Senses of Self, Society, and Cosmos

The pervasiveness of ayahuasca use in lowland South America, alongside its rising global diaspora spurred by ayahuasca tour-ism, religious movements, and the psychedelic renaissance, makes Gearin and Calavia Sáez’s critical scholarship particularly welcome. The authors’ comparative attention to visualise and individualism across“glocal” contexts of ayahuasca practices, namely, neoshamanic uses in Australia and indigenous practices in Amazonia, is compelling. They invite us to focus on diverging notions of property and personhood to understand ayahuasca visualism as an expression of divergent cultural viewpoints. I concur with their proposal that ayahuasca visions are sites of equivocation whose interpretations are rendered meaningful by particular socialities. They view the Australian neoshamanic individual as a product of the philosophical Enlightenmentwho becomes the center of the ayahuasca experience, interpretation, and outcome, while for“Amazonians,” the centrality of the individual is a product of animistic and perspectival ontologies and is therefore by default fractal and more broadly connected to larger social worlds.