ZINE 01
ZINE 02
ZINE 03
ZINE 04
ZINE 05
ZINE 06
ZINE 07
ZINE 08
ZINE 09
ZINE 10
ZINE 11
ZINE 12
ZINE 13
ZINE 01
ZINE 02
ZINE 03
ZINE 04
ZINE 05
ZINE 06
ZINE 07
ZINE 08
ZINE 09
ZINE 10
ZINE 11
ZINE 12
ZINE 13

By Maria Fernanda Gebara

Listening to the plants: Indigenous rituals and transitions for humanity

 

Some argue that the ecological crisis is a spiritual crisis. In this article I will present some initial results of my research on the role Amazonian traditional medicines and Indigenous spirituality may have in changing environmentally damaging attitudes.

 

At this moment of profound ecological and health crises, there is an urgent call to rethink human relationships with the rest of Nature. But how do we reconnect with Nature? According to different Indigenous Peoples in the Amazon we are experiencing a transition. As human beings, going through a transition is nothing new, whether as a collective or as individuals. COVID-19 made it clear to us that we are now collectively experiencing an important transition.

 

My main argument here is that Indigenous medicines could be seen as tools for changing larger social and ecological contexts faster. I look at the Yawanawá people, who live in the Brazilian Amazon, to give some practical examples and to reflect on aspects of cultural appropriation and Indigenous rights.

 

I will start by telling a story. I feel it is a good way to start once it is about Indigenous spirituality and they normally start their conversations by telling a story or a myth. Last time I was with the Yawanawá - and I will give some more information about them soon – I was talking to one of their spiritual leaders and I asked him how they say “sacred” in their language. His answer was that they do not have a sole word for that. But the main meaning of sacred to them is the mother’s breast milk and the act of breastfeeding. He explained to me that due to the importance of the mother’s breast milk for feeding and calming the baby, and so for maintaining the flow of life, the act of breastfeeding became the meaning of sacred. And then I thought – how are we feeding ourselves? And I am not just thinking about our bodies, but mainly about our spirits. Are we able to feed and calm ourselves everyday with the sacred? Whatever it means to each of us…

 

The central goal of my research was to examine the ways in which Ayahuasca and other traditional medicines that are used in Indigenous rituals are perceived to change participants' views of nature, and in consequence the way they relate to it. I chose the Yawanawá rituals as the ones in which I concentrated the research because they started to share their culture and medicines in the 2000s and very quickly, they became “trendy” and served as a good inspiration to find out more about different cultural constructions about nature.  Data was collected between 2016-2019 during field visits to the Yawanawá lands in Brazil but also during some of their spiritual retreats in Europe.

 

Enchanting transformations

 

The Yawanawá are hunters and gatherers. They see themselves as a unified people, a group that stands and works together, a family. That is why they call themselves ‘People of the Queixada (Peccary)’. The Yawanawá consider themselves to be the people of spirituality, the Yuve yahu in their language. They say that in the past, there were many pajés (the name given to spiritual healers and shamans, in Portuguese). To the Yawanawá, most plants are medicinal plants.

 

In traditional hunter-gatherer societies, there was no distinction between spirituality and the rest of subsistence and cultural life. In ‘civilised’ society, however, no river contains a spirit, no tree means life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom; plants nor animals no longer ‘speak’ to humankind – at least not to the majority of us. On the contrary, we are guided by material values. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right in our lives, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, food) or a service (a holiday, a new course, a therapy). This is rooted in the structural realities of today’s industrial and technological culture. Overcoming these realities consists of rediscovering ourselves as creative and spiritual beings, as opposed to consumers. Spirituality, as experienced in and through a sense of relationship with Nature, then allows us to talk about what is strangely invisible, but certainly necessary if we want to rethink ways of living and reshape modern societies. The overcoming of these realities may consist in rediscovering humans as part of nature as opposed to the human-nature dichotomy that dominates political discourses.

 

Spirituality in general, not just Indigenous, is a category of growing salience for many Westerns. While the genealogy of spirituality remains complex and its usage fluid, it has come to mean something specific, referring to what may be known as ‘new age’ or ‘spiritual era’. Since I’ve begun to work with Indigenous peoples, I have thought a lot about ceremony and ritual. All human societies have ceremonies, rituals, including religious rituals and sacraments, national rituals, seasonal festivals, and rites of passage and initiation, like the rituals surrounding birth, marriage, and death. These are generally community and culturally based and follow a traditional, formal pattern. Rituals imply a kind of continuity, a memory transmitted from past generations through the practice of the ritual itself as they bring the past to the present.

 

English anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, viewed rituals and certain kinds of spiritual beliefs as serving a ‘corrective function’, allowing integration of narrow, individual consciousness with the larger circuits of mental process, including collective and environmental ‘ecologies of mind’, how he called it. In the light of Bateson’s theories, psychoactive plants can be seen as tools for loosening up mental processes, blurring ego boundaries between individuals and their larger social and ecological contexts.  Ritual in this context is instrumental but not as something that maintains social structure; rather, it fosters self-transformation while at the same time challenging the participants' own cultural constructs and basic assumptions about the world.

 

Bateson also applies cybernetics to the field of ecological anthropology. He saw the world as a series of systems containing those of individuals, societies, and ecosystems. Within each system is found competition and dependency. He also viewed that all three systems were all together a part of one supreme cybernetic system that controls everything instead of just interacting systems. This supreme system is beyond the self of the individual and could be equated to what many people refer to as God, though Bateson referred to it as Mind.

Bateson also argued that Western epistemology perpetuates a system of understanding which is purpose or means-to-an-end driven. And this narrows our perception, thus limiting what comes into consciousness and therefore limiting the amount of wisdom that can be generated from the perception. He then argues for a position of humility and acceptance of the natural system instead of scientific superiority as a solution. He believes that humility can come about only when thought and emotion are combined to obtain knowledge.

And here is where Bateson and Indigenous people share an understanding. Such understanding of humility is central to animism and traditional Indigenous knowledge. Once Indigenous people are immersed in deep experiences with nature, they nurture a stance of humility, gratitude, and wonder at the contingency of life.  They perceive (and live) the world as relational and animate: humans are nature (and vice versa). They have deployed what has been called exuberant “technologies of enchantment” that reinforce connections with places and events. They perceive themselves as serving these other-than-human contexts, rather than the opposite. For them, care is what provides the sustenance of diversity and abundance, that is affective and embodied as opposed to calculative and rational. This means that different beings (human or non-human) come, “into being through the relations that enable them and that they, in turn, are able to establish,” as stated by Peruvian anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena.

 

Uni: Cultural appropriation or cultural exchanges?

 

Yawanawá’s most used and now very popularised plant medicine is the uni, commonly known as ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is a South American entheogenic brew made out of a vine called Baniteriopsis caapi and a plant most known as Psychotria viridis (also known as chacrona). The brew has been used for at least 3500 years (with some arguing 5000 or even 8000 years) and it is as a traditional spiritual medicine used in ceremonies among different Indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin.

 

By naming ayahuasca as uni, the Yawanawá teach us about unity. According to the Yawanawá, taking uni is an opportunity to unite and expand the family. Here, ‘family’ refers to the extended family of humans and other-than-human beings. It is only because of this continual engagement with other-than-human beings that they are able to understand all there is to know of the natural world. Their constant rituals and journeys through uni’s ensure that the relationship between humans and other-than-human beings is one of union, balance and reciprocation – meaning that humans never take more from other-than-humans than that which they can return – not just materially but with honour, gratitude, chants and prayer.

 

I started to be curious about the exchanges between the Yawanawá and non-Indigenous, especially Westerns, when I moved to the United Kingdom and noticed an enormous interest of Europeans in Indigenous traditions and medicines. When I was visiting the Yawanawá for the first time I also witnessed how much they were learning from non-Indigenous people too. Then, few months later one of their main spiritual leaders, the elder and pajé Tatá passed away and a lot of things changed in the village he used to live. I remember hearing from his grandson Rasu, a youth spiritual leader at that time, that when Tatá was alive they would live and work just for the spiritual world. And then he said: “Now that he is not here anymore, everything we do is for the material world.” Those words were very strong to me and made me realise how things have changed among them. They were working like never to promote rituals for non-Indigenous people, without much time for leisure, without much time to spend on their own rituals.

 

That made me think that they were losing themselves in our world, the so-called material world. But traditionally this type of exchange between cultures is consistent with the nature of Indigenous knowledge, which has always been exchanged across and between cultures. So, I thought to myself: isn’t it supposed to be happening? And then I talked to another Yawanawá elder about it. I went to him saying, “aren’t you afraid of reproducing the same mistakes we’ve made? And most importantly, aren’t you afraid of losing control of the medicines?” Afterall, many of the non-Indigenous people that were going there were learning from their traditions to then become shamans to other people across the world. And he said to me: “We knew this would happen. Our ancestors always told us that one day the white men would come and would ask us about the medicines and would want to learn about them. And we have the duty to share them. They are not ours; they are a gift from the forest”, he said. “The knowledge is ours, but how would the medicines work alone if we do not share the knowledge? They wouldn’t. They would probably be risky and cause more harm than good”, he complemented. In their view all this movement towards Indigenous spirituality, what many have called indigeneity, is deeply related to our urgent need to reconnect with the natural/spiritual world of which we are part as a way to move towards transformation.

 

I then realised that the exchange between Indigenous and non-Indigenous was a two-way exchange. As some Yawanawá always say, they would never be able to play different instruments in their rituals, such as the guitar, if it was not for their relationship with non-Indigenous. Instead of naming such exchanges as cultural appropriation, I prefer to see it as cultural exchanges and collaboration. But of course, there is more to this debate when we think about Indigenous rights and epistemic justice.

 

Indigenous rights and epistemic justice

 

Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect, and develop their biocultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and cultural expressions according to different regulations that are already in place, like the ILO 169 and the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity. Considering the extremely high demand to treat millions of depressed patients, the medicalization of ayahuasca, for example, without adequate regulation can be detrimental to Indigenous peoples.

 

The Indigenous epistemological attributes to the use of plant medicines are still to be recognized, however. A practical consequence of this situation in Brazil, for example, is that Indigenous people face difficulties when transporting their medicines inside the Brazilian territory. To foster the enforcement of their rights, Indigenous People at the different Indigenous Ayahuasca Conferences made a commitment to use their traditional medicines in “wise and responsible ways” and the creation of an “Indigenous Ethical Council on Traditional Medicines” was recommended.

 

But still most attempts to evaluate Indigenous knowledge systems by non-Indigenous often involves the use of scientific methods to prove their rigor, thereby rendering them invalid. This generates epistemic conflicts and possible injustices. Epistemic justice represents the phenomena of, and the violence resulting from, epistemological imposition, or domination of one particular way of knowing the world at the expense of others. Epistemic justice requires co-existence of different knowledge systems, diverse ways of knowing, seeing and being in the world. Epistemic Injustice, on the other hand, then is based on the logic and rhetoric of salvation (including democracy and progress). It hides the logic of coloniality – land, labour, war, destruction, racism, sexism, inequalities, injustice. It is normally violent and involves cultural and political oppression. It is a result of the Western historiographic, ethnographic and geographic “productions” of peoples and continents.

 

When questioned about the validity of Indigenous knowledge, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous interviewees mentioned how such traditional knowledge is sophisticated, diverse yet unique. The Amazon’s diverse traditional people have been experimenting with the biodiversity around them for centuries and, in many cases, the mixtures they use for healing different pathologies are very complex. The technology to replace such “alchemy” would require years to reach the level of sophistication at hand. As argued by Indigenous leader João Paulo Tukano: “manipulation of forest medicines involves much more than mixing the compounds of such medicines. It is not just a chemical manipulation, as in modern science. It is a meta-chemical experience that involves different mixtures of plants, minerals, elements, spirits, dreams, cosmologies and more.” Finally, in the words of a Yawanawá interviewee, “White people have run over the traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples to impose their scientific knowledge as if it is the best one. But they have lost their way and are now coming back to us to get back on track. I’m afraid to say I do not believe in their ideas and way of doing things anymore”.

 

In terms of rights, it is also important to recognize that the Brazilian Biodiversity Law decouples genetic heritage from traditional knowledge, ignoring Indigenous Peoples’ beliefs, and their interactions and co-evolution with the rest of nature and biodiversity for thousands of years. This is a result of the user-provider dichotomy present in international legislation. Such dichotomy generates a false duality between users and holders of genetic heritage and traditional knowledge, and assumes that holders of traditional knowledge are not users; that is, they do neither research nor technological development (to use the terms of Law 13.123/2015) based on their knowledge. Epistemologically, this imposed duality is a colonial legacy and must be abandoned if we want to move towards innovative models for knowledge co-creation. Innovation arises not only from the ‘outside’ user’s appropriation and use of knowledge or genetic heritage, but from encounters between two bodies of knowledge. This is an important epistemic problem that becomes crucial and threatening when scientists go to traditional communities assuming that an equitable and fair dialogue is possible, when there is already a hierarchy of superiority in which the scientist knows more and better than the community, and is the one in charge of creating the “innovative knowledge”.

 

In comm-uni-on

 

When looking at the results of the research I found that ritual provides the structure and space where self-transformation can happen. During ayahuasca rituals, participants are physically and temporarily away from their culture. Victor Turner called this liminal space communitas, an arena where the participants affirm and reaffirm fellowship with the community. The ingestion of the medicine evokes an ideal instrument for critiquing mainstream culture because it enables participants to challenge their basic cultural assumptions about themselves and their world. But then of course, you need to do your “homework” and integrate what you experienced in the ritual in your everyday life and this is the most important part of self-transformation.

I will never forget when one of the participants told me, “I met God tonight and now I understand what it is and how I can manifest its presence”. “Uni told me that God is everywhere, in every being and it wants us to dance, to chant, to be in common, to share the ground, to be together.”

 

In numerous interviews, participants expressed that they felt Western culture not only discourages people from “discovering themselves” but it is also lacking in utilizing ritual in any constructive way. It is like our ability to be open to, curious about, understand, and accept our own feelings and needs is shut down by other immediate needs that modern society impose on us. And we lose our ability to understand our place in relation to nature, to have more consistent choices around our feelings and behavior, to meet our needs and the needs of others. We need to know what is going on with us first if we are to understand other humans and other beings. Knowing what others need is key to ecological balance. Each of us was born with a certain ability to nurture. Nurturing ourselves to be able to nourish other beings, as in the act of breastfeeding.

 

Arne Naess, the father of deep ecology, has called this process self-realisation. For us humans, self-realisation involves the development of wide identification in which the sense of self is no longer limited by the personal ego, but instead encompasses greater and greater wholes. Naess has called this expanded sense of self the ecological self, where our own human striving for self-realisation is on an equal footing to the strivings of other beings. There is a fundamental equality between human and non-human life. This perspective contrasts with the anthropocentric view which ascribes intrinsic value only to humans, valuing nature only if it is useful to our own species.

For that I believe it is important to understand the role of emotions in moving towards such practice of self-realisation. Emotions are considered individual responses to relevant events producing feelings of pleasure or pain; they help to find solutions to concerns that cannot be treated routinely; they are used to accept or decline the interaction with objects, persons, and other beings; and they tend to control behaviors and thoughts. As such they have a lot of influence on how we feel and attribute meaning to things and people. For example, why do people vote for Bolsonaro even knowing that he will not protect the forest and Indigenous Peoples? It also affects our capacity to act in relation to other-than-human-natures. In human-nature studies, engagement with these ideas leads to affective and emotional aspects from the psyche to the global scale. Such movement includes a call for an ethics and political practice that nurtures the concepts of ‘being-in-common’, in communion.

One of the main challenges we have as a species is that we have forgotten our connection to nature. We have assumed that we own nature. The initial results of my research show that Amazonian plants and rituals are helping people to re-awake such connections. As importantly, people are comprehending that the plants, for example, are the ones “running the show”, by sustaining life on earth. Hopefully, there is a growing body of research on the intelligence and teachings of different plants[1]. Plants dominate every terrestrial environment, composing ninety-nine per cent of the biomass on earth. They are here much earlier than us and probably know much better about our Earth system.

 

Indigenous people have always had this perspective that plants are teachers. A few years ago, one would bring that up and would be just laughed at. Now, not so much. There is compelling evidence that plants are indeed intelligent. . . it is up to us to be open to listen to what they have to teach us. Finally, inclusive transitions are crucial in times of crises and could challenge the dominant practices of modern society. So far, we have been blocking or postponing our ability to communicate and act over the myriad crises we face as a species and Indigenous medicines could catalyse a transition.

 

[1] Paco Calvo, Monica Gagliano, Gustavo M Souza, Anthony Trewavas (2020) Plants are intelligent, here’s how, Annals of Botany, Volume 125, Issue 1, 2 January 2020, Pages 11–28.

 

Listening to the plants: Indigenous rituals and transitions for humanity

 

Some argue that the ecological crisis is a spiritual crisis. In this article I will present some initial results of my research on the role Amazonian traditional medicines and Indigenous spirituality may have in changing environmentally damaging attitudes.

 

At this moment of profound ecological and health crises, there is an urgent call to rethink human relationships with the rest of Nature. But how do we reconnect with Nature? According to different Indigenous Peoples in the Amazon we are experiencing a transition. As human beings, going through a transition is nothing new, whether as a collective or as individuals. COVID-19 made it clear to us that we are now collectively experiencing an important transition.

 

My main argument here is that Indigenous medicines could be seen as tools for changing larger social and ecological contexts faster. I look at the Yawanawá people, who live in the Brazilian Amazon, to give some practical examples and to reflect on aspects of cultural appropriation and Indigenous rights.

 

I will start by telling a story. I feel it is a good way to start once it is about Indigenous spirituality and they normally start their conversations by telling a story or a myth. Last time I was with the Yawanawá - and I will give some more information about them soon – I was talking to one of their spiritual leaders and I asked him how they say “sacred” in their language. His answer was that they do not have a sole word for that. But the main meaning of sacred to them is the mother’s breast milk and the act of breastfeeding. He explained to me that due to the importance of the mother’s breast milk for feeding and calming the baby, and so for maintaining the flow of life, the act of breastfeeding became the meaning of sacred. And then I thought – how are we feeding ourselves? And I am not just thinking about our bodies, but mainly about our spirits. Are we able to feed and calm ourselves everyday with the sacred? Whatever it means to each of us…

 

The central goal of my research was to examine the ways in which Ayahuasca and other traditional medicines that are used in Indigenous rituals are perceived to change participants' views of nature, and in consequence the way they relate to it. I chose the Yawanawá rituals as the ones in which I concentrated the research because they started to share their culture and medicines in the 2000s and very quickly, they became “trendy” and served as a good inspiration to find out more about different cultural constructions about nature.  Data was collected between 2016-2019 during field visits to the Yawanawá lands in Brazil but also during some of their spiritual retreats in Europe.

 

Enchanting transformations

 

The Yawanawá are hunters and gatherers. They see themselves as a unified people, a group that stands and works together, a family. That is why they call themselves ‘People of the Queixada (Peccary)’. The Yawanawá consider themselves to be the people of spirituality, the Yuve yahu in their language. They say that in the past, there were many pajés (the name given to spiritual healers and shamans, in Portuguese). To the Yawanawá, most plants are medicinal plants.

 

In traditional hunter-gatherer societies, there was no distinction between spirituality and the rest of subsistence and cultural life. In ‘civilised’ society, however, no river contains a spirit, no tree means life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom; plants nor animals no longer ‘speak’ to humankind – at least not to the majority of us. On the contrary, we are guided by material values. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right in our lives, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, food) or a service (a holiday, a new course, a therapy). This is rooted in the structural realities of today’s industrial and technological culture. Overcoming these realities consists of rediscovering ourselves as creative and spiritual beings, as opposed to consumers. Spirituality, as experienced in and through a sense of relationship with Nature, then allows us to talk about what is strangely invisible, but certainly necessary if we want to rethink ways of living and reshape modern societies. The overcoming of these realities may consist in rediscovering humans as part of nature as opposed to the human-nature dichotomy that dominates political discourses.

 

Spirituality in general, not just Indigenous, is a category of growing salience for many Westerns. While the genealogy of spirituality remains complex and its usage fluid, it has come to mean something specific, referring to what may be known as ‘new age’ or ‘spiritual era’. Since I’ve begun to work with Indigenous peoples, I have thought a lot about ceremony and ritual. All human societies have ceremonies, rituals, including religious rituals and sacraments, national rituals, seasonal festivals, and rites of passage and initiation, like the rituals surrounding birth, marriage, and death. These are generally community and culturally based and follow a traditional, formal pattern. Rituals imply a kind of continuity, a memory transmitted from past generations through the practice of the ritual itself as they bring the past to the present.

 

English anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, viewed rituals and certain kinds of spiritual beliefs as serving a ‘corrective function’, allowing integration of narrow, individual consciousness with the larger circuits of mental process, including collective and environmental ‘ecologies of mind’, how he called it. In the light of Bateson’s theories, psychoactive plants can be seen as tools for loosening up mental processes, blurring ego boundaries between individuals and their larger social and ecological contexts.  Ritual in this context is instrumental but not as something that maintains social structure; rather, it fosters self-transformation while at the same time challenging the participants' own cultural constructs and basic assumptions about the world.

 

Bateson also applies cybernetics to the field of ecological anthropology. He saw the world as a series of systems containing those of individuals, societies, and ecosystems. Within each system is found competition and dependency. He also viewed that all three systems were all together a part of one supreme cybernetic system that controls everything instead of just interacting systems. This supreme system is beyond the self of the individual and could be equated to what many people refer to as God, though Bateson referred to it as Mind.

Bateson also argued that Western epistemology perpetuates a system of understanding which is purpose or means-to-an-end driven. And this narrows our perception, thus limiting what comes into consciousness and therefore limiting the amount of wisdom that can be generated from the perception. He then argues for a position of humility and acceptance of the natural system instead of scientific superiority as a solution. He believes that humility can come about only when thought and emotion are combined to obtain knowledge.

And here is where Bateson and Indigenous people share an understanding. Such understanding of humility is central to animism and traditional Indigenous knowledge. Once Indigenous people are immersed in deep experiences with nature, they nurture a stance of humility, gratitude, and wonder at the contingency of life.  They perceive (and live) the world as relational and animate: humans are nature (and vice versa). They have deployed what has been called exuberant “technologies of enchantment” that reinforce connections with places and events. They perceive themselves as serving these other-than-human contexts, rather than the opposite. For them, care is what provides the sustenance of diversity and abundance, that is affective and embodied as opposed to calculative and rational. This means that different beings (human or non-human) come, “into being through the relations that enable them and that they, in turn, are able to establish,” as stated by Peruvian anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena.

 

Uni: Cultural appropriation or cultural exchanges?

 

Yawanawá’s most used and now very popularised plant medicine is the uni, commonly known as ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is a South American entheogenic brew made out of a vine called Baniteriopsis caapi and a plant most known as Psychotria viridis (also known as chacrona). The brew has been used for at least 3500 years (with some arguing 5000 or even 8000 years) and it is as a traditional spiritual medicine used in ceremonies among different Indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin.

 

By naming ayahuasca as uni, the Yawanawá teach us about unity. According to the Yawanawá, taking uni is an opportunity to unite and expand the family. Here, ‘family’ refers to the extended family of humans and other-than-human beings. It is only because of this continual engagement with other-than-human beings that they are able to understand all there is to know of the natural world. Their constant rituals and journeys through uni’s ensure that the relationship between humans and other-than-human beings is one of union, balance and reciprocation – meaning that humans never take more from other-than-humans than that which they can return – not just materially but with honour, gratitude, chants and prayer.

 

I started to be curious about the exchanges between the Yawanawá and non-Indigenous, especially Westerns, when I moved to the United Kingdom and noticed an enormous interest of Europeans in Indigenous traditions and medicines. When I was visiting the Yawanawá for the first time I also witnessed how much they were learning from non-Indigenous people too. Then, few months later one of their main spiritual leaders, the elder and pajé Tatá passed away and a lot of things changed in the village he used to live. I remember hearing from his grandson Rasu, a youth spiritual leader at that time, that when Tatá was alive they would live and work just for the spiritual world. And then he said: “Now that he is not here anymore, everything we do is for the material world.” Those words were very strong to me and made me realise how things have changed among them. They were working like never to promote rituals for non-Indigenous people, without much time for leisure, without much time to spend on their own rituals.

 

That made me think that they were losing themselves in our world, the so-called material world. But traditionally this type of exchange between cultures is consistent with the nature of Indigenous knowledge, which has always been exchanged across and between cultures. So, I thought to myself: isn’t it supposed to be happening? And then I talked to another Yawanawá elder about it. I went to him saying, “aren’t you afraid of reproducing the same mistakes we’ve made? And most importantly, aren’t you afraid of losing control of the medicines?” Afterall, many of the non-Indigenous people that were going there were learning from their traditions to then become shamans to other people across the world. And he said to me: “We knew this would happen. Our ancestors always told us that one day the white men would come and would ask us about the medicines and would want to learn about them. And we have the duty to share them. They are not ours; they are a gift from the forest”, he said. “The knowledge is ours, but how would the medicines work alone if we do not share the knowledge? They wouldn’t. They would probably be risky and cause more harm than good”, he complemented. In their view all this movement towards Indigenous spirituality, what many have called indigeneity, is deeply related to our urgent need to reconnect with the natural/spiritual world of which we are part as a way to move towards transformation.

 

I then realised that the exchange between Indigenous and non-Indigenous was a two-way exchange. As some Yawanawá always say, they would never be able to play different instruments in their rituals, such as the guitar, if it was not for their relationship with non-Indigenous. Instead of naming such exchanges as cultural appropriation, I prefer to see it as cultural exchanges and collaboration. But of course, there is more to this debate when we think about Indigenous rights and epistemic justice.

 

Indigenous rights and epistemic justice

 

Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect, and develop their biocultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and cultural expressions according to different regulations that are already in place, like the ILO 169 and the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity. Considering the extremely high demand to treat millions of depressed patients, the medicalization of ayahuasca, for example, without adequate regulation can be detrimental to Indigenous peoples.

 

The Indigenous epistemological attributes to the use of plant medicines are still to be recognized, however. A practical consequence of this situation in Brazil, for example, is that Indigenous people face difficulties when transporting their medicines inside the Brazilian territory. To foster the enforcement of their rights, Indigenous People at the different Indigenous Ayahuasca Conferences made a commitment to use their traditional medicines in “wise and responsible ways” and the creation of an “Indigenous Ethical Council on Traditional Medicines” was recommended.

 

But still most attempts to evaluate Indigenous knowledge systems by non-Indigenous often involves the use of scientific methods to prove their rigor, thereby rendering them invalid. This generates epistemic conflicts and possible injustices. Epistemic justice represents the phenomena of, and the violence resulting from, epistemological imposition, or domination of one particular way of knowing the world at the expense of others. Epistemic justice requires co-existence of different knowledge systems, diverse ways of knowing, seeing and being in the world. Epistemic Injustice, on the other hand, then is based on the logic and rhetoric of salvation (including democracy and progress). It hides the logic of coloniality – land, labour, war, destruction, racism, sexism, inequalities, injustice. It is normally violent and involves cultural and political oppression. It is a result of the Western historiographic, ethnographic and geographic “productions” of peoples and continents.

 

When questioned about the validity of Indigenous knowledge, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous interviewees mentioned how such traditional knowledge is sophisticated, diverse yet unique. The Amazon’s diverse traditional people have been experimenting with the biodiversity around them for centuries and, in many cases, the mixtures they use for healing different pathologies are very complex. The technology to replace such “alchemy” would require years to reach the level of sophistication at hand. As argued by Indigenous leader João Paulo Tukano: “manipulation of forest medicines involves much more than mixing the compounds of such medicines. It is not just a chemical manipulation, as in modern science. It is a meta-chemical experience that involves different mixtures of plants, minerals, elements, spirits, dreams, cosmologies and more.” Finally, in the words of a Yawanawá interviewee, “White people have run over the traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples to impose their scientific knowledge as if it is the best one. But they have lost their way and are now coming back to us to get back on track. I’m afraid to say I do not believe in their ideas and way of doing things anymore”.

 

In terms of rights, it is also important to recognize that the Brazilian Biodiversity Law decouples genetic heritage from traditional knowledge, ignoring Indigenous Peoples’ beliefs, and their interactions and co-evolution with the rest of nature and biodiversity for thousands of years. This is a result of the user-provider dichotomy present in international legislation. Such dichotomy generates a false duality between users and holders of genetic heritage and traditional knowledge, and assumes that holders of traditional knowledge are not users; that is, they do neither research nor technological development (to use the terms of Law 13.123/2015) based on their knowledge. Epistemologically, this imposed duality is a colonial legacy and must be abandoned if we want to move towards innovative models for knowledge co-creation. Innovation arises not only from the ‘outside’ user’s appropriation and use of knowledge or genetic heritage, but from encounters between two bodies of knowledge. This is an important epistemic problem that becomes crucial and threatening when scientists go to traditional communities assuming that an equitable and fair dialogue is possible, when there is already a hierarchy of superiority in which the scientist knows more and better than the community, and is the one in charge of creating the “innovative knowledge”.

 

In comm-uni-on

 

When looking at the results of the research I found that ritual provides the structure and space where self-transformation can happen. During ayahuasca rituals, participants are physically and temporarily away from their culture. Victor Turner called this liminal space communitas, an arena where the participants affirm and reaffirm fellowship with the community. The ingestion of the medicine evokes an ideal instrument for critiquing mainstream culture because it enables participants to challenge their basic cultural assumptions about themselves and their world. But then of course, you need to do your “homework” and integrate what you experienced in the ritual in your everyday life and this is the most important part of self-transformation.

I will never forget when one of the participants told me, “I met God tonight and now I understand what it is and how I can manifest its presence”. “Uni told me that God is everywhere, in every being and it wants us to dance, to chant, to be in common, to share the ground, to be together.”

 

In numerous interviews, participants expressed that they felt Western culture not only discourages people from “discovering themselves” but it is also lacking in utilizing ritual in any constructive way. It is like our ability to be open to, curious about, understand, and accept our own feelings and needs is shut down by other immediate needs that modern society impose on us. And we lose our ability to understand our place in relation to nature, to have more consistent choices around our feelings and behavior, to meet our needs and the needs of others. We need to know what is going on with us first if we are to understand other humans and other beings. Knowing what others need is key to ecological balance. Each of us was born with a certain ability to nurture. Nurturing ourselves to be able to nourish other beings, as in the act of breastfeeding.

 

Arne Naess, the father of deep ecology, has called this process self-realisation. For us humans, self-realisation involves the development of wide identification in which the sense of self is no longer limited by the personal ego, but instead encompasses greater and greater wholes. Naess has called this expanded sense of self the ecological self, where our own human striving for self-realisation is on an equal footing to the strivings of other beings. There is a fundamental equality between human and non-human life. This perspective contrasts with the anthropocentric view which ascribes intrinsic value only to humans, valuing nature only if it is useful to our own species.

For that I believe it is important to understand the role of emotions in moving towards such practice of self-realisation. Emotions are considered individual responses to relevant events producing feelings of pleasure or pain; they help to find solutions to concerns that cannot be treated routinely; they are used to accept or decline the interaction with objects, persons, and other beings; and they tend to control behaviors and thoughts. As such they have a lot of influence on how we feel and attribute meaning to things and people. For example, why do people vote for Bolsonaro even knowing that he will not protect the forest and Indigenous Peoples? It also affects our capacity to act in relation to other-than-human-natures. In human-nature studies, engagement with these ideas leads to affective and emotional aspects from the psyche to the global scale. Such movement includes a call for an ethics and political practice that nurtures the concepts of ‘being-in-common’, in communion.

One of the main challenges we have as a species is that we have forgotten our connection to nature. We have assumed that we own nature. The initial results of my research show that Amazonian plants and rituals are helping people to re-awake such connections. As importantly, people are comprehending that the plants, for example, are the ones “running the show”, by sustaining life on earth. Hopefully, there is a growing body of research on the intelligence and teachings of different plants[1]. Plants dominate every terrestrial environment, composing ninety-nine per cent of the biomass on earth. They are here much earlier than us and probably know much better about our Earth system.

 

Indigenous people have always had this perspective that plants are teachers. A few years ago, one would bring that up and would be just laughed at. Now, not so much. There is compelling evidence that plants are indeed intelligent. . . it is up to us to be open to listen to what they have to teach us. Finally, inclusive transitions are crucial in times of crises and could challenge the dominant practices of modern society. So far, we have been blocking or postponing our ability to communicate and act over the myriad crises we face as a species and Indigenous medicines could catalyse a transition.

 

[1] Paco Calvo, Monica Gagliano, Gustavo M Souza, Anthony Trewavas (2020) Plants are intelligent, here’s how, Annals of Botany, Volume 125, Issue 1, 2 January 2020, Pages 11–28.

 

Maria Fernanda Gebara is a doctor in social anthropology, writer and professor who has spent the last decade working with different traditional communities in the Brazilian Amazon.

download filedownload filedownload filedownload filedownload file
No items found.

By Maria Fernanda Gebara

Listening to the plants: Indigenous rituals and transitions for humanity

 

Some argue that the ecological crisis is a spiritual crisis. In this article I will present some initial results of my research on the role Amazonian traditional medicines and Indigenous spirituality may have in changing environmentally damaging attitudes.

 

At this moment of profound ecological and health crises, there is an urgent call to rethink human relationships with the rest of Nature. But how do we reconnect with Nature? According to different Indigenous Peoples in the Amazon we are experiencing a transition. As human beings, going through a transition is nothing new, whether as a collective or as individuals. COVID-19 made it clear to us that we are now collectively experiencing an important transition.

 

My main argument here is that Indigenous medicines could be seen as tools for changing larger social and ecological contexts faster. I look at the Yawanawá people, who live in the Brazilian Amazon, to give some practical examples and to reflect on aspects of cultural appropriation and Indigenous rights.

 

I will start by telling a story. I feel it is a good way to start once it is about Indigenous spirituality and they normally start their conversations by telling a story or a myth. Last time I was with the Yawanawá - and I will give some more information about them soon – I was talking to one of their spiritual leaders and I asked him how they say “sacred” in their language. His answer was that they do not have a sole word for that. But the main meaning of sacred to them is the mother’s breast milk and the act of breastfeeding. He explained to me that due to the importance of the mother’s breast milk for feeding and calming the baby, and so for maintaining the flow of life, the act of breastfeeding became the meaning of sacred. And then I thought – how are we feeding ourselves? And I am not just thinking about our bodies, but mainly about our spirits. Are we able to feed and calm ourselves everyday with the sacred? Whatever it means to each of us…

 

The central goal of my research was to examine the ways in which Ayahuasca and other traditional medicines that are used in Indigenous rituals are perceived to change participants' views of nature, and in consequence the way they relate to it. I chose the Yawanawá rituals as the ones in which I concentrated the research because they started to share their culture and medicines in the 2000s and very quickly, they became “trendy” and served as a good inspiration to find out more about different cultural constructions about nature.  Data was collected between 2016-2019 during field visits to the Yawanawá lands in Brazil but also during some of their spiritual retreats in Europe.

 

Enchanting transformations

 

The Yawanawá are hunters and gatherers. They see themselves as a unified people, a group that stands and works together, a family. That is why they call themselves ‘People of the Queixada (Peccary)’. The Yawanawá consider themselves to be the people of spirituality, the Yuve yahu in their language. They say that in the past, there were many pajés (the name given to spiritual healers and shamans, in Portuguese). To the Yawanawá, most plants are medicinal plants.

 

In traditional hunter-gatherer societies, there was no distinction between spirituality and the rest of subsistence and cultural life. In ‘civilised’ society, however, no river contains a spirit, no tree means life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom; plants nor animals no longer ‘speak’ to humankind – at least not to the majority of us. On the contrary, we are guided by material values. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right in our lives, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, food) or a service (a holiday, a new course, a therapy). This is rooted in the structural realities of today’s industrial and technological culture. Overcoming these realities consists of rediscovering ourselves as creative and spiritual beings, as opposed to consumers. Spirituality, as experienced in and through a sense of relationship with Nature, then allows us to talk about what is strangely invisible, but certainly necessary if we want to rethink ways of living and reshape modern societies. The overcoming of these realities may consist in rediscovering humans as part of nature as opposed to the human-nature dichotomy that dominates political discourses.

 

Spirituality in general, not just Indigenous, is a category of growing salience for many Westerns. While the genealogy of spirituality remains complex and its usage fluid, it has come to mean something specific, referring to what may be known as ‘new age’ or ‘spiritual era’. Since I’ve begun to work with Indigenous peoples, I have thought a lot about ceremony and ritual. All human societies have ceremonies, rituals, including religious rituals and sacraments, national rituals, seasonal festivals, and rites of passage and initiation, like the rituals surrounding birth, marriage, and death. These are generally community and culturally based and follow a traditional, formal pattern. Rituals imply a kind of continuity, a memory transmitted from past generations through the practice of the ritual itself as they bring the past to the present.

 

English anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, viewed rituals and certain kinds of spiritual beliefs as serving a ‘corrective function’, allowing integration of narrow, individual consciousness with the larger circuits of mental process, including collective and environmental ‘ecologies of mind’, how he called it. In the light of Bateson’s theories, psychoactive plants can be seen as tools for loosening up mental processes, blurring ego boundaries between individuals and their larger social and ecological contexts.  Ritual in this context is instrumental but not as something that maintains social structure; rather, it fosters self-transformation while at the same time challenging the participants' own cultural constructs and basic assumptions about the world.

 

Bateson also applies cybernetics to the field of ecological anthropology. He saw the world as a series of systems containing those of individuals, societies, and ecosystems. Within each system is found competition and dependency. He also viewed that all three systems were all together a part of one supreme cybernetic system that controls everything instead of just interacting systems. This supreme system is beyond the self of the individual and could be equated to what many people refer to as God, though Bateson referred to it as Mind.

Bateson also argued that Western epistemology perpetuates a system of understanding which is purpose or means-to-an-end driven. And this narrows our perception, thus limiting what comes into consciousness and therefore limiting the amount of wisdom that can be generated from the perception. He then argues for a position of humility and acceptance of the natural system instead of scientific superiority as a solution. He believes that humility can come about only when thought and emotion are combined to obtain knowledge.

And here is where Bateson and Indigenous people share an understanding. Such understanding of humility is central to animism and traditional Indigenous knowledge. Once Indigenous people are immersed in deep experiences with nature, they nurture a stance of humility, gratitude, and wonder at the contingency of life.  They perceive (and live) the world as relational and animate: humans are nature (and vice versa). They have deployed what has been called exuberant “technologies of enchantment” that reinforce connections with places and events. They perceive themselves as serving these other-than-human contexts, rather than the opposite. For them, care is what provides the sustenance of diversity and abundance, that is affective and embodied as opposed to calculative and rational. This means that different beings (human or non-human) come, “into being through the relations that enable them and that they, in turn, are able to establish,” as stated by Peruvian anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena.

 

Uni: Cultural appropriation or cultural exchanges?

 

Yawanawá’s most used and now very popularised plant medicine is the uni, commonly known as ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is a South American entheogenic brew made out of a vine called Baniteriopsis caapi and a plant most known as Psychotria viridis (also known as chacrona). The brew has been used for at least 3500 years (with some arguing 5000 or even 8000 years) and it is as a traditional spiritual medicine used in ceremonies among different Indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin.

 

By naming ayahuasca as uni, the Yawanawá teach us about unity. According to the Yawanawá, taking uni is an opportunity to unite and expand the family. Here, ‘family’ refers to the extended family of humans and other-than-human beings. It is only because of this continual engagement with other-than-human beings that they are able to understand all there is to know of the natural world. Their constant rituals and journeys through uni’s ensure that the relationship between humans and other-than-human beings is one of union, balance and reciprocation – meaning that humans never take more from other-than-humans than that which they can return – not just materially but with honour, gratitude, chants and prayer.

 

I started to be curious about the exchanges between the Yawanawá and non-Indigenous, especially Westerns, when I moved to the United Kingdom and noticed an enormous interest of Europeans in Indigenous traditions and medicines. When I was visiting the Yawanawá for the first time I also witnessed how much they were learning from non-Indigenous people too. Then, few months later one of their main spiritual leaders, the elder and pajé Tatá passed away and a lot of things changed in the village he used to live. I remember hearing from his grandson Rasu, a youth spiritual leader at that time, that when Tatá was alive they would live and work just for the spiritual world. And then he said: “Now that he is not here anymore, everything we do is for the material world.” Those words were very strong to me and made me realise how things have changed among them. They were working like never to promote rituals for non-Indigenous people, without much time for leisure, without much time to spend on their own rituals.

 

That made me think that they were losing themselves in our world, the so-called material world. But traditionally this type of exchange between cultures is consistent with the nature of Indigenous knowledge, which has always been exchanged across and between cultures. So, I thought to myself: isn’t it supposed to be happening? And then I talked to another Yawanawá elder about it. I went to him saying, “aren’t you afraid of reproducing the same mistakes we’ve made? And most importantly, aren’t you afraid of losing control of the medicines?” Afterall, many of the non-Indigenous people that were going there were learning from their traditions to then become shamans to other people across the world. And he said to me: “We knew this would happen. Our ancestors always told us that one day the white men would come and would ask us about the medicines and would want to learn about them. And we have the duty to share them. They are not ours; they are a gift from the forest”, he said. “The knowledge is ours, but how would the medicines work alone if we do not share the knowledge? They wouldn’t. They would probably be risky and cause more harm than good”, he complemented. In their view all this movement towards Indigenous spirituality, what many have called indigeneity, is deeply related to our urgent need to reconnect with the natural/spiritual world of which we are part as a way to move towards transformation.

 

I then realised that the exchange between Indigenous and non-Indigenous was a two-way exchange. As some Yawanawá always say, they would never be able to play different instruments in their rituals, such as the guitar, if it was not for their relationship with non-Indigenous. Instead of naming such exchanges as cultural appropriation, I prefer to see it as cultural exchanges and collaboration. But of course, there is more to this debate when we think about Indigenous rights and epistemic justice.

 

Indigenous rights and epistemic justice

 

Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect, and develop their biocultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and cultural expressions according to different regulations that are already in place, like the ILO 169 and the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity. Considering the extremely high demand to treat millions of depressed patients, the medicalization of ayahuasca, for example, without adequate regulation can be detrimental to Indigenous peoples.

 

The Indigenous epistemological attributes to the use of plant medicines are still to be recognized, however. A practical consequence of this situation in Brazil, for example, is that Indigenous people face difficulties when transporting their medicines inside the Brazilian territory. To foster the enforcement of their rights, Indigenous People at the different Indigenous Ayahuasca Conferences made a commitment to use their traditional medicines in “wise and responsible ways” and the creation of an “Indigenous Ethical Council on Traditional Medicines” was recommended.

 

But still most attempts to evaluate Indigenous knowledge systems by non-Indigenous often involves the use of scientific methods to prove their rigor, thereby rendering them invalid. This generates epistemic conflicts and possible injustices. Epistemic justice represents the phenomena of, and the violence resulting from, epistemological imposition, or domination of one particular way of knowing the world at the expense of others. Epistemic justice requires co-existence of different knowledge systems, diverse ways of knowing, seeing and being in the world. Epistemic Injustice, on the other hand, then is based on the logic and rhetoric of salvation (including democracy and progress). It hides the logic of coloniality – land, labour, war, destruction, racism, sexism, inequalities, injustice. It is normally violent and involves cultural and political oppression. It is a result of the Western historiographic, ethnographic and geographic “productions” of peoples and continents.

 

When questioned about the validity of Indigenous knowledge, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous interviewees mentioned how such traditional knowledge is sophisticated, diverse yet unique. The Amazon’s diverse traditional people have been experimenting with the biodiversity around them for centuries and, in many cases, the mixtures they use for healing different pathologies are very complex. The technology to replace such “alchemy” would require years to reach the level of sophistication at hand. As argued by Indigenous leader João Paulo Tukano: “manipulation of forest medicines involves much more than mixing the compounds of such medicines. It is not just a chemical manipulation, as in modern science. It is a meta-chemical experience that involves different mixtures of plants, minerals, elements, spirits, dreams, cosmologies and more.” Finally, in the words of a Yawanawá interviewee, “White people have run over the traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples to impose their scientific knowledge as if it is the best one. But they have lost their way and are now coming back to us to get back on track. I’m afraid to say I do not believe in their ideas and way of doing things anymore”.

 

In terms of rights, it is also important to recognize that the Brazilian Biodiversity Law decouples genetic heritage from traditional knowledge, ignoring Indigenous Peoples’ beliefs, and their interactions and co-evolution with the rest of nature and biodiversity for thousands of years. This is a result of the user-provider dichotomy present in international legislation. Such dichotomy generates a false duality between users and holders of genetic heritage and traditional knowledge, and assumes that holders of traditional knowledge are not users; that is, they do neither research nor technological development (to use the terms of Law 13.123/2015) based on their knowledge. Epistemologically, this imposed duality is a colonial legacy and must be abandoned if we want to move towards innovative models for knowledge co-creation. Innovation arises not only from the ‘outside’ user’s appropriation and use of knowledge or genetic heritage, but from encounters between two bodies of knowledge. This is an important epistemic problem that becomes crucial and threatening when scientists go to traditional communities assuming that an equitable and fair dialogue is possible, when there is already a hierarchy of superiority in which the scientist knows more and better than the community, and is the one in charge of creating the “innovative knowledge”.

 

In comm-uni-on

 

When looking at the results of the research I found that ritual provides the structure and space where self-transformation can happen. During ayahuasca rituals, participants are physically and temporarily away from their culture. Victor Turner called this liminal space communitas, an arena where the participants affirm and reaffirm fellowship with the community. The ingestion of the medicine evokes an ideal instrument for critiquing mainstream culture because it enables participants to challenge their basic cultural assumptions about themselves and their world. But then of course, you need to do your “homework” and integrate what you experienced in the ritual in your everyday life and this is the most important part of self-transformation.

I will never forget when one of the participants told me, “I met God tonight and now I understand what it is and how I can manifest its presence”. “Uni told me that God is everywhere, in every being and it wants us to dance, to chant, to be in common, to share the ground, to be together.”

 

In numerous interviews, participants expressed that they felt Western culture not only discourages people from “discovering themselves” but it is also lacking in utilizing ritual in any constructive way. It is like our ability to be open to, curious about, understand, and accept our own feelings and needs is shut down by other immediate needs that modern society impose on us. And we lose our ability to understand our place in relation to nature, to have more consistent choices around our feelings and behavior, to meet our needs and the needs of others. We need to know what is going on with us first if we are to understand other humans and other beings. Knowing what others need is key to ecological balance. Each of us was born with a certain ability to nurture. Nurturing ourselves to be able to nourish other beings, as in the act of breastfeeding.

 

Arne Naess, the father of deep ecology, has called this process self-realisation. For us humans, self-realisation involves the development of wide identification in which the sense of self is no longer limited by the personal ego, but instead encompasses greater and greater wholes. Naess has called this expanded sense of self the ecological self, where our own human striving for self-realisation is on an equal footing to the strivings of other beings. There is a fundamental equality between human and non-human life. This perspective contrasts with the anthropocentric view which ascribes intrinsic value only to humans, valuing nature only if it is useful to our own species.

For that I believe it is important to understand the role of emotions in moving towards such practice of self-realisation. Emotions are considered individual responses to relevant events producing feelings of pleasure or pain; they help to find solutions to concerns that cannot be treated routinely; they are used to accept or decline the interaction with objects, persons, and other beings; and they tend to control behaviors and thoughts. As such they have a lot of influence on how we feel and attribute meaning to things and people. For example, why do people vote for Bolsonaro even knowing that he will not protect the forest and Indigenous Peoples? It also affects our capacity to act in relation to other-than-human-natures. In human-nature studies, engagement with these ideas leads to affective and emotional aspects from the psyche to the global scale. Such movement includes a call for an ethics and political practice that nurtures the concepts of ‘being-in-common’, in communion.

One of the main challenges we have as a species is that we have forgotten our connection to nature. We have assumed that we own nature. The initial results of my research show that Amazonian plants and rituals are helping people to re-awake such connections. As importantly, people are comprehending that the plants, for example, are the ones “running the show”, by sustaining life on earth. Hopefully, there is a growing body of research on the intelligence and teachings of different plants[1]. Plants dominate every terrestrial environment, composing ninety-nine per cent of the biomass on earth. They are here much earlier than us and probably know much better about our Earth system.

 

Indigenous people have always had this perspective that plants are teachers. A few years ago, one would bring that up and would be just laughed at. Now, not so much. There is compelling evidence that plants are indeed intelligent. . . it is up to us to be open to listen to what they have to teach us. Finally, inclusive transitions are crucial in times of crises and could challenge the dominant practices of modern society. So far, we have been blocking or postponing our ability to communicate and act over the myriad crises we face as a species and Indigenous medicines could catalyse a transition.

 

[1] Paco Calvo, Monica Gagliano, Gustavo M Souza, Anthony Trewavas (2020) Plants are intelligent, here’s how, Annals of Botany, Volume 125, Issue 1, 2 January 2020, Pages 11–28.

 

Listening to the plants: Indigenous rituals and transitions for humanity

 

Some argue that the ecological crisis is a spiritual crisis. In this article I will present some initial results of my research on the role Amazonian traditional medicines and Indigenous spirituality may have in changing environmentally damaging attitudes.

 

At this moment of profound ecological and health crises, there is an urgent call to rethink human relationships with the rest of Nature. But how do we reconnect with Nature? According to different Indigenous Peoples in the Amazon we are experiencing a transition. As human beings, going through a transition is nothing new, whether as a collective or as individuals. COVID-19 made it clear to us that we are now collectively experiencing an important transition.

 

My main argument here is that Indigenous medicines could be seen as tools for changing larger social and ecological contexts faster. I look at the Yawanawá people, who live in the Brazilian Amazon, to give some practical examples and to reflect on aspects of cultural appropriation and Indigenous rights.

 

I will start by telling a story. I feel it is a good way to start once it is about Indigenous spirituality and they normally start their conversations by telling a story or a myth. Last time I was with the Yawanawá - and I will give some more information about them soon – I was talking to one of their spiritual leaders and I asked him how they say “sacred” in their language. His answer was that they do not have a sole word for that. But the main meaning of sacred to them is the mother’s breast milk and the act of breastfeeding. He explained to me that due to the importance of the mother’s breast milk for feeding and calming the baby, and so for maintaining the flow of life, the act of breastfeeding became the meaning of sacred. And then I thought – how are we feeding ourselves? And I am not just thinking about our bodies, but mainly about our spirits. Are we able to feed and calm ourselves everyday with the sacred? Whatever it means to each of us…

 

The central goal of my research was to examine the ways in which Ayahuasca and other traditional medicines that are used in Indigenous rituals are perceived to change participants' views of nature, and in consequence the way they relate to it. I chose the Yawanawá rituals as the ones in which I concentrated the research because they started to share their culture and medicines in the 2000s and very quickly, they became “trendy” and served as a good inspiration to find out more about different cultural constructions about nature.  Data was collected between 2016-2019 during field visits to the Yawanawá lands in Brazil but also during some of their spiritual retreats in Europe.

 

Enchanting transformations

 

The Yawanawá are hunters and gatherers. They see themselves as a unified people, a group that stands and works together, a family. That is why they call themselves ‘People of the Queixada (Peccary)’. The Yawanawá consider themselves to be the people of spirituality, the Yuve yahu in their language. They say that in the past, there were many pajés (the name given to spiritual healers and shamans, in Portuguese). To the Yawanawá, most plants are medicinal plants.

 

In traditional hunter-gatherer societies, there was no distinction between spirituality and the rest of subsistence and cultural life. In ‘civilised’ society, however, no river contains a spirit, no tree means life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom; plants nor animals no longer ‘speak’ to humankind – at least not to the majority of us. On the contrary, we are guided by material values. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right in our lives, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, food) or a service (a holiday, a new course, a therapy). This is rooted in the structural realities of today’s industrial and technological culture. Overcoming these realities consists of rediscovering ourselves as creative and spiritual beings, as opposed to consumers. Spirituality, as experienced in and through a sense of relationship with Nature, then allows us to talk about what is strangely invisible, but certainly necessary if we want to rethink ways of living and reshape modern societies. The overcoming of these realities may consist in rediscovering humans as part of nature as opposed to the human-nature dichotomy that dominates political discourses.

 

Spirituality in general, not just Indigenous, is a category of growing salience for many Westerns. While the genealogy of spirituality remains complex and its usage fluid, it has come to mean something specific, referring to what may be known as ‘new age’ or ‘spiritual era’. Since I’ve begun to work with Indigenous peoples, I have thought a lot about ceremony and ritual. All human societies have ceremonies, rituals, including religious rituals and sacraments, national rituals, seasonal festivals, and rites of passage and initiation, like the rituals surrounding birth, marriage, and death. These are generally community and culturally based and follow a traditional, formal pattern. Rituals imply a kind of continuity, a memory transmitted from past generations through the practice of the ritual itself as they bring the past to the present.

 

English anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, viewed rituals and certain kinds of spiritual beliefs as serving a ‘corrective function’, allowing integration of narrow, individual consciousness with the larger circuits of mental process, including collective and environmental ‘ecologies of mind’, how he called it. In the light of Bateson’s theories, psychoactive plants can be seen as tools for loosening up mental processes, blurring ego boundaries between individuals and their larger social and ecological contexts.  Ritual in this context is instrumental but not as something that maintains social structure; rather, it fosters self-transformation while at the same time challenging the participants' own cultural constructs and basic assumptions about the world.

 

Bateson also applies cybernetics to the field of ecological anthropology. He saw the world as a series of systems containing those of individuals, societies, and ecosystems. Within each system is found competition and dependency. He also viewed that all three systems were all together a part of one supreme cybernetic system that controls everything instead of just interacting systems. This supreme system is beyond the self of the individual and could be equated to what many people refer to as God, though Bateson referred to it as Mind.

Bateson also argued that Western epistemology perpetuates a system of understanding which is purpose or means-to-an-end driven. And this narrows our perception, thus limiting what comes into consciousness and therefore limiting the amount of wisdom that can be generated from the perception. He then argues for a position of humility and acceptance of the natural system instead of scientific superiority as a solution. He believes that humility can come about only when thought and emotion are combined to obtain knowledge.

And here is where Bateson and Indigenous people share an understanding. Such understanding of humility is central to animism and traditional Indigenous knowledge. Once Indigenous people are immersed in deep experiences with nature, they nurture a stance of humility, gratitude, and wonder at the contingency of life.  They perceive (and live) the world as relational and animate: humans are nature (and vice versa). They have deployed what has been called exuberant “technologies of enchantment” that reinforce connections with places and events. They perceive themselves as serving these other-than-human contexts, rather than the opposite. For them, care is what provides the sustenance of diversity and abundance, that is affective and embodied as opposed to calculative and rational. This means that different beings (human or non-human) come, “into being through the relations that enable them and that they, in turn, are able to establish,” as stated by Peruvian anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena.

 

Uni: Cultural appropriation or cultural exchanges?

 

Yawanawá’s most used and now very popularised plant medicine is the uni, commonly known as ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is a South American entheogenic brew made out of a vine called Baniteriopsis caapi and a plant most known as Psychotria viridis (also known as chacrona). The brew has been used for at least 3500 years (with some arguing 5000 or even 8000 years) and it is as a traditional spiritual medicine used in ceremonies among different Indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin.

 

By naming ayahuasca as uni, the Yawanawá teach us about unity. According to the Yawanawá, taking uni is an opportunity to unite and expand the family. Here, ‘family’ refers to the extended family of humans and other-than-human beings. It is only because of this continual engagement with other-than-human beings that they are able to understand all there is to know of the natural world. Their constant rituals and journeys through uni’s ensure that the relationship between humans and other-than-human beings is one of union, balance and reciprocation – meaning that humans never take more from other-than-humans than that which they can return – not just materially but with honour, gratitude, chants and prayer.

 

I started to be curious about the exchanges between the Yawanawá and non-Indigenous, especially Westerns, when I moved to the United Kingdom and noticed an enormous interest of Europeans in Indigenous traditions and medicines. When I was visiting the Yawanawá for the first time I also witnessed how much they were learning from non-Indigenous people too. Then, few months later one of their main spiritual leaders, the elder and pajé Tatá passed away and a lot of things changed in the village he used to live. I remember hearing from his grandson Rasu, a youth spiritual leader at that time, that when Tatá was alive they would live and work just for the spiritual world. And then he said: “Now that he is not here anymore, everything we do is for the material world.” Those words were very strong to me and made me realise how things have changed among them. They were working like never to promote rituals for non-Indigenous people, without much time for leisure, without much time to spend on their own rituals.

 

That made me think that they were losing themselves in our world, the so-called material world. But traditionally this type of exchange between cultures is consistent with the nature of Indigenous knowledge, which has always been exchanged across and between cultures. So, I thought to myself: isn’t it supposed to be happening? And then I talked to another Yawanawá elder about it. I went to him saying, “aren’t you afraid of reproducing the same mistakes we’ve made? And most importantly, aren’t you afraid of losing control of the medicines?” Afterall, many of the non-Indigenous people that were going there were learning from their traditions to then become shamans to other people across the world. And he said to me: “We knew this would happen. Our ancestors always told us that one day the white men would come and would ask us about the medicines and would want to learn about them. And we have the duty to share them. They are not ours; they are a gift from the forest”, he said. “The knowledge is ours, but how would the medicines work alone if we do not share the knowledge? They wouldn’t. They would probably be risky and cause more harm than good”, he complemented. In their view all this movement towards Indigenous spirituality, what many have called indigeneity, is deeply related to our urgent need to reconnect with the natural/spiritual world of which we are part as a way to move towards transformation.

 

I then realised that the exchange between Indigenous and non-Indigenous was a two-way exchange. As some Yawanawá always say, they would never be able to play different instruments in their rituals, such as the guitar, if it was not for their relationship with non-Indigenous. Instead of naming such exchanges as cultural appropriation, I prefer to see it as cultural exchanges and collaboration. But of course, there is more to this debate when we think about Indigenous rights and epistemic justice.

 

Indigenous rights and epistemic justice

 

Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect, and develop their biocultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and cultural expressions according to different regulations that are already in place, like the ILO 169 and the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity. Considering the extremely high demand to treat millions of depressed patients, the medicalization of ayahuasca, for example, without adequate regulation can be detrimental to Indigenous peoples.

 

The Indigenous epistemological attributes to the use of plant medicines are still to be recognized, however. A practical consequence of this situation in Brazil, for example, is that Indigenous people face difficulties when transporting their medicines inside the Brazilian territory. To foster the enforcement of their rights, Indigenous People at the different Indigenous Ayahuasca Conferences made a commitment to use their traditional medicines in “wise and responsible ways” and the creation of an “Indigenous Ethical Council on Traditional Medicines” was recommended.

 

But still most attempts to evaluate Indigenous knowledge systems by non-Indigenous often involves the use of scientific methods to prove their rigor, thereby rendering them invalid. This generates epistemic conflicts and possible injustices. Epistemic justice represents the phenomena of, and the violence resulting from, epistemological imposition, or domination of one particular way of knowing the world at the expense of others. Epistemic justice requires co-existence of different knowledge systems, diverse ways of knowing, seeing and being in the world. Epistemic Injustice, on the other hand, then is based on the logic and rhetoric of salvation (including democracy and progress). It hides the logic of coloniality – land, labour, war, destruction, racism, sexism, inequalities, injustice. It is normally violent and involves cultural and political oppression. It is a result of the Western historiographic, ethnographic and geographic “productions” of peoples and continents.

 

When questioned about the validity of Indigenous knowledge, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous interviewees mentioned how such traditional knowledge is sophisticated, diverse yet unique. The Amazon’s diverse traditional people have been experimenting with the biodiversity around them for centuries and, in many cases, the mixtures they use for healing different pathologies are very complex. The technology to replace such “alchemy” would require years to reach the level of sophistication at hand. As argued by Indigenous leader João Paulo Tukano: “manipulation of forest medicines involves much more than mixing the compounds of such medicines. It is not just a chemical manipulation, as in modern science. It is a meta-chemical experience that involves different mixtures of plants, minerals, elements, spirits, dreams, cosmologies and more.” Finally, in the words of a Yawanawá interviewee, “White people have run over the traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples to impose their scientific knowledge as if it is the best one. But they have lost their way and are now coming back to us to get back on track. I’m afraid to say I do not believe in their ideas and way of doing things anymore”.

 

In terms of rights, it is also important to recognize that the Brazilian Biodiversity Law decouples genetic heritage from traditional knowledge, ignoring Indigenous Peoples’ beliefs, and their interactions and co-evolution with the rest of nature and biodiversity for thousands of years. This is a result of the user-provider dichotomy present in international legislation. Such dichotomy generates a false duality between users and holders of genetic heritage and traditional knowledge, and assumes that holders of traditional knowledge are not users; that is, they do neither research nor technological development (to use the terms of Law 13.123/2015) based on their knowledge. Epistemologically, this imposed duality is a colonial legacy and must be abandoned if we want to move towards innovative models for knowledge co-creation. Innovation arises not only from the ‘outside’ user’s appropriation and use of knowledge or genetic heritage, but from encounters between two bodies of knowledge. This is an important epistemic problem that becomes crucial and threatening when scientists go to traditional communities assuming that an equitable and fair dialogue is possible, when there is already a hierarchy of superiority in which the scientist knows more and better than the community, and is the one in charge of creating the “innovative knowledge”.

 

In comm-uni-on

 

When looking at the results of the research I found that ritual provides the structure and space where self-transformation can happen. During ayahuasca rituals, participants are physically and temporarily away from their culture. Victor Turner called this liminal space communitas, an arena where the participants affirm and reaffirm fellowship with the community. The ingestion of the medicine evokes an ideal instrument for critiquing mainstream culture because it enables participants to challenge their basic cultural assumptions about themselves and their world. But then of course, you need to do your “homework” and integrate what you experienced in the ritual in your everyday life and this is the most important part of self-transformation.

I will never forget when one of the participants told me, “I met God tonight and now I understand what it is and how I can manifest its presence”. “Uni told me that God is everywhere, in every being and it wants us to dance, to chant, to be in common, to share the ground, to be together.”

 

In numerous interviews, participants expressed that they felt Western culture not only discourages people from “discovering themselves” but it is also lacking in utilizing ritual in any constructive way. It is like our ability to be open to, curious about, understand, and accept our own feelings and needs is shut down by other immediate needs that modern society impose on us. And we lose our ability to understand our place in relation to nature, to have more consistent choices around our feelings and behavior, to meet our needs and the needs of others. We need to know what is going on with us first if we are to understand other humans and other beings. Knowing what others need is key to ecological balance. Each of us was born with a certain ability to nurture. Nurturing ourselves to be able to nourish other beings, as in the act of breastfeeding.

 

Arne Naess, the father of deep ecology, has called this process self-realisation. For us humans, self-realisation involves the development of wide identification in which the sense of self is no longer limited by the personal ego, but instead encompasses greater and greater wholes. Naess has called this expanded sense of self the ecological self, where our own human striving for self-realisation is on an equal footing to the strivings of other beings. There is a fundamental equality between human and non-human life. This perspective contrasts with the anthropocentric view which ascribes intrinsic value only to humans, valuing nature only if it is useful to our own species.

For that I believe it is important to understand the role of emotions in moving towards such practice of self-realisation. Emotions are considered individual responses to relevant events producing feelings of pleasure or pain; they help to find solutions to concerns that cannot be treated routinely; they are used to accept or decline the interaction with objects, persons, and other beings; and they tend to control behaviors and thoughts. As such they have a lot of influence on how we feel and attribute meaning to things and people. For example, why do people vote for Bolsonaro even knowing that he will not protect the forest and Indigenous Peoples? It also affects our capacity to act in relation to other-than-human-natures. In human-nature studies, engagement with these ideas leads to affective and emotional aspects from the psyche to the global scale. Such movement includes a call for an ethics and political practice that nurtures the concepts of ‘being-in-common’, in communion.

One of the main challenges we have as a species is that we have forgotten our connection to nature. We have assumed that we own nature. The initial results of my research show that Amazonian plants and rituals are helping people to re-awake such connections. As importantly, people are comprehending that the plants, for example, are the ones “running the show”, by sustaining life on earth. Hopefully, there is a growing body of research on the intelligence and teachings of different plants[1]. Plants dominate every terrestrial environment, composing ninety-nine per cent of the biomass on earth. They are here much earlier than us and probably know much better about our Earth system.

 

Indigenous people have always had this perspective that plants are teachers. A few years ago, one would bring that up and would be just laughed at. Now, not so much. There is compelling evidence that plants are indeed intelligent. . . it is up to us to be open to listen to what they have to teach us. Finally, inclusive transitions are crucial in times of crises and could challenge the dominant practices of modern society. So far, we have been blocking or postponing our ability to communicate and act over the myriad crises we face as a species and Indigenous medicines could catalyse a transition.

 

[1] Paco Calvo, Monica Gagliano, Gustavo M Souza, Anthony Trewavas (2020) Plants are intelligent, here’s how, Annals of Botany, Volume 125, Issue 1, 2 January 2020, Pages 11–28.

 

No items found.

Maria Fernanda Gebara is a doctor in social anthropology, writer and professor who has spent the last decade working with different traditional communities in the Brazilian Amazon.

download filedownload filedownload filedownload filedownload file

By Maria Fernanda Gebara

Listening to the plants: Indigenous rituals and transitions for humanity

 

Some argue that the ecological crisis is a spiritual crisis. In this article I will present some initial results of my research on the role Amazonian traditional medicines and Indigenous spirituality may have in changing environmentally damaging attitudes.

 

At this moment of profound ecological and health crises, there is an urgent call to rethink human relationships with the rest of Nature. But how do we reconnect with Nature? According to different Indigenous Peoples in the Amazon we are experiencing a transition. As human beings, going through a transition is nothing new, whether as a collective or as individuals. COVID-19 made it clear to us that we are now collectively experiencing an important transition.

 

My main argument here is that Indigenous medicines could be seen as tools for changing larger social and ecological contexts faster. I look at the Yawanawá people, who live in the Brazilian Amazon, to give some practical examples and to reflect on aspects of cultural appropriation and Indigenous rights.

 

I will start by telling a story. I feel it is a good way to start once it is about Indigenous spirituality and they normally start their conversations by telling a story or a myth. Last time I was with the Yawanawá - and I will give some more information about them soon – I was talking to one of their spiritual leaders and I asked him how they say “sacred” in their language. His answer was that they do not have a sole word for that. But the main meaning of sacred to them is the mother’s breast milk and the act of breastfeeding. He explained to me that due to the importance of the mother’s breast milk for feeding and calming the baby, and so for maintaining the flow of life, the act of breastfeeding became the meaning of sacred. And then I thought – how are we feeding ourselves? And I am not just thinking about our bodies, but mainly about our spirits. Are we able to feed and calm ourselves everyday with the sacred? Whatever it means to each of us…

 

The central goal of my research was to examine the ways in which Ayahuasca and other traditional medicines that are used in Indigenous rituals are perceived to change participants' views of nature, and in consequence the way they relate to it. I chose the Yawanawá rituals as the ones in which I concentrated the research because they started to share their culture and medicines in the 2000s and very quickly, they became “trendy” and served as a good inspiration to find out more about different cultural constructions about nature.  Data was collected between 2016-2019 during field visits to the Yawanawá lands in Brazil but also during some of their spiritual retreats in Europe.

 

Enchanting transformations

 

The Yawanawá are hunters and gatherers. They see themselves as a unified people, a group that stands and works together, a family. That is why they call themselves ‘People of the Queixada (Peccary)’. The Yawanawá consider themselves to be the people of spirituality, the Yuve yahu in their language. They say that in the past, there were many pajés (the name given to spiritual healers and shamans, in Portuguese). To the Yawanawá, most plants are medicinal plants.

 

In traditional hunter-gatherer societies, there was no distinction between spirituality and the rest of subsistence and cultural life. In ‘civilised’ society, however, no river contains a spirit, no tree means life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom; plants nor animals no longer ‘speak’ to humankind – at least not to the majority of us. On the contrary, we are guided by material values. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right in our lives, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, food) or a service (a holiday, a new course, a therapy). This is rooted in the structural realities of today’s industrial and technological culture. Overcoming these realities consists of rediscovering ourselves as creative and spiritual beings, as opposed to consumers. Spirituality, as experienced in and through a sense of relationship with Nature, then allows us to talk about what is strangely invisible, but certainly necessary if we want to rethink ways of living and reshape modern societies. The overcoming of these realities may consist in rediscovering humans as part of nature as opposed to the human-nature dichotomy that dominates political discourses.

 

Spirituality in general, not just Indigenous, is a category of growing salience for many Westerns. While the genealogy of spirituality remains complex and its usage fluid, it has come to mean something specific, referring to what may be known as ‘new age’ or ‘spiritual era’. Since I’ve begun to work with Indigenous peoples, I have thought a lot about ceremony and ritual. All human societies have ceremonies, rituals, including religious rituals and sacraments, national rituals, seasonal festivals, and rites of passage and initiation, like the rituals surrounding birth, marriage, and death. These are generally community and culturally based and follow a traditional, formal pattern. Rituals imply a kind of continuity, a memory transmitted from past generations through the practice of the ritual itself as they bring the past to the present.

 

English anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, viewed rituals and certain kinds of spiritual beliefs as serving a ‘corrective function’, allowing integration of narrow, individual consciousness with the larger circuits of mental process, including collective and environmental ‘ecologies of mind’, how he called it. In the light of Bateson’s theories, psychoactive plants can be seen as tools for loosening up mental processes, blurring ego boundaries between individuals and their larger social and ecological contexts.  Ritual in this context is instrumental but not as something that maintains social structure; rather, it fosters self-transformation while at the same time challenging the participants' own cultural constructs and basic assumptions about the world.

 

Bateson also applies cybernetics to the field of ecological anthropology. He saw the world as a series of systems containing those of individuals, societies, and ecosystems. Within each system is found competition and dependency. He also viewed that all three systems were all together a part of one supreme cybernetic system that controls everything instead of just interacting systems. This supreme system is beyond the self of the individual and could be equated to what many people refer to as God, though Bateson referred to it as Mind.

Bateson also argued that Western epistemology perpetuates a system of understanding which is purpose or means-to-an-end driven. And this narrows our perception, thus limiting what comes into consciousness and therefore limiting the amount of wisdom that can be generated from the perception. He then argues for a position of humility and acceptance of the natural system instead of scientific superiority as a solution. He believes that humility can come about only when thought and emotion are combined to obtain knowledge.

And here is where Bateson and Indigenous people share an understanding. Such understanding of humility is central to animism and traditional Indigenous knowledge. Once Indigenous people are immersed in deep experiences with nature, they nurture a stance of humility, gratitude, and wonder at the contingency of life.  They perceive (and live) the world as relational and animate: humans are nature (and vice versa). They have deployed what has been called exuberant “technologies of enchantment” that reinforce connections with places and events. They perceive themselves as serving these other-than-human contexts, rather than the opposite. For them, care is what provides the sustenance of diversity and abundance, that is affective and embodied as opposed to calculative and rational. This means that different beings (human or non-human) come, “into being through the relations that enable them and that they, in turn, are able to establish,” as stated by Peruvian anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena.

 

Uni: Cultural appropriation or cultural exchanges?

 

Yawanawá’s most used and now very popularised plant medicine is the uni, commonly known as ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is a South American entheogenic brew made out of a vine called Baniteriopsis caapi and a plant most known as Psychotria viridis (also known as chacrona). The brew has been used for at least 3500 years (with some arguing 5000 or even 8000 years) and it is as a traditional spiritual medicine used in ceremonies among different Indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin.

 

By naming ayahuasca as uni, the Yawanawá teach us about unity. According to the Yawanawá, taking uni is an opportunity to unite and expand the family. Here, ‘family’ refers to the extended family of humans and other-than-human beings. It is only because of this continual engagement with other-than-human beings that they are able to understand all there is to know of the natural world. Their constant rituals and journeys through uni’s ensure that the relationship between humans and other-than-human beings is one of union, balance and reciprocation – meaning that humans never take more from other-than-humans than that which they can return – not just materially but with honour, gratitude, chants and prayer.

 

I started to be curious about the exchanges between the Yawanawá and non-Indigenous, especially Westerns, when I moved to the United Kingdom and noticed an enormous interest of Europeans in Indigenous traditions and medicines. When I was visiting the Yawanawá for the first time I also witnessed how much they were learning from non-Indigenous people too. Then, few months later one of their main spiritual leaders, the elder and pajé Tatá passed away and a lot of things changed in the village he used to live. I remember hearing from his grandson Rasu, a youth spiritual leader at that time, that when Tatá was alive they would live and work just for the spiritual world. And then he said: “Now that he is not here anymore, everything we do is for the material world.” Those words were very strong to me and made me realise how things have changed among them. They were working like never to promote rituals for non-Indigenous people, without much time for leisure, without much time to spend on their own rituals.

 

That made me think that they were losing themselves in our world, the so-called material world. But traditionally this type of exchange between cultures is consistent with the nature of Indigenous knowledge, which has always been exchanged across and between cultures. So, I thought to myself: isn’t it supposed to be happening? And then I talked to another Yawanawá elder about it. I went to him saying, “aren’t you afraid of reproducing the same mistakes we’ve made? And most importantly, aren’t you afraid of losing control of the medicines?” Afterall, many of the non-Indigenous people that were going there were learning from their traditions to then become shamans to other people across the world. And he said to me: “We knew this would happen. Our ancestors always told us that one day the white men would come and would ask us about the medicines and would want to learn about them. And we have the duty to share them. They are not ours; they are a gift from the forest”, he said. “The knowledge is ours, but how would the medicines work alone if we do not share the knowledge? They wouldn’t. They would probably be risky and cause more harm than good”, he complemented. In their view all this movement towards Indigenous spirituality, what many have called indigeneity, is deeply related to our urgent need to reconnect with the natural/spiritual world of which we are part as a way to move towards transformation.

 

I then realised that the exchange between Indigenous and non-Indigenous was a two-way exchange. As some Yawanawá always say, they would never be able to play different instruments in their rituals, such as the guitar, if it was not for their relationship with non-Indigenous. Instead of naming such exchanges as cultural appropriation, I prefer to see it as cultural exchanges and collaboration. But of course, there is more to this debate when we think about Indigenous rights and epistemic justice.

 

Indigenous rights and epistemic justice

 

Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect, and develop their biocultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and cultural expressions according to different regulations that are already in place, like the ILO 169 and the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity. Considering the extremely high demand to treat millions of depressed patients, the medicalization of ayahuasca, for example, without adequate regulation can be detrimental to Indigenous peoples.

 

The Indigenous epistemological attributes to the use of plant medicines are still to be recognized, however. A practical consequence of this situation in Brazil, for example, is that Indigenous people face difficulties when transporting their medicines inside the Brazilian territory. To foster the enforcement of their rights, Indigenous People at the different Indigenous Ayahuasca Conferences made a commitment to use their traditional medicines in “wise and responsible ways” and the creation of an “Indigenous Ethical Council on Traditional Medicines” was recommended.

 

But still most attempts to evaluate Indigenous knowledge systems by non-Indigenous often involves the use of scientific methods to prove their rigor, thereby rendering them invalid. This generates epistemic conflicts and possible injustices. Epistemic justice represents the phenomena of, and the violence resulting from, epistemological imposition, or domination of one particular way of knowing the world at the expense of others. Epistemic justice requires co-existence of different knowledge systems, diverse ways of knowing, seeing and being in the world. Epistemic Injustice, on the other hand, then is based on the logic and rhetoric of salvation (including democracy and progress). It hides the logic of coloniality – land, labour, war, destruction, racism, sexism, inequalities, injustice. It is normally violent and involves cultural and political oppression. It is a result of the Western historiographic, ethnographic and geographic “productions” of peoples and continents.

 

When questioned about the validity of Indigenous knowledge, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous interviewees mentioned how such traditional knowledge is sophisticated, diverse yet unique. The Amazon’s diverse traditional people have been experimenting with the biodiversity around them for centuries and, in many cases, the mixtures they use for healing different pathologies are very complex. The technology to replace such “alchemy” would require years to reach the level of sophistication at hand. As argued by Indigenous leader João Paulo Tukano: “manipulation of forest medicines involves much more than mixing the compounds of such medicines. It is not just a chemical manipulation, as in modern science. It is a meta-chemical experience that involves different mixtures of plants, minerals, elements, spirits, dreams, cosmologies and more.” Finally, in the words of a Yawanawá interviewee, “White people have run over the traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples to impose their scientific knowledge as if it is the best one. But they have lost their way and are now coming back to us to get back on track. I’m afraid to say I do not believe in their ideas and way of doing things anymore”.

 

In terms of rights, it is also important to recognize that the Brazilian Biodiversity Law decouples genetic heritage from traditional knowledge, ignoring Indigenous Peoples’ beliefs, and their interactions and co-evolution with the rest of nature and biodiversity for thousands of years. This is a result of the user-provider dichotomy present in international legislation. Such dichotomy generates a false duality between users and holders of genetic heritage and traditional knowledge, and assumes that holders of traditional knowledge are not users; that is, they do neither research nor technological development (to use the terms of Law 13.123/2015) based on their knowledge. Epistemologically, this imposed duality is a colonial legacy and must be abandoned if we want to move towards innovative models for knowledge co-creation. Innovation arises not only from the ‘outside’ user’s appropriation and use of knowledge or genetic heritage, but from encounters between two bodies of knowledge. This is an important epistemic problem that becomes crucial and threatening when scientists go to traditional communities assuming that an equitable and fair dialogue is possible, when there is already a hierarchy of superiority in which the scientist knows more and better than the community, and is the one in charge of creating the “innovative knowledge”.

 

In comm-uni-on

 

When looking at the results of the research I found that ritual provides the structure and space where self-transformation can happen. During ayahuasca rituals, participants are physically and temporarily away from their culture. Victor Turner called this liminal space communitas, an arena where the participants affirm and reaffirm fellowship with the community. The ingestion of the medicine evokes an ideal instrument for critiquing mainstream culture because it enables participants to challenge their basic cultural assumptions about themselves and their world. But then of course, you need to do your “homework” and integrate what you experienced in the ritual in your everyday life and this is the most important part of self-transformation.

I will never forget when one of the participants told me, “I met God tonight and now I understand what it is and how I can manifest its presence”. “Uni told me that God is everywhere, in every being and it wants us to dance, to chant, to be in common, to share the ground, to be together.”

 

In numerous interviews, participants expressed that they felt Western culture not only discourages people from “discovering themselves” but it is also lacking in utilizing ritual in any constructive way. It is like our ability to be open to, curious about, understand, and accept our own feelings and needs is shut down by other immediate needs that modern society impose on us. And we lose our ability to understand our place in relation to nature, to have more consistent choices around our feelings and behavior, to meet our needs and the needs of others. We need to know what is going on with us first if we are to understand other humans and other beings. Knowing what others need is key to ecological balance. Each of us was born with a certain ability to nurture. Nurturing ourselves to be able to nourish other beings, as in the act of breastfeeding.

 

Arne Naess, the father of deep ecology, has called this process self-realisation. For us humans, self-realisation involves the development of wide identification in which the sense of self is no longer limited by the personal ego, but instead encompasses greater and greater wholes. Naess has called this expanded sense of self the ecological self, where our own human striving for self-realisation is on an equal footing to the strivings of other beings. There is a fundamental equality between human and non-human life. This perspective contrasts with the anthropocentric view which ascribes intrinsic value only to humans, valuing nature only if it is useful to our own species.

For that I believe it is important to understand the role of emotions in moving towards such practice of self-realisation. Emotions are considered individual responses to relevant events producing feelings of pleasure or pain; they help to find solutions to concerns that cannot be treated routinely; they are used to accept or decline the interaction with objects, persons, and other beings; and they tend to control behaviors and thoughts. As such they have a lot of influence on how we feel and attribute meaning to things and people. For example, why do people vote for Bolsonaro even knowing that he will not protect the forest and Indigenous Peoples? It also affects our capacity to act in relation to other-than-human-natures. In human-nature studies, engagement with these ideas leads to affective and emotional aspects from the psyche to the global scale. Such movement includes a call for an ethics and political practice that nurtures the concepts of ‘being-in-common’, in communion.

One of the main challenges we have as a species is that we have forgotten our connection to nature. We have assumed that we own nature. The initial results of my research show that Amazonian plants and rituals are helping people to re-awake such connections. As importantly, people are comprehending that the plants, for example, are the ones “running the show”, by sustaining life on earth. Hopefully, there is a growing body of research on the intelligence and teachings of different plants[1]. Plants dominate every terrestrial environment, composing ninety-nine per cent of the biomass on earth. They are here much earlier than us and probably know much better about our Earth system.

 

Indigenous people have always had this perspective that plants are teachers. A few years ago, one would bring that up and would be just laughed at. Now, not so much. There is compelling evidence that plants are indeed intelligent. . . it is up to us to be open to listen to what they have to teach us. Finally, inclusive transitions are crucial in times of crises and could challenge the dominant practices of modern society. So far, we have been blocking or postponing our ability to communicate and act over the myriad crises we face as a species and Indigenous medicines could catalyse a transition.

 

[1] Paco Calvo, Monica Gagliano, Gustavo M Souza, Anthony Trewavas (2020) Plants are intelligent, here’s how, Annals of Botany, Volume 125, Issue 1, 2 January 2020, Pages 11–28.

 

Listening to the plants: Indigenous rituals and transitions for humanity

 

Some argue that the ecological crisis is a spiritual crisis. In this article I will present some initial results of my research on the role Amazonian traditional medicines and Indigenous spirituality may have in changing environmentally damaging attitudes.

 

At this moment of profound ecological and health crises, there is an urgent call to rethink human relationships with the rest of Nature. But how do we reconnect with Nature? According to different Indigenous Peoples in the Amazon we are experiencing a transition. As human beings, going through a transition is nothing new, whether as a collective or as individuals. COVID-19 made it clear to us that we are now collectively experiencing an important transition.

 

My main argument here is that Indigenous medicines could be seen as tools for changing larger social and ecological contexts faster. I look at the Yawanawá people, who live in the Brazilian Amazon, to give some practical examples and to reflect on aspects of cultural appropriation and Indigenous rights.

 

I will start by telling a story. I feel it is a good way to start once it is about Indigenous spirituality and they normally start their conversations by telling a story or a myth. Last time I was with the Yawanawá - and I will give some more information about them soon – I was talking to one of their spiritual leaders and I asked him how they say “sacred” in their language. His answer was that they do not have a sole word for that. But the main meaning of sacred to them is the mother’s breast milk and the act of breastfeeding. He explained to me that due to the importance of the mother’s breast milk for feeding and calming the baby, and so for maintaining the flow of life, the act of breastfeeding became the meaning of sacred. And then I thought – how are we feeding ourselves? And I am not just thinking about our bodies, but mainly about our spirits. Are we able to feed and calm ourselves everyday with the sacred? Whatever it means to each of us…

 

The central goal of my research was to examine the ways in which Ayahuasca and other traditional medicines that are used in Indigenous rituals are perceived to change participants' views of nature, and in consequence the way they relate to it. I chose the Yawanawá rituals as the ones in which I concentrated the research because they started to share their culture and medicines in the 2000s and very quickly, they became “trendy” and served as a good inspiration to find out more about different cultural constructions about nature.  Data was collected between 2016-2019 during field visits to the Yawanawá lands in Brazil but also during some of their spiritual retreats in Europe.

 

Enchanting transformations

 

The Yawanawá are hunters and gatherers. They see themselves as a unified people, a group that stands and works together, a family. That is why they call themselves ‘People of the Queixada (Peccary)’. The Yawanawá consider themselves to be the people of spirituality, the Yuve yahu in their language. They say that in the past, there were many pajés (the name given to spiritual healers and shamans, in Portuguese). To the Yawanawá, most plants are medicinal plants.

 

In traditional hunter-gatherer societies, there was no distinction between spirituality and the rest of subsistence and cultural life. In ‘civilised’ society, however, no river contains a spirit, no tree means life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom; plants nor animals no longer ‘speak’ to humankind – at least not to the majority of us. On the contrary, we are guided by material values. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right in our lives, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, food) or a service (a holiday, a new course, a therapy). This is rooted in the structural realities of today’s industrial and technological culture. Overcoming these realities consists of rediscovering ourselves as creative and spiritual beings, as opposed to consumers. Spirituality, as experienced in and through a sense of relationship with Nature, then allows us to talk about what is strangely invisible, but certainly necessary if we want to rethink ways of living and reshape modern societies. The overcoming of these realities may consist in rediscovering humans as part of nature as opposed to the human-nature dichotomy that dominates political discourses.

 

Spirituality in general, not just Indigenous, is a category of growing salience for many Westerns. While the genealogy of spirituality remains complex and its usage fluid, it has come to mean something specific, referring to what may be known as ‘new age’ or ‘spiritual era’. Since I’ve begun to work with Indigenous peoples, I have thought a lot about ceremony and ritual. All human societies have ceremonies, rituals, including religious rituals and sacraments, national rituals, seasonal festivals, and rites of passage and initiation, like the rituals surrounding birth, marriage, and death. These are generally community and culturally based and follow a traditional, formal pattern. Rituals imply a kind of continuity, a memory transmitted from past generations through the practice of the ritual itself as they bring the past to the present.

 

English anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, viewed rituals and certain kinds of spiritual beliefs as serving a ‘corrective function’, allowing integration of narrow, individual consciousness with the larger circuits of mental process, including collective and environmental ‘ecologies of mind’, how he called it. In the light of Bateson’s theories, psychoactive plants can be seen as tools for loosening up mental processes, blurring ego boundaries between individuals and their larger social and ecological contexts.  Ritual in this context is instrumental but not as something that maintains social structure; rather, it fosters self-transformation while at the same time challenging the participants' own cultural constructs and basic assumptions about the world.

 

Bateson also applies cybernetics to the field of ecological anthropology. He saw the world as a series of systems containing those of individuals, societies, and ecosystems. Within each system is found competition and dependency. He also viewed that all three systems were all together a part of one supreme cybernetic system that controls everything instead of just interacting systems. This supreme system is beyond the self of the individual and could be equated to what many people refer to as God, though Bateson referred to it as Mind.

Bateson also argued that Western epistemology perpetuates a system of understanding which is purpose or means-to-an-end driven. And this narrows our perception, thus limiting what comes into consciousness and therefore limiting the amount of wisdom that can be generated from the perception. He then argues for a position of humility and acceptance of the natural system instead of scientific superiority as a solution. He believes that humility can come about only when thought and emotion are combined to obtain knowledge.

And here is where Bateson and Indigenous people share an understanding. Such understanding of humility is central to animism and traditional Indigenous knowledge. Once Indigenous people are immersed in deep experiences with nature, they nurture a stance of humility, gratitude, and wonder at the contingency of life.  They perceive (and live) the world as relational and animate: humans are nature (and vice versa). They have deployed what has been called exuberant “technologies of enchantment” that reinforce connections with places and events. They perceive themselves as serving these other-than-human contexts, rather than the opposite. For them, care is what provides the sustenance of diversity and abundance, that is affective and embodied as opposed to calculative and rational. This means that different beings (human or non-human) come, “into being through the relations that enable them and that they, in turn, are able to establish,” as stated by Peruvian anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena.

 

Uni: Cultural appropriation or cultural exchanges?

 

Yawanawá’s most used and now very popularised plant medicine is the uni, commonly known as ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is a South American entheogenic brew made out of a vine called Baniteriopsis caapi and a plant most known as Psychotria viridis (also known as chacrona). The brew has been used for at least 3500 years (with some arguing 5000 or even 8000 years) and it is as a traditional spiritual medicine used in ceremonies among different Indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin.

 

By naming ayahuasca as uni, the Yawanawá teach us about unity. According to the Yawanawá, taking uni is an opportunity to unite and expand the family. Here, ‘family’ refers to the extended family of humans and other-than-human beings. It is only because of this continual engagement with other-than-human beings that they are able to understand all there is to know of the natural world. Their constant rituals and journeys through uni’s ensure that the relationship between humans and other-than-human beings is one of union, balance and reciprocation – meaning that humans never take more from other-than-humans than that which they can return – not just materially but with honour, gratitude, chants and prayer.

 

I started to be curious about the exchanges between the Yawanawá and non-Indigenous, especially Westerns, when I moved to the United Kingdom and noticed an enormous interest of Europeans in Indigenous traditions and medicines. When I was visiting the Yawanawá for the first time I also witnessed how much they were learning from non-Indigenous people too. Then, few months later one of their main spiritual leaders, the elder and pajé Tatá passed away and a lot of things changed in the village he used to live. I remember hearing from his grandson Rasu, a youth spiritual leader at that time, that when Tatá was alive they would live and work just for the spiritual world. And then he said: “Now that he is not here anymore, everything we do is for the material world.” Those words were very strong to me and made me realise how things have changed among them. They were working like never to promote rituals for non-Indigenous people, without much time for leisure, without much time to spend on their own rituals.

 

That made me think that they were losing themselves in our world, the so-called material world. But traditionally this type of exchange between cultures is consistent with the nature of Indigenous knowledge, which has always been exchanged across and between cultures. So, I thought to myself: isn’t it supposed to be happening? And then I talked to another Yawanawá elder about it. I went to him saying, “aren’t you afraid of reproducing the same mistakes we’ve made? And most importantly, aren’t you afraid of losing control of the medicines?” Afterall, many of the non-Indigenous people that were going there were learning from their traditions to then become shamans to other people across the world. And he said to me: “We knew this would happen. Our ancestors always told us that one day the white men would come and would ask us about the medicines and would want to learn about them. And we have the duty to share them. They are not ours; they are a gift from the forest”, he said. “The knowledge is ours, but how would the medicines work alone if we do not share the knowledge? They wouldn’t. They would probably be risky and cause more harm than good”, he complemented. In their view all this movement towards Indigenous spirituality, what many have called indigeneity, is deeply related to our urgent need to reconnect with the natural/spiritual world of which we are part as a way to move towards transformation.

 

I then realised that the exchange between Indigenous and non-Indigenous was a two-way exchange. As some Yawanawá always say, they would never be able to play different instruments in their rituals, such as the guitar, if it was not for their relationship with non-Indigenous. Instead of naming such exchanges as cultural appropriation, I prefer to see it as cultural exchanges and collaboration. But of course, there is more to this debate when we think about Indigenous rights and epistemic justice.

 

Indigenous rights and epistemic justice

 

Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect, and develop their biocultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and cultural expressions according to different regulations that are already in place, like the ILO 169 and the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity. Considering the extremely high demand to treat millions of depressed patients, the medicalization of ayahuasca, for example, without adequate regulation can be detrimental to Indigenous peoples.

 

The Indigenous epistemological attributes to the use of plant medicines are still to be recognized, however. A practical consequence of this situation in Brazil, for example, is that Indigenous people face difficulties when transporting their medicines inside the Brazilian territory. To foster the enforcement of their rights, Indigenous People at the different Indigenous Ayahuasca Conferences made a commitment to use their traditional medicines in “wise and responsible ways” and the creation of an “Indigenous Ethical Council on Traditional Medicines” was recommended.

 

But still most attempts to evaluate Indigenous knowledge systems by non-Indigenous often involves the use of scientific methods to prove their rigor, thereby rendering them invalid. This generates epistemic conflicts and possible injustices. Epistemic justice represents the phenomena of, and the violence resulting from, epistemological imposition, or domination of one particular way of knowing the world at the expense of others. Epistemic justice requires co-existence of different knowledge systems, diverse ways of knowing, seeing and being in the world. Epistemic Injustice, on the other hand, then is based on the logic and rhetoric of salvation (including democracy and progress). It hides the logic of coloniality – land, labour, war, destruction, racism, sexism, inequalities, injustice. It is normally violent and involves cultural and political oppression. It is a result of the Western historiographic, ethnographic and geographic “productions” of peoples and continents.

 

When questioned about the validity of Indigenous knowledge, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous interviewees mentioned how such traditional knowledge is sophisticated, diverse yet unique. The Amazon’s diverse traditional people have been experimenting with the biodiversity around them for centuries and, in many cases, the mixtures they use for healing different pathologies are very complex. The technology to replace such “alchemy” would require years to reach the level of sophistication at hand. As argued by Indigenous leader João Paulo Tukano: “manipulation of forest medicines involves much more than mixing the compounds of such medicines. It is not just a chemical manipulation, as in modern science. It is a meta-chemical experience that involves different mixtures of plants, minerals, elements, spirits, dreams, cosmologies and more.” Finally, in the words of a Yawanawá interviewee, “White people have run over the traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples to impose their scientific knowledge as if it is the best one. But they have lost their way and are now coming back to us to get back on track. I’m afraid to say I do not believe in their ideas and way of doing things anymore”.

 

In terms of rights, it is also important to recognize that the Brazilian Biodiversity Law decouples genetic heritage from traditional knowledge, ignoring Indigenous Peoples’ beliefs, and their interactions and co-evolution with the rest of nature and biodiversity for thousands of years. This is a result of the user-provider dichotomy present in international legislation. Such dichotomy generates a false duality between users and holders of genetic heritage and traditional knowledge, and assumes that holders of traditional knowledge are not users; that is, they do neither research nor technological development (to use the terms of Law 13.123/2015) based on their knowledge. Epistemologically, this imposed duality is a colonial legacy and must be abandoned if we want to move towards innovative models for knowledge co-creation. Innovation arises not only from the ‘outside’ user’s appropriation and use of knowledge or genetic heritage, but from encounters between two bodies of knowledge. This is an important epistemic problem that becomes crucial and threatening when scientists go to traditional communities assuming that an equitable and fair dialogue is possible, when there is already a hierarchy of superiority in which the scientist knows more and better than the community, and is the one in charge of creating the “innovative knowledge”.

 

In comm-uni-on

 

When looking at the results of the research I found that ritual provides the structure and space where self-transformation can happen. During ayahuasca rituals, participants are physically and temporarily away from their culture. Victor Turner called this liminal space communitas, an arena where the participants affirm and reaffirm fellowship with the community. The ingestion of the medicine evokes an ideal instrument for critiquing mainstream culture because it enables participants to challenge their basic cultural assumptions about themselves and their world. But then of course, you need to do your “homework” and integrate what you experienced in the ritual in your everyday life and this is the most important part of self-transformation.

I will never forget when one of the participants told me, “I met God tonight and now I understand what it is and how I can manifest its presence”. “Uni told me that God is everywhere, in every being and it wants us to dance, to chant, to be in common, to share the ground, to be together.”

 

In numerous interviews, participants expressed that they felt Western culture not only discourages people from “discovering themselves” but it is also lacking in utilizing ritual in any constructive way. It is like our ability to be open to, curious about, understand, and accept our own feelings and needs is shut down by other immediate needs that modern society impose on us. And we lose our ability to understand our place in relation to nature, to have more consistent choices around our feelings and behavior, to meet our needs and the needs of others. We need to know what is going on with us first if we are to understand other humans and other beings. Knowing what others need is key to ecological balance. Each of us was born with a certain ability to nurture. Nurturing ourselves to be able to nourish other beings, as in the act of breastfeeding.

 

Arne Naess, the father of deep ecology, has called this process self-realisation. For us humans, self-realisation involves the development of wide identification in which the sense of self is no longer limited by the personal ego, but instead encompasses greater and greater wholes. Naess has called this expanded sense of self the ecological self, where our own human striving for self-realisation is on an equal footing to the strivings of other beings. There is a fundamental equality between human and non-human life. This perspective contrasts with the anthropocentric view which ascribes intrinsic value only to humans, valuing nature only if it is useful to our own species.

For that I believe it is important to understand the role of emotions in moving towards such practice of self-realisation. Emotions are considered individual responses to relevant events producing feelings of pleasure or pain; they help to find solutions to concerns that cannot be treated routinely; they are used to accept or decline the interaction with objects, persons, and other beings; and they tend to control behaviors and thoughts. As such they have a lot of influence on how we feel and attribute meaning to things and people. For example, why do people vote for Bolsonaro even knowing that he will not protect the forest and Indigenous Peoples? It also affects our capacity to act in relation to other-than-human-natures. In human-nature studies, engagement with these ideas leads to affective and emotional aspects from the psyche to the global scale. Such movement includes a call for an ethics and political practice that nurtures the concepts of ‘being-in-common’, in communion.

One of the main challenges we have as a species is that we have forgotten our connection to nature. We have assumed that we own nature. The initial results of my research show that Amazonian plants and rituals are helping people to re-awake such connections. As importantly, people are comprehending that the plants, for example, are the ones “running the show”, by sustaining life on earth. Hopefully, there is a growing body of research on the intelligence and teachings of different plants[1]. Plants dominate every terrestrial environment, composing ninety-nine per cent of the biomass on earth. They are here much earlier than us and probably know much better about our Earth system.

 

Indigenous people have always had this perspective that plants are teachers. A few years ago, one would bring that up and would be just laughed at. Now, not so much. There is compelling evidence that plants are indeed intelligent. . . it is up to us to be open to listen to what they have to teach us. Finally, inclusive transitions are crucial in times of crises and could challenge the dominant practices of modern society. So far, we have been blocking or postponing our ability to communicate and act over the myriad crises we face as a species and Indigenous medicines could catalyse a transition.

 

[1] Paco Calvo, Monica Gagliano, Gustavo M Souza, Anthony Trewavas (2020) Plants are intelligent, here’s how, Annals of Botany, Volume 125, Issue 1, 2 January 2020, Pages 11–28.

 

No items found.

Maria Fernanda Gebara is a doctor in social anthropology, writer and professor who has spent the last decade working with different traditional communities in the Brazilian Amazon.

download filedownload filedownload filedownload filedownload file

By Maria Fernanda Gebara

Listening to the plants: Indigenous rituals and transitions for humanity

 

Some argue that the ecological crisis is a spiritual crisis. In this article I will present some initial results of my research on the role Amazonian traditional medicines and Indigenous spirituality may have in changing environmentally damaging attitudes.

 

At this moment of profound ecological and health crises, there is an urgent call to rethink human relationships with the rest of Nature. But how do we reconnect with Nature? According to different Indigenous Peoples in the Amazon we are experiencing a transition. As human beings, going through a transition is nothing new, whether as a collective or as individuals. COVID-19 made it clear to us that we are now collectively experiencing an important transition.

 

My main argument here is that Indigenous medicines could be seen as tools for changing larger social and ecological contexts faster. I look at the Yawanawá people, who live in the Brazilian Amazon, to give some practical examples and to reflect on aspects of cultural appropriation and Indigenous rights.

 

I will start by telling a story. I feel it is a good way to start once it is about Indigenous spirituality and they normally start their conversations by telling a story or a myth. Last time I was with the Yawanawá - and I will give some more information about them soon – I was talking to one of their spiritual leaders and I asked him how they say “sacred” in their language. His answer was that they do not have a sole word for that. But the main meaning of sacred to them is the mother’s breast milk and the act of breastfeeding. He explained to me that due to the importance of the mother’s breast milk for feeding and calming the baby, and so for maintaining the flow of life, the act of breastfeeding became the meaning of sacred. And then I thought – how are we feeding ourselves? And I am not just thinking about our bodies, but mainly about our spirits. Are we able to feed and calm ourselves everyday with the sacred? Whatever it means to each of us…

 

The central goal of my research was to examine the ways in which Ayahuasca and other traditional medicines that are used in Indigenous rituals are perceived to change participants' views of nature, and in consequence the way they relate to it. I chose the Yawanawá rituals as the ones in which I concentrated the research because they started to share their culture and medicines in the 2000s and very quickly, they became “trendy” and served as a good inspiration to find out more about different cultural constructions about nature.  Data was collected between 2016-2019 during field visits to the Yawanawá lands in Brazil but also during some of their spiritual retreats in Europe.

 

Enchanting transformations

 

The Yawanawá are hunters and gatherers. They see themselves as a unified people, a group that stands and works together, a family. That is why they call themselves ‘People of the Queixada (Peccary)’. The Yawanawá consider themselves to be the people of spirituality, the Yuve yahu in their language. They say that in the past, there were many pajés (the name given to spiritual healers and shamans, in Portuguese). To the Yawanawá, most plants are medicinal plants.

 

In traditional hunter-gatherer societies, there was no distinction between spirituality and the rest of subsistence and cultural life. In ‘civilised’ society, however, no river contains a spirit, no tree means life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom; plants nor animals no longer ‘speak’ to humankind – at least not to the majority of us. On the contrary, we are guided by material values. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right in our lives, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, food) or a service (a holiday, a new course, a therapy). This is rooted in the structural realities of today’s industrial and technological culture. Overcoming these realities consists of rediscovering ourselves as creative and spiritual beings, as opposed to consumers. Spirituality, as experienced in and through a sense of relationship with Nature, then allows us to talk about what is strangely invisible, but certainly necessary if we want to rethink ways of living and reshape modern societies. The overcoming of these realities may consist in rediscovering humans as part of nature as opposed to the human-nature dichotomy that dominates political discourses.

 

Spirituality in general, not just Indigenous, is a category of growing salience for many Westerns. While the genealogy of spirituality remains complex and its usage fluid, it has come to mean something specific, referring to what may be known as ‘new age’ or ‘spiritual era’. Since I’ve begun to work with Indigenous peoples, I have thought a lot about ceremony and ritual. All human societies have ceremonies, rituals, including religious rituals and sacraments, national rituals, seasonal festivals, and rites of passage and initiation, like the rituals surrounding birth, marriage, and death. These are generally community and culturally based and follow a traditional, formal pattern. Rituals imply a kind of continuity, a memory transmitted from past generations through the practice of the ritual itself as they bring the past to the present.

 

English anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, viewed rituals and certain kinds of spiritual beliefs as serving a ‘corrective function’, allowing integration of narrow, individual consciousness with the larger circuits of mental process, including collective and environmental ‘ecologies of mind’, how he called it. In the light of Bateson’s theories, psychoactive plants can be seen as tools for loosening up mental processes, blurring ego boundaries between individuals and their larger social and ecological contexts.  Ritual in this context is instrumental but not as something that maintains social structure; rather, it fosters self-transformation while at the same time challenging the participants' own cultural constructs and basic assumptions about the world.

 

Bateson also applies cybernetics to the field of ecological anthropology. He saw the world as a series of systems containing those of individuals, societies, and ecosystems. Within each system is found competition and dependency. He also viewed that all three systems were all together a part of one supreme cybernetic system that controls everything instead of just interacting systems. This supreme system is beyond the self of the individual and could be equated to what many people refer to as God, though Bateson referred to it as Mind.

Bateson also argued that Western epistemology perpetuates a system of understanding which is purpose or means-to-an-end driven. And this narrows our perception, thus limiting what comes into consciousness and therefore limiting the amount of wisdom that can be generated from the perception. He then argues for a position of humility and acceptance of the natural system instead of scientific superiority as a solution. He believes that humility can come about only when thought and emotion are combined to obtain knowledge.

And here is where Bateson and Indigenous people share an understanding. Such understanding of humility is central to animism and traditional Indigenous knowledge. Once Indigenous people are immersed in deep experiences with nature, they nurture a stance of humility, gratitude, and wonder at the contingency of life.  They perceive (and live) the world as relational and animate: humans are nature (and vice versa). They have deployed what has been called exuberant “technologies of enchantment” that reinforce connections with places and events. They perceive themselves as serving these other-than-human contexts, rather than the opposite. For them, care is what provides the sustenance of diversity and abundance, that is affective and embodied as opposed to calculative and rational. This means that different beings (human or non-human) come, “into being through the relations that enable them and that they, in turn, are able to establish,” as stated by Peruvian anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena.

 

Uni: Cultural appropriation or cultural exchanges?

 

Yawanawá’s most used and now very popularised plant medicine is the uni, commonly known as ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is a South American entheogenic brew made out of a vine called Baniteriopsis caapi and a plant most known as Psychotria viridis (also known as chacrona). The brew has been used for at least 3500 years (with some arguing 5000 or even 8000 years) and it is as a traditional spiritual medicine used in ceremonies among different Indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin.

 

By naming ayahuasca as uni, the Yawanawá teach us about unity. According to the Yawanawá, taking uni is an opportunity to unite and expand the family. Here, ‘family’ refers to the extended family of humans and other-than-human beings. It is only because of this continual engagement with other-than-human beings that they are able to understand all there is to know of the natural world. Their constant rituals and journeys through uni’s ensure that the relationship between humans and other-than-human beings is one of union, balance and reciprocation – meaning that humans never take more from other-than-humans than that which they can return – not just materially but with honour, gratitude, chants and prayer.

 

I started to be curious about the exchanges between the Yawanawá and non-Indigenous, especially Westerns, when I moved to the United Kingdom and noticed an enormous interest of Europeans in Indigenous traditions and medicines. When I was visiting the Yawanawá for the first time I also witnessed how much they were learning from non-Indigenous people too. Then, few months later one of their main spiritual leaders, the elder and pajé Tatá passed away and a lot of things changed in the village he used to live. I remember hearing from his grandson Rasu, a youth spiritual leader at that time, that when Tatá was alive they would live and work just for the spiritual world. And then he said: “Now that he is not here anymore, everything we do is for the material world.” Those words were very strong to me and made me realise how things have changed among them. They were working like never to promote rituals for non-Indigenous people, without much time for leisure, without much time to spend on their own rituals.

 

That made me think that they were losing themselves in our world, the so-called material world. But traditionally this type of exchange between cultures is consistent with the nature of Indigenous knowledge, which has always been exchanged across and between cultures. So, I thought to myself: isn’t it supposed to be happening? And then I talked to another Yawanawá elder about it. I went to him saying, “aren’t you afraid of reproducing the same mistakes we’ve made? And most importantly, aren’t you afraid of losing control of the medicines?” Afterall, many of the non-Indigenous people that were going there were learning from their traditions to then become shamans to other people across the world. And he said to me: “We knew this would happen. Our ancestors always told us that one day the white men would come and would ask us about the medicines and would want to learn about them. And we have the duty to share them. They are not ours; they are a gift from the forest”, he said. “The knowledge is ours, but how would the medicines work alone if we do not share the knowledge? They wouldn’t. They would probably be risky and cause more harm than good”, he complemented. In their view all this movement towards Indigenous spirituality, what many have called indigeneity, is deeply related to our urgent need to reconnect with the natural/spiritual world of which we are part as a way to move towards transformation.

 

I then realised that the exchange between Indigenous and non-Indigenous was a two-way exchange. As some Yawanawá always say, they would never be able to play different instruments in their rituals, such as the guitar, if it was not for their relationship with non-Indigenous. Instead of naming such exchanges as cultural appropriation, I prefer to see it as cultural exchanges and collaboration. But of course, there is more to this debate when we think about Indigenous rights and epistemic justice.

 

Indigenous rights and epistemic justice

 

Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect, and develop their biocultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and cultural expressions according to different regulations that are already in place, like the ILO 169 and the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity. Considering the extremely high demand to treat millions of depressed patients, the medicalization of ayahuasca, for example, without adequate regulation can be detrimental to Indigenous peoples.

 

The Indigenous epistemological attributes to the use of plant medicines are still to be recognized, however. A practical consequence of this situation in Brazil, for example, is that Indigenous people face difficulties when transporting their medicines inside the Brazilian territory. To foster the enforcement of their rights, Indigenous People at the different Indigenous Ayahuasca Conferences made a commitment to use their traditional medicines in “wise and responsible ways” and the creation of an “Indigenous Ethical Council on Traditional Medicines” was recommended.

 

But still most attempts to evaluate Indigenous knowledge systems by non-Indigenous often involves the use of scientific methods to prove their rigor, thereby rendering them invalid. This generates epistemic conflicts and possible injustices. Epistemic justice represents the phenomena of, and the violence resulting from, epistemological imposition, or domination of one particular way of knowing the world at the expense of others. Epistemic justice requires co-existence of different knowledge systems, diverse ways of knowing, seeing and being in the world. Epistemic Injustice, on the other hand, then is based on the logic and rhetoric of salvation (including democracy and progress). It hides the logic of coloniality – land, labour, war, destruction, racism, sexism, inequalities, injustice. It is normally violent and involves cultural and political oppression. It is a result of the Western historiographic, ethnographic and geographic “productions” of peoples and continents.

 

When questioned about the validity of Indigenous knowledge, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous interviewees mentioned how such traditional knowledge is sophisticated, diverse yet unique. The Amazon’s diverse traditional people have been experimenting with the biodiversity around them for centuries and, in many cases, the mixtures they use for healing different pathologies are very complex. The technology to replace such “alchemy” would require years to reach the level of sophistication at hand. As argued by Indigenous leader João Paulo Tukano: “manipulation of forest medicines involves much more than mixing the compounds of such medicines. It is not just a chemical manipulation, as in modern science. It is a meta-chemical experience that involves different mixtures of plants, minerals, elements, spirits, dreams, cosmologies and more.” Finally, in the words of a Yawanawá interviewee, “White people have run over the traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples to impose their scientific knowledge as if it is the best one. But they have lost their way and are now coming back to us to get back on track. I’m afraid to say I do not believe in their ideas and way of doing things anymore”.

 

In terms of rights, it is also important to recognize that the Brazilian Biodiversity Law decouples genetic heritage from traditional knowledge, ignoring Indigenous Peoples’ beliefs, and their interactions and co-evolution with the rest of nature and biodiversity for thousands of years. This is a result of the user-provider dichotomy present in international legislation. Such dichotomy generates a false duality between users and holders of genetic heritage and traditional knowledge, and assumes that holders of traditional knowledge are not users; that is, they do neither research nor technological development (to use the terms of Law 13.123/2015) based on their knowledge. Epistemologically, this imposed duality is a colonial legacy and must be abandoned if we want to move towards innovative models for knowledge co-creation. Innovation arises not only from the ‘outside’ user’s appropriation and use of knowledge or genetic heritage, but from encounters between two bodies of knowledge. This is an important epistemic problem that becomes crucial and threatening when scientists go to traditional communities assuming that an equitable and fair dialogue is possible, when there is already a hierarchy of superiority in which the scientist knows more and better than the community, and is the one in charge of creating the “innovative knowledge”.

 

In comm-uni-on

 

When looking at the results of the research I found that ritual provides the structure and space where self-transformation can happen. During ayahuasca rituals, participants are physically and temporarily away from their culture. Victor Turner called this liminal space communitas, an arena where the participants affirm and reaffirm fellowship with the community. The ingestion of the medicine evokes an ideal instrument for critiquing mainstream culture because it enables participants to challenge their basic cultural assumptions about themselves and their world. But then of course, you need to do your “homework” and integrate what you experienced in the ritual in your everyday life and this is the most important part of self-transformation.

I will never forget when one of the participants told me, “I met God tonight and now I understand what it is and how I can manifest its presence”. “Uni told me that God is everywhere, in every being and it wants us to dance, to chant, to be in common, to share the ground, to be together.”

 

In numerous interviews, participants expressed that they felt Western culture not only discourages people from “discovering themselves” but it is also lacking in utilizing ritual in any constructive way. It is like our ability to be open to, curious about, understand, and accept our own feelings and needs is shut down by other immediate needs that modern society impose on us. And we lose our ability to understand our place in relation to nature, to have more consistent choices around our feelings and behavior, to meet our needs and the needs of others. We need to know what is going on with us first if we are to understand other humans and other beings. Knowing what others need is key to ecological balance. Each of us was born with a certain ability to nurture. Nurturing ourselves to be able to nourish other beings, as in the act of breastfeeding.

 

Arne Naess, the father of deep ecology, has called this process self-realisation. For us humans, self-realisation involves the development of wide identification in which the sense of self is no longer limited by the personal ego, but instead encompasses greater and greater wholes. Naess has called this expanded sense of self the ecological self, where our own human striving for self-realisation is on an equal footing to the strivings of other beings. There is a fundamental equality between human and non-human life. This perspective contrasts with the anthropocentric view which ascribes intrinsic value only to humans, valuing nature only if it is useful to our own species.

For that I believe it is important to understand the role of emotions in moving towards such practice of self-realisation. Emotions are considered individual responses to relevant events producing feelings of pleasure or pain; they help to find solutions to concerns that cannot be treated routinely; they are used to accept or decline the interaction with objects, persons, and other beings; and they tend to control behaviors and thoughts. As such they have a lot of influence on how we feel and attribute meaning to things and people. For example, why do people vote for Bolsonaro even knowing that he will not protect the forest and Indigenous Peoples? It also affects our capacity to act in relation to other-than-human-natures. In human-nature studies, engagement with these ideas leads to affective and emotional aspects from the psyche to the global scale. Such movement includes a call for an ethics and political practice that nurtures the concepts of ‘being-in-common’, in communion.

One of the main challenges we have as a species is that we have forgotten our connection to nature. We have assumed that we own nature. The initial results of my research show that Amazonian plants and rituals are helping people to re-awake such connections. As importantly, people are comprehending that the plants, for example, are the ones “running the show”, by sustaining life on earth. Hopefully, there is a growing body of research on the intelligence and teachings of different plants[1]. Plants dominate every terrestrial environment, composing ninety-nine per cent of the biomass on earth. They are here much earlier than us and probably know much better about our Earth system.

 

Indigenous people have always had this perspective that plants are teachers. A few years ago, one would bring that up and would be just laughed at. Now, not so much. There is compelling evidence that plants are indeed intelligent. . . it is up to us to be open to listen to what they have to teach us. Finally, inclusive transitions are crucial in times of crises and could challenge the dominant practices of modern society. So far, we have been blocking or postponing our ability to communicate and act over the myriad crises we face as a species and Indigenous medicines could catalyse a transition.

 

[1] Paco Calvo, Monica Gagliano, Gustavo M Souza, Anthony Trewavas (2020) Plants are intelligent, here’s how, Annals of Botany, Volume 125, Issue 1, 2 January 2020, Pages 11–28.

 

Listening to the plants: Indigenous rituals and transitions for humanity

 

Some argue that the ecological crisis is a spiritual crisis. In this article I will present some initial results of my research on the role Amazonian traditional medicines and Indigenous spirituality may have in changing environmentally damaging attitudes.

 

At this moment of profound ecological and health crises, there is an urgent call to rethink human relationships with the rest of Nature. But how do we reconnect with Nature? According to different Indigenous Peoples in the Amazon we are experiencing a transition. As human beings, going through a transition is nothing new, whether as a collective or as individuals. COVID-19 made it clear to us that we are now collectively experiencing an important transition.

 

My main argument here is that Indigenous medicines could be seen as tools for changing larger social and ecological contexts faster. I look at the Yawanawá people, who live in the Brazilian Amazon, to give some practical examples and to reflect on aspects of cultural appropriation and Indigenous rights.

 

I will start by telling a story. I feel it is a good way to start once it is about Indigenous spirituality and they normally start their conversations by telling a story or a myth. Last time I was with the Yawanawá - and I will give some more information about them soon – I was talking to one of their spiritual leaders and I asked him how they say “sacred” in their language. His answer was that they do not have a sole word for that. But the main meaning of sacred to them is the mother’s breast milk and the act of breastfeeding. He explained to me that due to the importance of the mother’s breast milk for feeding and calming the baby, and so for maintaining the flow of life, the act of breastfeeding became the meaning of sacred. And then I thought – how are we feeding ourselves? And I am not just thinking about our bodies, but mainly about our spirits. Are we able to feed and calm ourselves everyday with the sacred? Whatever it means to each of us…

 

The central goal of my research was to examine the ways in which Ayahuasca and other traditional medicines that are used in Indigenous rituals are perceived to change participants' views of nature, and in consequence the way they relate to it. I chose the Yawanawá rituals as the ones in which I concentrated the research because they started to share their culture and medicines in the 2000s and very quickly, they became “trendy” and served as a good inspiration to find out more about different cultural constructions about nature.  Data was collected between 2016-2019 during field visits to the Yawanawá lands in Brazil but also during some of their spiritual retreats in Europe.

 

Enchanting transformations

 

The Yawanawá are hunters and gatherers. They see themselves as a unified people, a group that stands and works together, a family. That is why they call themselves ‘People of the Queixada (Peccary)’. The Yawanawá consider themselves to be the people of spirituality, the Yuve yahu in their language. They say that in the past, there were many pajés (the name given to spiritual healers and shamans, in Portuguese). To the Yawanawá, most plants are medicinal plants.

 

In traditional hunter-gatherer societies, there was no distinction between spirituality and the rest of subsistence and cultural life. In ‘civilised’ society, however, no river contains a spirit, no tree means life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom; plants nor animals no longer ‘speak’ to humankind – at least not to the majority of us. On the contrary, we are guided by material values. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right in our lives, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, food) or a service (a holiday, a new course, a therapy). This is rooted in the structural realities of today’s industrial and technological culture. Overcoming these realities consists of rediscovering ourselves as creative and spiritual beings, as opposed to consumers. Spirituality, as experienced in and through a sense of relationship with Nature, then allows us to talk about what is strangely invisible, but certainly necessary if we want to rethink ways of living and reshape modern societies. The overcoming of these realities may consist in rediscovering humans as part of nature as opposed to the human-nature dichotomy that dominates political discourses.

 

Spirituality in general, not just Indigenous, is a category of growing salience for many Westerns. While the genealogy of spirituality remains complex and its usage fluid, it has come to mean something specific, referring to what may be known as ‘new age’ or ‘spiritual era’. Since I’ve begun to work with Indigenous peoples, I have thought a lot about ceremony and ritual. All human societies have ceremonies, rituals, including religious rituals and sacraments, national rituals, seasonal festivals, and rites of passage and initiation, like the rituals surrounding birth, marriage, and death. These are generally community and culturally based and follow a traditional, formal pattern. Rituals imply a kind of continuity, a memory transmitted from past generations through the practice of the ritual itself as they bring the past to the present.

 

English anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, viewed rituals and certain kinds of spiritual beliefs as serving a ‘corrective function’, allowing integration of narrow, individual consciousness with the larger circuits of mental process, including collective and environmental ‘ecologies of mind’, how he called it. In the light of Bateson’s theories, psychoactive plants can be seen as tools for loosening up mental processes, blurring ego boundaries between individuals and their larger social and ecological contexts.  Ritual in this context is instrumental but not as something that maintains social structure; rather, it fosters self-transformation while at the same time challenging the participants' own cultural constructs and basic assumptions about the world.

 

Bateson also applies cybernetics to the field of ecological anthropology. He saw the world as a series of systems containing those of individuals, societies, and ecosystems. Within each system is found competition and dependency. He also viewed that all three systems were all together a part of one supreme cybernetic system that controls everything instead of just interacting systems. This supreme system is beyond the self of the individual and could be equated to what many people refer to as God, though Bateson referred to it as Mind.

Bateson also argued that Western epistemology perpetuates a system of understanding which is purpose or means-to-an-end driven. And this narrows our perception, thus limiting what comes into consciousness and therefore limiting the amount of wisdom that can be generated from the perception. He then argues for a position of humility and acceptance of the natural system instead of scientific superiority as a solution. He believes that humility can come about only when thought and emotion are combined to obtain knowledge.

And here is where Bateson and Indigenous people share an understanding. Such understanding of humility is central to animism and traditional Indigenous knowledge. Once Indigenous people are immersed in deep experiences with nature, they nurture a stance of humility, gratitude, and wonder at the contingency of life.  They perceive (and live) the world as relational and animate: humans are nature (and vice versa). They have deployed what has been called exuberant “technologies of enchantment” that reinforce connections with places and events. They perceive themselves as serving these other-than-human contexts, rather than the opposite. For them, care is what provides the sustenance of diversity and abundance, that is affective and embodied as opposed to calculative and rational. This means that different beings (human or non-human) come, “into being through the relations that enable them and that they, in turn, are able to establish,” as stated by Peruvian anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena.

 

Uni: Cultural appropriation or cultural exchanges?

 

Yawanawá’s most used and now very popularised plant medicine is the uni, commonly known as ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is a South American entheogenic brew made out of a vine called Baniteriopsis caapi and a plant most known as Psychotria viridis (also known as chacrona). The brew has been used for at least 3500 years (with some arguing 5000 or even 8000 years) and it is as a traditional spiritual medicine used in ceremonies among different Indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin.

 

By naming ayahuasca as uni, the Yawanawá teach us about unity. According to the Yawanawá, taking uni is an opportunity to unite and expand the family. Here, ‘family’ refers to the extended family of humans and other-than-human beings. It is only because of this continual engagement with other-than-human beings that they are able to understand all there is to know of the natural world. Their constant rituals and journeys through uni’s ensure that the relationship between humans and other-than-human beings is one of union, balance and reciprocation – meaning that humans never take more from other-than-humans than that which they can return – not just materially but with honour, gratitude, chants and prayer.

 

I started to be curious about the exchanges between the Yawanawá and non-Indigenous, especially Westerns, when I moved to the United Kingdom and noticed an enormous interest of Europeans in Indigenous traditions and medicines. When I was visiting the Yawanawá for the first time I also witnessed how much they were learning from non-Indigenous people too. Then, few months later one of their main spiritual leaders, the elder and pajé Tatá passed away and a lot of things changed in the village he used to live. I remember hearing from his grandson Rasu, a youth spiritual leader at that time, that when Tatá was alive they would live and work just for the spiritual world. And then he said: “Now that he is not here anymore, everything we do is for the material world.” Those words were very strong to me and made me realise how things have changed among them. They were working like never to promote rituals for non-Indigenous people, without much time for leisure, without much time to spend on their own rituals.

 

That made me think that they were losing themselves in our world, the so-called material world. But traditionally this type of exchange between cultures is consistent with the nature of Indigenous knowledge, which has always been exchanged across and between cultures. So, I thought to myself: isn’t it supposed to be happening? And then I talked to another Yawanawá elder about it. I went to him saying, “aren’t you afraid of reproducing the same mistakes we’ve made? And most importantly, aren’t you afraid of losing control of the medicines?” Afterall, many of the non-Indigenous people that were going there were learning from their traditions to then become shamans to other people across the world. And he said to me: “We knew this would happen. Our ancestors always told us that one day the white men would come and would ask us about the medicines and would want to learn about them. And we have the duty to share them. They are not ours; they are a gift from the forest”, he said. “The knowledge is ours, but how would the medicines work alone if we do not share the knowledge? They wouldn’t. They would probably be risky and cause more harm than good”, he complemented. In their view all this movement towards Indigenous spirituality, what many have called indigeneity, is deeply related to our urgent need to reconnect with the natural/spiritual world of which we are part as a way to move towards transformation.

 

I then realised that the exchange between Indigenous and non-Indigenous was a two-way exchange. As some Yawanawá always say, they would never be able to play different instruments in their rituals, such as the guitar, if it was not for their relationship with non-Indigenous. Instead of naming such exchanges as cultural appropriation, I prefer to see it as cultural exchanges and collaboration. But of course, there is more to this debate when we think about Indigenous rights and epistemic justice.

 

Indigenous rights and epistemic justice

 

Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect, and develop their biocultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and cultural expressions according to different regulations that are already in place, like the ILO 169 and the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity. Considering the extremely high demand to treat millions of depressed patients, the medicalization of ayahuasca, for example, without adequate regulation can be detrimental to Indigenous peoples.

 

The Indigenous epistemological attributes to the use of plant medicines are still to be recognized, however. A practical consequence of this situation in Brazil, for example, is that Indigenous people face difficulties when transporting their medicines inside the Brazilian territory. To foster the enforcement of their rights, Indigenous People at the different Indigenous Ayahuasca Conferences made a commitment to use their traditional medicines in “wise and responsible ways” and the creation of an “Indigenous Ethical Council on Traditional Medicines” was recommended.

 

But still most attempts to evaluate Indigenous knowledge systems by non-Indigenous often involves the use of scientific methods to prove their rigor, thereby rendering them invalid. This generates epistemic conflicts and possible injustices. Epistemic justice represents the phenomena of, and the violence resulting from, epistemological imposition, or domination of one particular way of knowing the world at the expense of others. Epistemic justice requires co-existence of different knowledge systems, diverse ways of knowing, seeing and being in the world. Epistemic Injustice, on the other hand, then is based on the logic and rhetoric of salvation (including democracy and progress). It hides the logic of coloniality – land, labour, war, destruction, racism, sexism, inequalities, injustice. It is normally violent and involves cultural and political oppression. It is a result of the Western historiographic, ethnographic and geographic “productions” of peoples and continents.

 

When questioned about the validity of Indigenous knowledge, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous interviewees mentioned how such traditional knowledge is sophisticated, diverse yet unique. The Amazon’s diverse traditional people have been experimenting with the biodiversity around them for centuries and, in many cases, the mixtures they use for healing different pathologies are very complex. The technology to replace such “alchemy” would require years to reach the level of sophistication at hand. As argued by Indigenous leader João Paulo Tukano: “manipulation of forest medicines involves much more than mixing the compounds of such medicines. It is not just a chemical manipulation, as in modern science. It is a meta-chemical experience that involves different mixtures of plants, minerals, elements, spirits, dreams, cosmologies and more.” Finally, in the words of a Yawanawá interviewee, “White people have run over the traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples to impose their scientific knowledge as if it is the best one. But they have lost their way and are now coming back to us to get back on track. I’m afraid to say I do not believe in their ideas and way of doing things anymore”.

 

In terms of rights, it is also important to recognize that the Brazilian Biodiversity Law decouples genetic heritage from traditional knowledge, ignoring Indigenous Peoples’ beliefs, and their interactions and co-evolution with the rest of nature and biodiversity for thousands of years. This is a result of the user-provider dichotomy present in international legislation. Such dichotomy generates a false duality between users and holders of genetic heritage and traditional knowledge, and assumes that holders of traditional knowledge are not users; that is, they do neither research nor technological development (to use the terms of Law 13.123/2015) based on their knowledge. Epistemologically, this imposed duality is a colonial legacy and must be abandoned if we want to move towards innovative models for knowledge co-creation. Innovation arises not only from the ‘outside’ user’s appropriation and use of knowledge or genetic heritage, but from encounters between two bodies of knowledge. This is an important epistemic problem that becomes crucial and threatening when scientists go to traditional communities assuming that an equitable and fair dialogue is possible, when there is already a hierarchy of superiority in which the scientist knows more and better than the community, and is the one in charge of creating the “innovative knowledge”.

 

In comm-uni-on

 

When looking at the results of the research I found that ritual provides the structure and space where self-transformation can happen. During ayahuasca rituals, participants are physically and temporarily away from their culture. Victor Turner called this liminal space communitas, an arena where the participants affirm and reaffirm fellowship with the community. The ingestion of the medicine evokes an ideal instrument for critiquing mainstream culture because it enables participants to challenge their basic cultural assumptions about themselves and their world. But then of course, you need to do your “homework” and integrate what you experienced in the ritual in your everyday life and this is the most important part of self-transformation.

I will never forget when one of the participants told me, “I met God tonight and now I understand what it is and how I can manifest its presence”. “Uni told me that God is everywhere, in every being and it wants us to dance, to chant, to be in common, to share the ground, to be together.”

 

In numerous interviews, participants expressed that they felt Western culture not only discourages people from “discovering themselves” but it is also lacking in utilizing ritual in any constructive way. It is like our ability to be open to, curious about, understand, and accept our own feelings and needs is shut down by other immediate needs that modern society impose on us. And we lose our ability to understand our place in relation to nature, to have more consistent choices around our feelings and behavior, to meet our needs and the needs of others. We need to know what is going on with us first if we are to understand other humans and other beings. Knowing what others need is key to ecological balance. Each of us was born with a certain ability to nurture. Nurturing ourselves to be able to nourish other beings, as in the act of breastfeeding.

 

Arne Naess, the father of deep ecology, has called this process self-realisation. For us humans, self-realisation involves the development of wide identification in which the sense of self is no longer limited by the personal ego, but instead encompasses greater and greater wholes. Naess has called this expanded sense of self the ecological self, where our own human striving for self-realisation is on an equal footing to the strivings of other beings. There is a fundamental equality between human and non-human life. This perspective contrasts with the anthropocentric view which ascribes intrinsic value only to humans, valuing nature only if it is useful to our own species.

For that I believe it is important to understand the role of emotions in moving towards such practice of self-realisation. Emotions are considered individual responses to relevant events producing feelings of pleasure or pain; they help to find solutions to concerns that cannot be treated routinely; they are used to accept or decline the interaction with objects, persons, and other beings; and they tend to control behaviors and thoughts. As such they have a lot of influence on how we feel and attribute meaning to things and people. For example, why do people vote for Bolsonaro even knowing that he will not protect the forest and Indigenous Peoples? It also affects our capacity to act in relation to other-than-human-natures. In human-nature studies, engagement with these ideas leads to affective and emotional aspects from the psyche to the global scale. Such movement includes a call for an ethics and political practice that nurtures the concepts of ‘being-in-common’, in communion.

One of the main challenges we have as a species is that we have forgotten our connection to nature. We have assumed that we own nature. The initial results of my research show that Amazonian plants and rituals are helping people to re-awake such connections. As importantly, people are comprehending that the plants, for example, are the ones “running the show”, by sustaining life on earth. Hopefully, there is a growing body of research on the intelligence and teachings of different plants[1]. Plants dominate every terrestrial environment, composing ninety-nine per cent of the biomass on earth. They are here much earlier than us and probably know much better about our Earth system.

 

Indigenous people have always had this perspective that plants are teachers. A few years ago, one would bring that up and would be just laughed at. Now, not so much. There is compelling evidence that plants are indeed intelligent. . . it is up to us to be open to listen to what they have to teach us. Finally, inclusive transitions are crucial in times of crises and could challenge the dominant practices of modern society. So far, we have been blocking or postponing our ability to communicate and act over the myriad crises we face as a species and Indigenous medicines could catalyse a transition.

 

[1] Paco Calvo, Monica Gagliano, Gustavo M Souza, Anthony Trewavas (2020) Plants are intelligent, here’s how, Annals of Botany, Volume 125, Issue 1, 2 January 2020, Pages 11–28.

 

No items found.

Maria Fernanda Gebara is a doctor in social anthropology, writer and professor who has spent the last decade working with different traditional communities in the Brazilian Amazon.

download filedownload filedownload filedownload filedownload file