Wednesday, June 8th, 2022 from 12:00-1:30pm PST

One of the the main components associated with psychedelics and sacred plants are their “healing” properties. There are hundreds of different sacred plants that have been traditionally used for healing many ailments, and for well being, and more recently an increasing mainstreaming and commodification of these practices. Adam Aranovich, who is part of the Ayahuasca Community Committee at the Chacruna Institute and has worked many years as a facilitator in a renowned international ayahuasca retreat center, will be joined in a conversation with Olivia Marcus, who is a medical anthropologist whose research focuses on ayahuasca. They will discuss the emergence of a new “healing culture”, associated with the wellness market. Some questions addressed include: What are the ideologies, beliefs, practices, and behaviors that underlie many modern healing approaches with plant-spirit shamanism? How is ayahuasca shamanism shifting from its relational practices to something more focused on personal development, self-actualization, and becoming part of a reified “healing culture”? What role does neoliberalism play in these new healing modalities? Why is it important for people to better understand Amazonian ontologies and the way that these underlie the medical systems that we encounter? Join Chacruna in another interesting anthropological conversation!

📷Adam is a doctoral candidate at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Spain, focusing on Medical Anthropology and Cultural Psychiatry. He is an active member of the Medical Anthropology Research Center (MARC-URV) and part of the Ayahuasca Community Committee at the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. Adam spent more than four years conducting research and extensive fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon, where he also facilitated Ayahuasca workshops in the context of shamanic and medical tourism. He is the creator of Healing from Healing, a social media platform that casts a critical, skeptical and humorous gaze at Healing Culture. Adam is currently the director of therapy and integration for Rē Precision Health, a wellness centre in the Pacific Coast of Mexico. He also facilitates preparation and integration processes in private practice, and helps clients reframe “Healing” within relational frameworks and a secular, grounded and open-ended interpretive and epistemic orientation.

📷Olivia Marcus (she/her) completed her Phd in Medical Anthropology from the University of Connecticut and an MPH in sociomedical sciences from Columbia University. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (5T32 DA007233), where she is conducting mixed-methods research on the design and evaluation of complex interventions to address addiction recovery and mental health issues in Indigenous/First Nations communities in Mexico and Canada. She is also working to co-develop a survey on integration practices among people who drink ayahuasca in the US and Canada. For the past few years, she has led the qualitative component of the mixed-methods Ayahuasca Treatment Outcome Project to assess outcomes for addiction recovery in an all-male therapeutic community in Peru. Olivia conducted her doctoral fieldwork in the upper Peruvian Amazon, where she investigated perceptions of mental wellness and healing among mestizo curanderos (i.e., vegetalistas) and their clientele.

This talk will be recorded and immediately available for rewatch for all attendees.

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Healing from Healing: Psychedelics, Hyper-individualism and the New Age