Estar Con La Planta | Being With Plants: Ecologies of Knowledge and Ritual Healing in the Peruvian Amazon

Abstract

Estar Con La Planta | Being With Plants is an ethnographic study of the ritual healing practiced by the Shipibo peoples in the Peruvian Amazon, with a particular focus on the techniques of plant diets and ayahuasca ceremonies. The thesis is based on fieldwork conducted during August 2017 and January/February 2018 in the Shipibo native community of Nueva Betania in the state of Ucayali, as well as in the cities of Pucallpa and Lima. My engagement with a local family of healers, participation in ceremonies, and observation of Nueva Betania’s plant world were complemented by interviews with doctors spearheading the clinical use of ayahuasca in Peruvian urban settings. My ethnographic narrative of how Shipibo healers create knowledge with plants is permeated by critical reflections on human-nonhuman interactions, therapeutic efficacy, environmental change and economic sustainability, which also draw from history, mythology, anthropology, and the environmental humanities. In Nueva Betania, plants, animals, spirits, and other other-than-human beings are lively agents mediating Shipibo livelihoods in the Amazon forest. Both Shipibo’s spiritual ritual healing and livelihoods are inseparably bound to the material world. Their ecologies of knowledge and healing unfold against the backdrop of violent histories, today’s encroachment of neoliberal market forces, and the uncertainties of the Anthropocene. Although the Shipibo are often imagined as inhabiting a past and far-away reality, their cosmologies and ways of engaging with nature both ritualistically and in their day to day propel them to the forefront of our times, as they articulate with plants an alternative form of environmental becoming and care.