Peganum harmala or Syrian rue. That was very popular in Australia when I was doing my research in 2011-15 – people would mix it with acacias grown in the wild across different parts of Australia. 

It’s really interesting that you have completely different botanical sources all evoking the spirit of Mother Ayahuasca. Within the acacias in Australia, there’s a diversity of psychoactive molecules or compounds in different species. Acacia obtusifolia, for example, contains nn-DMT as well as bufotenine, and is sometimes described as having more of a trickster spirit. So here we see a movement away from the molecularisation of psychedelics towards plant-personhood – a recognition that different plants have different personalities that people can identify and describe. 

Who knows, maybe one day new psychedelic medications will have different personalities that subcultures encounter and identify. It’s hard to see where the medicalisation of psychedelics is fully going in the future, in terms of cultural change.  

Who knows, maybe one day new psychedelic medications will have different personalities that subcultures encounter and identify. It’s hard to see where the medicalisation of psychedelics is fully going in the future, in terms of cultural change.

Anita: Do you see value in the practice of keeping ayahuasca experiences a secret as some Santo Daime people do?

Alex: These are really different cultural approaches, and it’s hard to extrapolate from one to the other. As anthropologists, we’re more likely to appreciate each in its own world. As psychedelics and ayahuasca have globalised, they have taken root in psychotherapeutically influenced contexts, where people undertake ‘integration’ practices.

In ayahuasca circles, this usually means sitting around in a group and narrating what you have experienced and what it means to you. In many ways, this is a very Western thing – it prioritises the individual to describe their own struggles and trauma and their own hope, visions, future in a way that can be healing for them. 

It certainly contrasts sharply with what you see in ethnography on Shuar or other Indigenous ayahuasca use, where the visions induced by psychoactive plants have been understood as ways of building alliances with the more-than-human world, such as the spirit of an animal or the spirit of a plant. Those relations take effort to keep active – you might need to provide offerings, communicate with them, trade or even barter. They are unstable relations that require renewal. In this context, secrecy can be a way of maintaining those relations – to speak about a powerful vision can make the spirit ally leave your body and go away. You can lose that spiritual power or spiritual relation through talking about it.

We could say, psychologically, that there are ramifications to exposing our inner worlds to other people. But this is a rough translation, across different ontologies.  

Anita: What can people expect from your presentation at Garden States? 

Alex: At Garden States I’m going to present on ayahuasca and time travel. I’m really intrigued by narratives of how ayahuasca can transport people across time. You see a lot of that in Australia – people will wrestle with past challenges or crises. Psychedelics provide not just a space of remembering what happened, but a kind of re-encountering, or even re-experiencing, that some people describe as healing.

At Garden States I’m going to present on ayahuasca and time travel. I’m really intrigued by narratives of how ayahuasca can transport people across time. 

In Amazonian societies, ayahuasca also offers visions of the future and plans – helping people coordinate hunting or understand the nature of a city or technological future, like with imagery of surgical equipment and cosmic spaceships.

I’ll be looking at some of these cultural contrasts.  

Anita: So interesting. I can’t wait.  

Alex K. Gearin, PhD, will be speaking on the topic “Ayahuasca and Time Travel” at this year’s Garden States: Regeneration Conference, being held in Victoria, Australia, from 28th November to 1st December.

“Ayahuasca has provided visionary encounters with possible futures, including among Indigenous specialists seeking support for hunting or drinking the brew to access futurist underwater cities filled with skyscrapers where shamans obtain powers and a vast array of tools like X-ray machines, large bright surgical lights, hypodermic needles, as well as jet fighters and flying saucers. This talk explores the altered temporalities afforded by this wondrous brew.”

Information on Alex K Gearin’s lecture can be found here: 

https://www.gardenstates.org/allpresentations/ayahuasca-and-time-travel

Anita Spooner is a writer and editor with a background in arts management. Her Masters research concerns the capacity of language to convey numinous experience. She lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne.

Cover image: Brewing Ayahuasca at Pachamama Temple, 2019. Photo: Dominik Janus