A REINVENÇÃO DO USO DA AYAHUASCA NOS CENTROS URBANOS
Beatriz Caiuby Labate
Publisher: Editora Mercado de Letras, Campinas/SP - Brazil
Tel: 55 +
19 + 3241 7514
ISBN 85-7591-037-X
Format 16 x 23 cm – 536 pp.
Support
from the Fapesp (Research Support Foundation of the
State of São Paulo)
Price: R$ 65,00 (US$ 24,50 + shipping fee)
ANPOCS (National Post-secondary Association of
Social Sciences) Prize for best Master’s Thesis in Social Sciences in 2000.
Summary:
From its beginnings, the phenomenon of the Brazilian
ayahuasca religions has involved strong intercultural
transits, with constant migratory flows leading to fusions of northeastern
traditions with the Amazonian universe, where beliefs and practices of
indigenous populations were creatively retranslated by diverse types of “forest
peoples,” from the rubber tappers to modern
environmentalists.
The work of Bia Labate emphasizes this fact, showing that the inventive
possibilities of the use of ayahuasca are extensive,
and marked by the dissolution of boundaries between indigenous and white, rural
and urban, forest and city, tradition and modernity or old and “neo.” Labate tells us how, in the practice of urban neo-ayahuasqueiros
these domains interpenetrate one another, using examples in which art, therapy,
political intervention, play, magic, and religion commingle through the use of ayahuasca, a drink that seems to operate here as a mediator
or communicator of diverse perspectives, perceptions, experiences, and
sensations. Known variously as Cipó, Daime,
or Vegetal, it permits the
translation and resignification of different cultural
practices from the point of view of the “other.” That is what A Reinvenção do Uso da Ayahuasca
nos Centros Urbanos makes clear, thus highlighting the right to alterity, the fundamental principle of anthropology.
In pointing to the new modalities of ayahuasca use, the author ends up questioning monopolies on
legitimacy, putting in focus the priority of certain types of uses above
others, or of privileges pertaining to this substance belonging to groups,
cultures, and subjects. She analyzes how these new uses, despite their
originality, are inserted into a “Brazilian ayahuasca
field,” expressing its logic and motivating many of its elements. The author
notes that the diversity of practices in the ayahuasca
field do not imply disorder, but to the contrary, manifests forms of control
proper to this religious universe. Thus, through Labate’s
work one sees that “ritual” and the “religious” can assume innumerable faces
and forms, involving a dynamic process of transformation, or, in other words,
of invention and reinvention. At the same time that it makes a lucid criticism
of religious intolerance, the book is in implicit dialogue with the premises of
anti-drug policy, indicating that informal and cultural controls of the uses of
psychoactive drugs tend to be more effective than external controls based only
on state and legal standardization
Six years
since her research began, empirical reality confirms many of the hypotheses put
forward by the author. We witness a proliferation, in Brazil’s large cities, of
new modes of consuming this drink of Amazonian origin, always inserted within
the logic identified by the author. The dimensions and varieties assumed by the
ayahuasca field seem to be a signal that, instead of
the death of religion, as some have predicted, we are witnessing an extension
of the sacred to dimensions previously unimaginable, and a multiplication of
the possibilities of ritualization of contemporary
life (Translated to English by Matthew Meyer).
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