Ayahuasca Singing, Indigenous Knowledge, and Decolonization

Featuring Bernd Brabec de Mori in conversation with Bia Labate

Wednesday, September 23rd at from 12-1:30pm PST

The practice of singing plays an essential role in much of indigenous culture and ceremony. In traditional ayahuasca ceremonies, singing is how the shamans communicate with the spirit of the plants and is intimately related to healing. Traditional medicine communities in the Amazon have recently opened their doors to Western visitors, which has led to significant changes to the traditional culture, promoting positive cultural revitalization processes while also having negative impacts on local communities. All this raises important questions around oppression, colonialism, cultural appropriation.

Some of these issues can also be seen in the ayahuasca singing itself, and how the practice has transformed over the last couple decades. Anthropologist and Ethnomusicologist Bernd Brabec de Mori studied singing and its meaning among various indigenous groups in the Western Amazon from 1998-2008, including singing in ayahuasca sessions.

In this conversation with Bia Labate, Bernd will discuss his research into how the focus of ayahuasca singing changed when the focus shifted from treating kinspeople in indigenous villages to providing an experience for visitors and tourists. This transformation reflects the re-interpretation of indigenous knowledge as internal psychological processes, and the Western attribution of indigenous people as pursuing "deep ecological wisdom."

Bernd Brabec de Morireceived his M.A. (Mag. phil., 2003) and Ph.D. (Dr. phil., 2012) in musicology from the University of Vienna. He has been working for five years in the field among Indigenous People in the Peruvian lowland rainforests. After returning to Europe in 2006, he has been teaching and researching, among other institutions, at the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, at the department for social and cultural anthropology at Philipps-University Marburg, at the centre for systematic musicology of Karl-Franzens-University Graz, at the institute of musicology at the University of Vienna, at the institute of ethnomusicology at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, and as an associate researcher at Yunnan University. He published a couple of books, among them Die Lieder der Richtigen Menschen [Songs of the Real People] (2015), Sudamérica y sus mundos audibles [South America and its auditory worlds] (2015), and Auditive Wissenskulturen [Auditory knowledge cultures] (2018), as well as research articles in the areas of Indigenous vocal music, medical ethnomusicology, sound perception, and auditory knowledge. Contact: bbdm@posteo.de

Dr. Beatriz Caiuby Labate (Bia Labate) is a queer Brazilian anthropologist. She has a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. Her main areas of interest are the study of plant medicines, drug policy, shamanism, ritual, and religion. She is Executive Director of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines (https://chacruna.net). She is also Public Education and Culture Specialist at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), and Adjunct Faculty at the East-West Psychology Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). She is author, co-author, and co-editor of twenty-one books, two special-edition journals, and several peer-reviewed articles (http://bialabate.net).

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