Taylor Dysart joins us from the University of Pennsylvania to workshop a chapter from her dissertation, “The Psychedelic Century: The Amazonian Origins of Global Science and Medicine of Hallucinogens in the Long Twentieth Century"
Abstract: My dissertation, “The Psychedelic Century: The Amazonian Origins of Global Science and Medicine of Hallucinogens in the Long Twentieth Century,” examines the history of psychedelics research through the prism of ayahuasca, a plant derivative native to the lowlands of the Amazon basin. It does so by tracing how a network of transnational and multidisciplinary researchers in the human and life sciences transformed ayahuasca from plant medicine into biomedical therapeutic from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. These researchers relied extensively on the knowledges and practices of mestizo and Indigenous healers, especially those of Tucano- and Shipibo-descent, who held longstanding relations with ayahuasca. Ultimately, this project reimagines the history of psychedelic science and medicine as one where Amazonia is paramount.
The first chapter of my dissertation recounts how and why ayahuasca, a plant derivative native to the lowlands of the Amazon basin, first became a matter of concern for naturalists in the mid-nineteenth century. I begin this story in Panuré, a small settlement in Brazilian Amazonia, where the English botanist Richard Spruce first observed how Tucano men imbibed ayahuasca in 1852. In addition to Spruce, numerous naturalists from along the Americas and the European continent, remarked not only on ayahuasca’s ceremonial and everyday uses but speculated as to its medicinal and psychical potential. At the same time, I demonstrate how these naturalists drew ayahuasca and its world into the shifting discourses of primitive savagery, racial degeneration, and Darwinian logics of extinction, while observing how it remained intimately connected to both real and imagined violence as turbulent post-colonial states increasingly expanded into Amazonian borderlands.
We will be joined by Geoff Bil (University of Delaware) and Staffan Müller-Wille (University of Cambridge) who will provide commentary on Taylor's chapter.
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