# Science's "Savage Slot": the appropriation and erasure of Indigenous science in the psychedelic renaissance

Emilia Sanabria

► To cite this version:

Emilia Sanabria. Science's "Savage Slot": the appropriation and erasure of Indigenous science in the psychedelic renaissance. Psychedelics, 2025, 2, pp.100003. 10.1016/j.psyche.2025.100003. halshs-05286555

HAL Id: halshs-05286555

https://shs.hal.science/halshs-05286555v1

Submitted on 15 Jan 2026

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

Distributed under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 - Attribution - International License
# Science’s “Savage Slot”: The appropriation and erasure of Indigenous science in the psychedelic renaissance

Emilia Sanabria

CNRS (CERMES3, Centre for Research on Medicine, Science, Health, Mental Health, and Society), France

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

## ARTICLE INFO

**Keywords:**

Ayahuasca

Plant medicines

Anthropology

Science and technology studies (STS)

Colonialism

Politics of knowledge

## ABSTRACT

This article examines the operations of what Trouillot named the “Savage slot” in psychedelic science. Indigenous efforts to break out of the “Savage Slot” (to which they are continuously re-allocated) threatens a foundational narrative of Western science. This is that the West has rational, experimentally validated facts and “they” have beliefs and traditions. Unsettling the dichotomy between Indigenous and Western sciences is often caught in a double-bind: it requires contrasting the two to make the point, thereby reanimating the distinction it is trying to dismantle. This article proposes that the reiteration of the idea of radical incommensurability between these knowledge systems at times serve to circumvent the difficult labour of creating Otherwise modes of engagement between Western and Indigenous Sciences. Drawing on a series of ethnographic vignettes of working alongside Indigenous colleagues in the psychedelic science renaissance, the article maps how Indigenous ways of knowing about healing are strategically (and oftentimes partially) appropriated while Indigenous past contributions to the field are erased. Against the focus on human brains and cognition that predominate in psychedelic science, Indigenous experts locate knowledge in territories and remind Westerners that other beings may also be thinking with us.

## Introduction

Indigenous Peoples’ voices and leadership have been notably absent from Western psychedelic research and psychedelic-assisted therapy spaces, with the field currently being widely represented by Westerners. When Indigenous voices have been engaged, their presence is often more symbolic, with little distributed benefit going back to their communities (Celidwen et al., 2023).

In late 2023, a headline in the prestigious journal *Nature* caught my attention. It read: “Psychedelic treatments are speeding towards approval – but *no one knows how they work*” (Reardon, 2023, *emph. added*). Having conducted over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork with traditional and Indigenous healers on their detailed expertise of working with plant medicines and psychedelics, I was – to put it mildly – taken aback. Who is *someone* if the traditional and Indigenous healers and knowledge keepers who know so much about these transformative modalities Western biomedicine dubs “psychedelic” are “*no one*”?

This headline is highly significant because it makes explicit a set of assumptions that I wish to explore here regarding the strategic dynamic of inclusion/erasure of non-Western knowledge forms from the field of (psychedelic) “Science”. I am interested in tracking what of Indigenous

life and knowledge is strategically drawn into the field and how certain non-Western knowledge practices are – tacitly or overtly – deemed incompatible with scientific praxis and invisibilized, erased, sidetracked, dubbed “culture” or otherwise rendered un-intelligeable to the Western scientific vantage point. These moves are often subtle, unconscious (despite the profuse literature on decolonization) and can take place despite best intentions to bring Indigenous and traditional knowledges to the table of psychedelic research.

In what follows, I show how such maneuvers exist in a *longue durée* and depend upon the perpetuation of several ghosts: that of the “Savage,” on the one hand, and of the Scientific Revolution, on the other. As the headline I opened with suggests, such historically predetermined maneuvers circumscribe what knowing can even mean today. It seems that we have reached an absurd point in our intellectual history when the absence of a double-blind randomized control trial (or RCT) – this narrow, highly specific format of knowing – equals “not knowing”. My hope is that in critically examining this legacy and its perpetuation, we can collectively embrace a much larger, inherently relational approach to knowing. Or, at least, collectively learn to revalue other ways of knowing than those delivered by the forms of patent-driven corporate science that have come to dominate Science in the wake of the intense
neoliberalization of our Universities (Benedito and Sanabria, 2024; la paperson, 2017).

Given that readers of this journal will be very familiar with the field of Psychedelic research, I eschew the classic – oftentimes highly promissory – introduction to the “rebirth” of knowledge made possible by its shoehorning into evidentiary medicine. Instead, I propose to take the reader through a very brief Science and Technology Studies (STS) inflected introduction to discussions on the contours of (non)Science, bringing this into conversation with Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s concept of “the savage slot.” I then turn to an ethnographically-informed discussion of the politics of interdisciplinary knowledge in the field Western biomedicine has dubbed “psychedelic.” Through this discussion, I show how the idealized figure of “the Savage” has been operating in the psychedelic renaissance to selectively include the facets of Indigenous life that fit the idealized paradigm of psychedelic medicine. This “decontextualized appropriation of Indigenous traditional medicines” (Celidwen et al., 2023) fails to recognize that Indigenous life and science form an interwoven fabric that cannot be torn apart to meet the uncompromising, uncaring and unmannerly criteria of much (although not all) contemporary scientific praxis.

In their Editorial to this new journal, Davis and Noorani propose that none of the existing Psychedelic journals have been “substantially interdisciplinary” in aims, scope and editorial composition (Davis & Noorani, 2025). My hope is that the present discussion will contribute to opening the way towards a form of radical interdisciplinarity that includes non-Western, Indigenous sciences. Interdisciplinarity has often been idealized as the piecemeal integration of humanities, social and natural sciences. Where psychedelic science is concerned, anthropologists such as myself have predominantly found our place in the discussions that structure this arena as experts on “traditional” practices and cultural uses (such as Amazonian shamanism, ethnobotany or religious and sacramental uses of plant medicines). While these are all critically important areas, in what follows I explore additional ways in which anthropology and the social sciences can contribute to the interdisciplinary discussions underway in this new journal.

## The undead scientific revolution and the enduring figure of “the Savage”

The narrative that science is the intellectual contribution of a handful of men in select European enclaves serves as an expedient fiction. This mythologizing of the Scientific Revolution positions it as the foundational event that cuts the West off from the rest of the pre-rational world. The tacit insistence on the superiority of European thought is a persistent, insidious myth that lives on in many micropolitical negotiations concerning the funding, design, conduct and publication of psychedelic research. As an undergraduate in the department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London I was taught the then standard narrative that China and Asia had very elaborate knowledge systems and great technical capacity but that Science-proper had only ever arisen once: in Europe, during the Scientific Revolution. Such a self-serving fiction was predicated on the supposition that this was an “internalist” process (to the history of ideas) that had strictly nothing to do with the wider context of empire, slavery and the technologies of global commerce. This tenacious fiction was what, up into the late 1990s, scholars were still writing against. As has now been very well documented, science flourished through the very structures of colonialism which forged violent global circuits that contributed to birthing and imposing this new transnational rationality (Haraway, 1991; Harding, 2016; Mignolo, 2011; Schiebinger, 2007; Smith, 2012; Subramaniam, 2024; Tilley, 2011; Whitt, 2009; Wynter, 2003). This creates a paradox where the richness and variety of global knowledge is subsumed under a singular narrative, side-lining anything that is not part of its tautological self-description.

Before turning to the implications that this has for the Psychedelic Renaissance, I want to briefly dwell on the shadow that the ghost of the

Scientific Revolution continues to cast. Historian of Science Mario Biagioli speaks of the Scientific Revolution as being “Undead” (Biagioli, 1998). Biagioli describes it as a “capacious empty container” that can be filled with any narrative and its contrary giving it rhetorical and institutional stability. The question is not so much what is said about it, but that every time we re- evoke its ghost (as I am doing here) it continues to live on. Like a zombie, this narrative is hard to kill. It is through enduring, oftentimes unquestioned incumbency to precepts of scientific materialism, universalism or replicability that concrete break downs in collaborative possibility arise in the field of psychedelic research. New narratives that enable critical departures from such callused narratives – without giving up the possibility to know and corroborate collectively – are urgently needed. Or better put, building narratives that enable us to break out of the science/non science duality that is set up by these old narratives are where we can aspire to grow. How can we usher in new stories about science that radically depart from this tired zombie myth?

As an anthropologist, I suggest that the undead Scientific Revolution endures in part because it is tethered to another enduring figure: that of “the Savage.” In his famous essay “Anthropology and the Savage Slot”, Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, argued that anthropology was consolidated as a discipline within the larger discursive field of “the Savage” that pre-existed it (Trouillot, 2003). The “Savage Slot” was not created by anthropology. Rather, anthropology emerged within a field of significance in which Christian imperial Europe constructed its image of itself in relation to those it “discovered” after 1492. The Savage in missionary and travelers’ accounts could be noble, wise, barbaric, human like “us,” or enslaveable. As Trouillot notes: “The space within the slot is not static.” The slot, another “capacious empty container,” delivers the spectacle of the Other necessary for the West’s self-definition as rational, modern and superior. Trouillot revealed the ways that Indigenous people contest the Savage Slot simply by claiming their right to historicity, authorship and self-determination. Indeed, the Savage Slot requires the silence of the Native. The Native must be Silent, and cannot be an interlocutor, a collaborator or exercise the labor of peer-review of Western scientific ideas. This silencing of the Native is what keeps the Savage Slot animated and potentiated. It endures not because of the ontology of the Native but because institutionally, it continues to function as an obligatory entry-point for Indigenous people into Western discursive arenas, such as Science, and by extension, the psychedelic renaissance. Trouillot’s analysis can inform us on the workings of the Savage Slot in the psychedelic arena. Here, a key narrative the West holds about itself is that it has rational, experimentally validated facts and “they” have beliefs and traditions. Yet there are growing calls to recognize that Indigenous knowledge is scientific. These rest on the demonstration that Indigenous knowledge practices are cumulative, experimental, and collectively produced. Ethnoecologist Jeannine Pfeiffer calls this “crowd-sourced citizen science taken to the next level” (Pfeiffer, 2022). In an Editorial in the journal *Science* titled “Time to Support Indigenous Science”, Kimmerer and Artelle note: “For centuries, Indigenous scientists have had to adapt to, and develop fluency in, Western modes of knowledge making. It’s now Western scientists’ turn to learn from, and respect, Indigenous science” (Kimmerer & Kyle, 2024).

Unsettling the dichotomy between Indigenous and Western sciences is often caught in the double bind of the Savage Slot. That is, it needs to contrast the two to make the point, thereby reanimating the distinction it is trying to kill. Indigenous knowledge systems are frequently portrayed as closed, pragmatic, utilitarian, value laden, indexical, context dependent and local in contrast to Western Science that is held to be universal, objective, value free and in some mysterious way, above culture. A key difference hinges on the fact that Indigenous science has been denied the status of Science because it is understood to be “local”. Yet as STS scholarship has so exquisitely demonstrated, science is an assemblage of local practices (Ong and Collier, 2007; Pickering, 1992; Turnbull, 1997). Indigenous science can thus not be rightfully dismissed on the basis that it is context dependent. Science, Susan Leigh Star
taught us, is the result of deeply heterogeneous local practices getting adduced and reconciled (Bowker et al., 2016). The aggregation of all viewpoints is the source of the robustness of science. And therein lies the crux of the matter I opened with: who gets to have a viewpoint here? Who can weigh in? and who cannot? And what keeps it that way?

On this matter, historian of science Geoffrey Lloyd (2019:40) calls for "modesty" and "antidogmatism" arguing that:

> ...we can and should allow Science in the Forest and Science in the Past to be indeed "science" in the broad understanding of that term that focuses on aims and methods rather than on results. We find in both careful, more-or-less systematic observation, careful description, an interest in classification, in explanation, in prediction, in the use of experiment in the large sense of trial-and-error procedures. The particular challenge of these ancient and modern indigenous materials is to see what we can learn from such an exposure to the strange, to unfamiliar assumptions and practices. The first thing we can learn, maybe, is simply not to assume that "we" (whoever) are right and "they" are wrong.

In an article on ethical engagements between Indigenous and Western sciences, the authors argue that the liberal framework of inclusion reproduces the deadlock that holds Western and Indigenous Sciences in a binary:

> Through inclusion, Western-trained scientists selectively engage only elements of Indigenous science that are understood to be similar to Western science; ignore the spiritual foundations, ethical obligations, and political implications that come with Indigenous knowledges; tokenistically invite Indigenous persons; and instrumentalize the insights of Indigenous sciences to "fill gaps" of Western science instead of recognizing the integrity of Indigenous sciences as knowledge systems that have their own internal measures of validity, quality, rigour, and relevance.

This echoes with Evangia Foutiou's (2020) remarkable analysis of the role of Indigenous knowledge in psychedelic science. In this, Fotiou proposes that "Despite the great number of scientific studies on ayahuasca and other psychedelic plant medicines, the accompanying local knowledge systems are understudied. Certain well-established stereotypes about the spiritual or noble savage still plague much of the western discourse on Indigenous religious and medical systems." (Fotiou, 2020:18). As Fotiou astutely notes, biomedicine is but one ethnomedical system among others, elevated through a long history of conquest and violent erasure as more objective and factual than others.

One key way that the therapeutic psychedelic paradigm does violence to Indigenous ways of knowing is by sanitizing aspects of Indigenous shamanism perceived as "sorcery" (on this topic see Fotiou, 2025). In this process, the more ambivalent or even aggressive aspects of Amerindian shamanisms are invisibilized, in favour of romantic versions of shamanism that correspond more closely to the aspirations and imaginaries of urban publics in search of "healing." Gearing (2022:15) refers to this as a mechanism of ignorance that functions as a kind of secular enchantment giving Westerners ethical immunity from genuinely engaging with the intense injustice and violence that Indigenous peoples endure (see also Fotiou, 2016). In this sense, romantic stereotyping of Amazonian shamans as 'noble savage' living in benevolent harmony with the natural world fits with an idealized Western spiritual quest, contributing to the perpetuation of the Savage slot.<fnref n="1" />

In an article on *Indigenous Ways of Knowing for the Twenty-First Century*, Lakota philosopher Philip Deloria and colleagues also propose to read Indigenous knowledge as science. They argue that the dialectical relationship between what is often dubbed "Traditional Environmental Knowledge" (TEK) and "mainstream science" offers potential for both

Indigenous and non-Indigenous futures in the face of climate disaster. Their qualification of hegemonic institutional science as “mainstream” is important here as it does not bring into question the validity of Indigenous ways of knowing, but instead invites critical reflection about “the singular hegemony of Western science” in ways that makes room for Indigenous sciences as both a powerful practice of knowledge-making in its own right and an important partner in a multisided scientific exchange of knowledge (Deloria et al., 2018:13). And yet, they are careful to note that, in ethical terms, this should not mean that “Indigenous knowledge ought to be available to the full sweep of science; too often that has meant appropriation and new practices of colonial domination. Indigenous peoples insist that they will stand with the sciences, particularly in our moment of planetary crisis. They would simply like to know that scientists from all disciplines will stand with them as well.” (Deloria et al., 2018:13)

As Sharon Stein and colleagues are careful to note (Stein et al., 2024:2), Western and Indigenous sciences are not monolithic; each comprises multiple epistemological lineages and heterogeneous practices. Hence: "It is particularly important to emphasize the diversity of Indigenous knowledges, given the tendency of Western institutions to reproduce forms of pan-Indigenism that flatten the diversity within and between Indigenous communities and knowledge systems by assuming they are all the same."

Some question whether Indigenous ways of living and knowing should be understood as science. Critics of the definition of Indigenous knowledge as science underscore the fact that there are other discourses of truth that do not require being subsumed within the rather limited frame of Enlightenment definitions of what counts as a collectively corroborated fact.<fnref n="2" /> Maori environmental scientist Makere Harawira (2013) notes that Indigenous science has been gaining traction as a source of wealth only insofar as it is compatible with profit and growth. Describing the movement towards knowledge capitalism in contemporary academia, Harawira notes that:

> The operation of the market for the pursuit of truth and meaning as the main driver of the academe constitute a new form of cognitive imperialism which impacts on indigenous knowledge and indigenous scholarship in deeply contradictory but ultimately damaging ways. On one hand, the new 'knowledge economy' operates to marginalize Indigenous philosophical knowledge and traditional ways of being in the world as valid and legitimate forms of study, insofar as Indigenous ways of knowing do not immediately produce profitable research. On the other hand, it repositions (some) Indigenous knowledge and scholarship within the discursive framework of innovation, excellence and contribution to economic wealth. As university-industry partnerships substitute public funding and demands and scholars and researchers are faced with monetizing their teaching and research in order to maintain programs and spaces of engagement, there are difficult decisions to be made, especially by those of us who see our work as holding the space for Indigenous community-University relationships and engagement. (47–8)

In a similar vein, Brazilian anthropologist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha (2009) who has worked extensively on intellectual property regimes situates her discussion of Indigenous knowledge squarely within the neoliberalization of the University – with its race to patent – that has turned pure, disinterested science into for-profit science. As Stein et al. note (2024 *emph.added*) "colonial patterns and power relations are often reproduced at the interface between Western and Indigenous sciences, including the reproduction of epistemic Eurocentrism and *extractive modes of relationship* between settlers and Indigenous Peoples."

To sum up my argument so far, I have suggested that the myth of the Scientific Revolution – as a historical break that lead to the privileged,

<footnote n="1">¹ I am grateful to one of the reviewers of this article for calling my attention to this point.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² For a detailed discussion of these issues, see https://tapestryinstitute.org/indigenous-knowledge/indigenous-science/ (accessed 16/07/2025)</footnote>
experimentally-validated access to the real facts of Nature – endures in
tacit (and not so tacit) assumptions regarding the superiority of the
Western scientific method over other ways of engaging with the world.
The emergence of Western science is ensnared to another persistent
colonial trope: the “Savage Slot,” a framework that historically posi-
tioned Indigenous peoples as objects rather than producers of knowl-
edge. This binary still haunts contemporary science, where Indigenous
knowledge is either excluded or selectively included, stripped of its
ethical, spiritual, and political dimensions. Efforts to recognize Indige-
nous knowledge as science confront a paradox: to be taken seriously,
such knowledge must mirror Western science, thus reinforcing the very
distinction they seek to overcome. This reflects deeper trends of
epistemic extractivism and cognitive imperialism, especially under
neoliberal academic pressures. Genuine collaboration must acknowl-
edge the integrity, diversity, and sovereignty of Indigenous knowledge
systems—without subsuming them under Western scientific frameworks
or capitalist logics. This leads me to a central question: *Does reiterating
the radical incommensurability between Indigenous and mainstream knowl-
edge practices serve to circumvent the labour of creating Otherwise modes of
engagement between Western and Indigenous Sciences?* To answer this
question, I turn to some examples of working alongside Indigenous
colleagues in the so-called Psychedelic Science Renaissance.

The neuro-centric psychedelic renaissance

Psychedelic therapy has been defined as a paradigm shift in mental
health, as an editorial in JAMA recently suggested (Yehuda & Lehrner,
2023). A driving force for this revolution is the rehabilitation of
demonized “drugs” as panacea for the global mental heath crisis. Much
of the know-how that went into building the first wave of clinical psy-
chedelic experiments in the 1960s was directly inspired by Western
clinicians participating in, and emulating Indigenous ceremonial prac-
tices such as those centering Peyote in the Native American Church,
Ayahuasca in the Amazon or Sacred Mushroom traditions among the
Mazatec of Mexico (Celidwen et al., 2023; Williams et al., 2022). The
first ethical principle that Celidwen et al. (2023) outline to guide
Western psychedelic research and practice is “the direct acknowledge-
ment of Indigenous traditional knowledges and practices being the root
of Western psychedelic medicine.”

I have been tracking the psychedelic movement through a European-
funded collaborative research project on ayahuasca healing practices
titled Healing Encounters.<fnref n="3" /> The project examined how ideas and prac-
tices concerning ayahuasca circulate between the traditional Amazonian
communities who stewarded this vegetal technology, the myriad
contemporary urban ritual formations arising out of the colonial
encounter and the clinical and biomedical understandings within which
ayahuasca becomes embedded with the revived boom of psychedelic
research.

As many have argued, a defining feature of the current wave of
psychedelic clinical research is that it seeks to abide to the standards of
the randomized controlled trial (RCT) to be “genuinely” scientific. RCTs
evaluate efficacy in two blinded arms: one active, one placebo. Blinding
in psychedelic trials is a major problem, that has kept these treatments
from gaining FDA approval. The second major stumbling block is the
fact that these clinical trials are **psychedelic-assisted**. While RCTs, and
the regulators who validate them, only know how to evaluate drugs,
these trials evaluate the interplay of a molecule **and** the psychothera-
peutic intervention that “holds” and directs the experience. This has
been a major stumbling block as regulatory agencies do not know how to

deal with this or how to evaluate therapeutic interventions.

Unlike with other pharmaceuticals, most of this research is funded by
philanthropists operating in the ideological fold of Silicon Valley
(Devenot et al., 2022; Tvorun-Dunn, 2022). From Steve Jobs describing
LSD as “one of the most important things in my life” to billionaires Tim
Ferris (angel investor to Facebook), Peter Thiel (CEO of Paypal) or
ChatGPT founder Sam Altman have all financially endorsed psycho-
delics. Not to speak of Elon Musk. These financial endorsements come
with their share of transhumanist self-optimizing ideological input. As
Keel (2022:4) incisively notes: “An important assumption is clear: psy-
chedelia is no antagonist to late capitalism.”

"Psychedelic," a term coined by psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in the 1950s, means "mind manifesting." This is because these compounds were and continue to be understood to cause alterations in consciousness, including the perceptions of self, time, space, emotion and cognition. Biomedical studies find them to be agonists at the serotonin 5-HT2A receptors that are densely distributed in the cortex and amygdala. Neuroimaging studies purport to demonstrate increased connectivity between brain regions not usually 'speaking' to each other (such as regions where memory is stored and those where emotions are processed). Psychedelics, biomedical articles profess, disrupt connectivity in the brain region known as the default mode network (DMN). This brain region has been experimentally associated with the capacity to imagine mental states in others as well as the ability to mentally time travel or project into the past or future. The DMN emerges when the child develops a stable sense of narrative self. All of this leads many neuroscientists to postulate that the DMN is a kind of biological expression of the ego (Buchborn et al., 2023; Carhart-Harris et al., 2014; Gattuso et al., 2022; Gattuso et al., 2023; Lebedev et al., 2015; Stoliker et al., 2022; Palhano-Fontes et al., 2015).

In 2019, my team was invited to participate in an expedition to bring
the lab to the forest called Expedition Neuron. The idea was to reverse
epistemic injustices by conducting a neuroscience study of ayahuasca in
a naturalistic setting. Mobile EEG systems (valued at 20,000€ each) and
blood, sweat, vomit and feces samples collected alongside video re-
cordings of the songs and participant reactions that could be synched to
the biomarkers were proposed. A series of conversations began with the
idealogues of the project who were keen to embark anthropologists of
science as those that made up the Healing Encounters team on their
expedition. Several core and irreconcilable differences emerged in the
process of our conversations. For me, the key issue was understanding
how Expedition Neuron responded to the community needs of the Huni
Kuin among whom the research was going to be conducted. Within our
project we were committed to working with Indigenous Research
Methods and co-defining the process of inquiry with our Indigenous
collaborators.

Expedition Neuron required a dozen or so EEG systems and I
wondered if there was not better uses to put that funding to, given that it
was unclear how this study responded to intellectual questions the Huni
Kuin had for science. My conversations with Huni Kuin associations
indicated that the Huni Kuin were not at all hostile to mainstream
Western science, but that in the order of priority, there were much more
pressing issues that they faced such as documenting and qualifying the
mercury pollution from gold mining in their rivers or adopting agro-
ecological techniques to ensure food security in the now sedenterized
villages.

Conversations with the Expedition Neuron team culminated in a
panel discussion at the International Conference on Psychedelic
Research (ICPR, 2020) during which I asked the neuroscientists how
conducting the experiment in the forest would overcome the problem of
standardization. Anticipating the demands of Western peer reviewers in
the prestigious journals where they hoped to publish, they had decided
that the order of the songs that the shamans would sing during the
"naturalistic" ceremony would need to be standardized. This goes
directly against the fact that healers may – in the course of the ceremony,
and in response to what is taking place– deem it necessary to change the

<footnote n="3">³ This research was made possible by generous support from the European Research Council Grant n°757589 "Healing Encounters: reinventing an indigenous medicine in the clinic and beyond" based at CERMES3 (Université de Paris Cité, EHESS, CNRS, INSERM). More information about this project is available here: https://encounters.cnrs.fr/en/project</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Image 1. Ibā and Rita observing the display of animal brains at the Museum of ‘Man’ in Paris, June 2019. Photo by Emilia Sanabria.</figcaption></figure>

order of the songs or to change the structure of the ritual to respond to the specificity of a situation. In ritual contexts, standardization is a direct violation of the healing potency of the ceremony that being in the forest (rather than wired up in a lab) does nothing to change. Finally, I asked them about the central place of the brain and how their Indigenous collaborators understood the process of being wiring up to an EEG machine during ceremony. This question was informed by my conversations with Indigenous collaborators that made it evident that thinking about psychedelics as mind manifesting was deeply problematic.

Ibā Sales is a Huni Kuin ritual specialist born into a long lineage of ayahuasca healers. He was Ethical and Scientific Advisor for the Healing Encounters project and in 2019 spent a month in Europe with his daughter Rita. On this occasion we visited the *Musée de l'Homme* (or Museum of Man as it is still called) in Paris. We found ourselves in front of a display of some twenty animal brains floating in formalin that truly captured their attention. The display showcased how science understands the evolution of cognitive capacities. Ibā and Rita had endless questions about this. I found myself unable to adequately convey what was being said with this display of floating brains. The extent to which this Museum display presumed prior socialization into Western selfhood as consubstantialized with the brain became obvious to me in a profoundly unsettling way. The more I explained the less it seemed to make sense. They were polite and gracious in this chasm of untranslatability. Later, I spoke at length with Ibā on how Western science understands psychedelics through the lens of the brain. Ibā, who is generous and curious, never directly contested this idea but it intrigues him, or makes him laugh. On one occasion he told me that the brain really is not a good piece of meat: one does not eat the brain of a prey. On another occasion, he told me that *Nixi pae* (as ayahuasca is called in his language) seizes you like a giant anaconda wrapping its coils around you putting pressure on your whole body. The visionary experience is not located in the brain or even in the self, but rather opens up the possibility of transspecies perspectival shifts.

José Lopez Sanchez – the other Indigenous advisor to our project – is more explicit about denouncing the idea that ayahuasca produces effects through the mind. In the book we published with José, he warns that it is essential to approach the mind’s tricks and the illusionary world of the

visions that these medicines generate with caution. “Don’t think too much, trust,” Shipibo healers tend to emphasize. As José puts it : “*Gringos* (Westerners) study a lot, they read a lot. For this reason, they come very ‘mentalized’” (Lopez Sanchez et al., 2024, my translation). If we listen to José carefully, we might in fact reframe my earlier statement: ayahuasca can be mind-manifesting but this is not often deemed desirable. José makes a connection between this mentalist approach and the fascination Western participants often have with their “visions.” These, he notes, are often taken too literally:

> “This is not the plants speaking. This is *la mente* (mind). This is their own story. They hallucinate their self. And they believe their hallucinations. It is the mind that is managing them. The power that the mind and the word has over them is very strong.” (op.cit)

Much of the biomedical literature on ayahuasca is framed within the fields of neuropharmacology or cognitive science. Much anthropological work on ayahuasca reproduces this cognitive impetus with its focus on the visual or visionary, on “hallucinations” (Dupuis, 2022) or on cognition, language, information and thought (Doyle, 2012; Fortier, 2018; Kohn, 2022; Shanon, 2002). Given that my own work has sought to theorize from the question of embodiment (Sanabria, 2016) I was somewhat cautious with such cognitive approaches and proposed, in the design of Healing Encounters, to focus on the “mind below the neck” (Sanabria, 2019, see also Sanabria, 2020). While there is certainly much to learn about the cognitive and neurogenerative pathways that ayahuasca opens, the emphasis of so many of my interlocutors who work therapeutically with these medicines is to approach the mind’s tricks and the illusionary world of the visions that these medicines can generate with tremendous caution. The danger is, as José powerfully notes: “the learning is very mental, *it is not connected to the heart*. ” This provides an important corrective to the concern with knowledge as located in brains and as something that can be separated from the relational ethics that characterize traditional and Indigenous healers practices.

## Epistemic territories and plant teachers

Walter López who is President of the Peruvian Association of Shipibo Healers recently stated in an interview: “Ayahuasca is a very wise plant,
it can teach you many interesting things, but it can also show you very
ugly things, depending on what kind of person you are. (...) We are all
people, but few of us are human beings."<fnref n="4" /> The idea that master plants
such as ayahuasca may be teachers is widespread in Amazonia (Luna,
1984). UMIYAC 2019, the Colombian association of Ayahuasca healers
is also explicit in stating that Yaje (ayahuasca) is a sentient being: "Yagé
is not a hallucinogen or a psychedelic. Yagé is a plant that has a living
spirit and teaches us how to live with Earth."<fnref n="5" />

UMIYAC put forward the idea of the territory as an epistemic space,
suggesting that knowledge is derived with and from the territory. In its
declaration on cultural appropriation, UMIYAC states that (Indigenous)
knowledge is "inextricably tied to the land."

We are still suffering from colonization and invasion. Armed conflict, drug-trafficking, land grabbing, mining and oil multinationals, timber traffickers and cattle ranchers continue to threaten the survival of our people by waging war on Indigenous ways of life caused by the voracious appetites for precious Amazonian resources such as minerals, petrol, and coca for the production of cocaine (UMIYAC, 2019).

This point is echoed by Williams et al. (2022:510) in their article *Indigenous Philosophies and the "Psychedelic Renaissance"*. They observe that *topos*—place, land, territory—is foundational to Indigenous ways of knowing, where knowledge emerges through relationship with the living earth, rather than through the abstractions of *logos*, the disembodied discourse of Western philosophy. Land, in this view, is not a passive setting but an ontological ground—alive with meaning, memory, and relation—through which the interdependence of animate and inanimate beings is continuously enacted. This immanent, place-based ontology stands in quiet but radical contrast to the transcendent frameworks that often shape Western psychedelic imaginaries. Far from being merely symbolic, such grounded cosmologies articulate a sophisticated relational understanding of life, one that refuses the separation of mind and matter, spirit and soil. As Celidwen et al. (2023:4) note,

Western psychedelic research and practice has its roots within
traditional Indigenous medicines systems yet have turned ‘kincen-
tric’ approaches (treating all relationships, including medicines, as
kin) to anthropocentric approaches (human-centric). This anthro-
pocentric approach fails to adequately reference or acknowledge
Indigenous paradigms in Western procedures, thus expropriating
Indigenous knowledges while separating the medicines from the
context of their original environments.

The closest that the psychedelic arena comes to recognizing the
importance of the environments in which such experiences take place is
through the notion of “setting,” a concept that is becoming increasingly
emptied out of its potency as scales to measure it are developed. A
commentary titled *The Ancient Roots of Today’s Emerging Renaissance in
Psychedelic Medicine* poses the question in terms of

"whether Western medicine can draw upon indigenous knowledge as it integrates psychedelics into current clinical environments. It would, for instance, seem critical for health systems to preserve the ancient ritualistic elements of psychedelic-based therapies, with close attention to assessment, set and setting, time for preparation, processing and dialogue, and re-integration after profound experiences, as commonly practiced in current clinical research (George et al., 2022)."

But even as the authors recognize that “society” (presumably,
although they fail to specify, Western late liberal society) may not be
willing to “invest” in such “resource-intensive treatments – activities for
which entire days/weeks were often devoted by our ancient forebears
(ibid)” we can see how far removed this is from what Indigenous people
articulate about territory, relationality, ethics and lifeways.

Part of the problem stems from the fact that psychedelic science, in its quest to make itself legitimate and credible, indeed scientific, is entangled in a delicate exercise of self-legitimation within hegemonic science. It does so while brandishing its revolutionary potential., But in the balancing act between legitimacy and credibility (oftentimes indexed by financial measures) and paradigm shift the latter has recently been losing. Indeed since 2018, an increasingly individualized, psychologised, patent-centric model has come to dominate. As Keel (2022:5) powerfully argues, psychedelia has held “in abeyance any ontological disordering that might result if the clinical trip report was understood as something more than psychological.” This empties out of its radical potential the recognition of the extraordinary (to the Western mind) agential potential of beings such as plants. The idea that plants may be pedagogical envoys sits in tension with the intensely instrumentalist and reductionist ways in which biomedical research apprehends them, as containers of active principles, difficult to standardize and challenging to extract from their biocultural worlds in the wake of albeit highly imperfect international legislation against biopiracy. Keel (2022:6) makes a call for interdisciplinary research to eschew “becoming submissive to an academic scientific enterprise that is subject to institutional protocols that negate the agencies of (magic) plants and our emergent agencies in relation with them.”

It is particularly striking that despite the revolution in Western sci-
entific approaches to plants (Bynum, 2022; Calvo et al., 2020; Gagliano,
2017; Kimmerer, 2014; Lee, 2023; Myers, 2015; Segundo-Ortin and
Calvo, 2022), psychedelic science is unable or unwilling to open up to
experimentation the conceptual and methodological possibilities this
renewed approach to plants brings forth. The road to genuinely inter-
epistemic dialogue is, clearly, full of challenges but the potential to
generate renewed research questions is extraordinary. Imagine what
ground-shifting research questions could be generated out of such di-
alogues! This would require the interruption of what Stein et al. (2024)
refer to as the “inherited monoculture of inquiry” and the unlearning of
“ethnocentric assumptions about the superiority, objectivity, and uni-
versality of Western sciences.” This does not mean the dismissal of
existing scientific standards but a willingness to embark collaboratively
into new areas, to open up to genuine forms of intellectual curiosity, find
common ground beyond the obvious differences and explore ways to do
things otherwise collaboratively.

A recent article published in the wake of the Multidisciplinary As-
sociation for Psychedelic Science (MAPS)'s 2025 conference and titled
"Psychedelic Confluence" powerfully draws on Brazilian quilombolo
philosopher Négo Bispo and his deployment of the fluvial metaphor of
confluence (Kambeba et al., 2025). Confluencia (confluence) enables
Bispo to name processes of colonial encounter that do not result in a
homogenization (of waters, of peoples) but enables him to conceptualize
coexistence outside the hegemonic imposition of one world on all others
(which is how he defines colonialism): "A river does not stop being a
river because it 'conflated' with another river. It continues with its
essence. This is the power of confluence." In their article, Adana Kam-
beba, Jairo Lima and Glauber Loures de Assis are careful to note that the
psychedelic confluence is a call for alliance, but not a call for
universalism:

Confluence demands open dialogue between cosmologies, sciences, epistemologies, and cultures. It invites us to recognize Indigenous systems of knowledge not only as “wisdom,” but also as science. It challenges us to build therapeutic bridges without reproducing colonial hierarchies between biomedical and traditional knowledge.

<footnote n="4">⁴ Interview with Walter López available at https://psychedelicconference.org/en/danger-ayahuasca-spiritual-appropriation/</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ https://umiyac.org/2019/11/01/declaration-about-cultural-appropriation-from-the-spiritual-authorities-representatives-and-indigenous-organizations-of-the-amazon-region/?lang=en</footnote>
Relation over conquest. Solidarity over gatekeeping. Co-production of knowledge over patents. (Kambeba et al., 2025)

## Feathering-up the psychedelic arena: Inclusion and the politics of the multiple

Over the course of the last decade, Psychedelic Science conferences have mushroomed. These events bring together a disparate set of actors including Indigenous experts, psychiatrists, pharmacologists, therapists, ethnobotanists, venture capitalists, ayahuasca Church leaders, psychonauts and – increasingly – wellness industry entrepreneurs and integration coaches, Silicon Valley cryptochain app developers, patent lawyers and more. Mainstream psychedelic conferences tend to limit Indigenous participation to Opening “Ceremonies” and other tokenistic roles.

However, Indigenous presence is particularly at stake in the World Ayahuasca Conferences. ICEERS – a Spanish nonprofit – has organized three such “World Ayahuasca Conferences.” The first, held in Ibiza in 2014, was relatively small and included few Indigenous delegates. In a bold move, ICEERS held the second World Ayahuasca Conference in the ex-rubber-tapping capital Rio Branco, in the Amazonian state of Acre, Brazil. Over one very dense week in October 2016, the conference brought to life in this consequential locality some intense conflicts. The first panel was held in the main auditorium and was devoted to Indigenous “voices”. But this did not go to plan: indeed the Indigenous delegates took the stage to question what they denounced as an absurd request: to give their perspective on ayahuasca in ten minutes. The conference celebrated the diversity of perspectives on ayahuasca and as such sought to be inclusive by bringing together a plurality of approaches. Such a setup presumes a whole made up of a plurality of perspectives. One after the other, each of the Indigenous representatives spoke denouncing the framework of the conference. The sentiment was that it was offensive for a European organization to invite Indigenous peoples to a gathering about their most sacred practice, giving equal place to ayahuasca religions and scientists, on occupied Indigenous land. The World Ayahuasca Conference’s celebration of diversity places this event within the frame of the plural. Within this frame, the entities brought together pre-exist the relating, as autonomous things. In requesting that the conversation begin with a recognition of colonial violence the Indigenous delegates directly challenged the implicit liberal framework of inclusion that the conference reproduced. They demanded that the conference be an occasion to transform the Western framing of ayahuasca. This is how feminist STS has taught us to understand the significant difference between the plural and the multiple. The multiple undoes the unitary notion of the whole (see Sanabria, 2021 for a detailed discussion of this point). A positive outcome of the Rio Branco conference was that Indigenous people began organizing their own autonomous Indigenous Ayahuasca Conferences. In 2019 ICEERS organized the third World Ayahuasca conference which was informed by the failures of the second. The conference organizers decided to create an autonomous Indigenous space in which Indigenous peoples could self-organize, chose their discussion themes, allocate timing as they wished and generate an independent Indigenous Declaration. Three Indigenous and two non-Indigenous members of our team took part in the autonomous Indigenous space. We were allocated a rather small room that was difficult to find, far from the main stage. Few conference participants found their way to the Indigenous space which ended up being somewhat marginalized from the main event where neuroscience literally took center stage. On the last day, as the Indigenous delegates were intensely engrossed in the discussions concerning the final wording of the Indigenous declaration, one of the conference organizers approached me and asked if she could “borrow” Rita, our young Indigenous collaborator, for a panel on the main stage. Rita had done a great job of looking inconspicuously Western – having recently died her hair green and wearing jeans and trainers. She was ambivalent about leaving the Indigenous space as the stakes of the discussion there were high. As

she ushered Rita away, this person asked her if she could don the feather head-dress she had been wearing at one of the Opening events. Rita complied, giving me one of her knowing looks.

In 2023 I was invited to consult on “how to do inclusion better” for a European psychedelic conference. We had a number of calls, and email exchanges in which formats enabling a proper dialogue were discussed. In the end, it became evident that Indigenous participation was valued only in as much as it did not disturb the central goal of showcasing psychedelic science. None of this was overt, but in the undeniably complex process of putting on an international conference, the pragmatics and contingencies of choosing speakers and allocating time did not weigh in favor of disruptive conversations or unusual formats. When I questioned the prominent place given to a male speaker whose honorary could have funded five Indigenous delegates I was told “yes, but he really brings in the crowds and the press”. I pulled out and, in the end, this conference did not have a single Indigenous panel.

These examples show that, despite performative inclusivity, Psychedelic Conferences are not imagined as spaces for contesting Western framings. Indigenous participation is side-lined, exoticized and presented as “culture” or “tradition” but never as Science. Indigenous participants are not considered as peers. They are subtly – and not so subtly – pushed into the Savage Slot and even at times asked to “feather-up” for the occasion. But then, as Max Liboiron (2021:876) so powerfully summarized it: “The opposite of colonialism is not inclusion.”

Fortunately, Kambeba et al. (2025) note that things are starting to change. Panels at the most recent Psychedelic Science conference held in Spring 2025 brought Indigenous and non-Indigenous voices together into dialogue, they report: “Despite being a minority presence, Indigenous voices created new gravitational fields in the conference and shifted its magnetic pole.” The organisers of the autonomous Indigenous Ayahuasca conferences and ICEERS are now partnering to prepare a World Ayahuasca Forum in Autumn 2026 which promises to deepen this confluencial vision for radical dialogue.

## Conclusion

If the new psychedelia is made subservient to liberal institutions, predominant natural realism, and entrenched divisions of academic labor, it is unlikely that any politics, ontological or otherwise, will be allowed to emerge in these sites. (Keel, 2022:10)

A respectful approach to engaging with Indigenous Peoples and their ways of knowing and being is urgently needed within Western psychedelic research and praxis. A respectful method consists of approaching Indigenous knowledge systems through relationship building first and foremost with Indigenous scholars and practitioners, Indigenous organizations, and/or respected traditional knowledge-holders within regional contexts. This respectful method also includes following the respective traditional Indigenous protocols in the region in addition to upholding free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) at all levels of the engagement process when it comes to the potential use of Indigenous knowledges in new contexts (“nothing about us, without us”). (Celidwen et al., 2023)

It’s not the plants that must be integrated into the West. It’s the West that must be re-woven into the living tapestry of the Earth. (Kambeba et al., 2025)

In “Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man” Taussig (1987) provides a chilling analysis of colonial violence in Colombia. Recounting episodes of torture and dehumanization, Taussig notes that “The savagery of the wild Indians was important to the propaganda of the rubber company” (83). Taussig is attentive to the shadows cast by Homo oeconomicus in the vicious circle of alterity: “What stands out is the mimesis between the savagery attributed to the Indians by the colonists and the savagery perpetuated by the colonists in the name of (...)
civilization, meaning business" (134). Life on the colonial rubber estate folded the otherness of the one into the otherness of the other, inter-locking "Indian understandings of white understandings of Indians — to white understandings of Indian understandings of whites" (109). Taussig's puzzle is making sense of why colonialists in Colombia despise Indians as savages and yet seek them out for healing: "Going to the Indians for their healing power and killing them for their wildness are not so far apart. Indeed, these actions are not only intertwined but codependent" (100).

I have pointed here to the ways that Psychedelic Science is caught in such intertwined codependency. While Indigenous people are not overtly despised, their contribution to the field is instrumentalized, and the realities of ongoing genocide, hunger, and extractivism (that is, their ongoing killing) is inseparable from the extraction of their healing power. In the wake of the ontological turn, the question of radical incommensurability has been re-animated. Against this stands the idea that layers of brutal history have forged the dialectics of the West and its Savage "antiself" (Taussig, 1987). I want to suggest that what is commonly seen as "incommensurable" actually gives way to a thousand shades of bridgeable / unbridgeable differences that are only held solid by the enduring legacies of those figures slotted into the Savage Slot, as they live on, consciously or unconsciously in our institutional arrangements. But Otherwise ways of being with difference are always available to us.

The implications are far-reaching. By opening up the black box of scientific fact-making, Science and Technology Studies (STS) powerfully demonstrated that scientific knowledge is not a monolith but an assemblage of diverse, situated practices. STS has a key role to play by continuing to question some of the more ideological ways in which the authority of Science gets upheld at the cost of other ways of doing and knowing. Practices of inclusion that appear to welcome Indigenous perspectives can actually reinforce the perceived incommensurability between Western and Indigenous Sciences. Incorporating Indigenous knowledge as "culture" (Cunha, 2009) rather than as scientific contribution creates surface-level inclusion that selectively brings in Indigenous presence while reinforcing otherness. In this way, the supposed incommensurability between Western and Indigenous sciences is re-inscribed. The challenge, then, is to push for forms of epistemic exchange that make room for other knowledge systems to stand as different-but-equal rather than as peripheral. Indigenous efforts to break out of the "Savage Slot" destabilize a foundational narrative of the West. And this is good news: the West's track record has not been good, by any standard. It invites us to collectively rework not just what the slots contain, but the very system of slots on which our orders of knowledge continue to be built.

As argued above, genuine inter-epistemic dialogue is demanding, yet it carries immense potential to generate vital new research questions. Realizing this will require funders, publishers, and researchers to loosen the grip of some of Western science's most entrenched dogmas. In psychedelic science, this means confronting dismissive and racist attitudes toward knowledge systems that elude Eurocentric ideals of standardization, blinding, or universality. This is not a rejection of scientific standards, but an opening: a willingness to enter unfamiliar terrains together, cultivate shared curiosity, and explore other ways of knowing and doing. In this article, I have — alongside a wide array of Indigenous scientists' and STS scholars — opted to refer to Indigenous science as science. I do this while recognizing the importance of not reducing all knowledge to the peculiar frame of Western science and not effacing the significant differences between these knowledge systems (as Cunha, 2009, cited above invites us to do). This said, it is important to eschew the dichotomy between, on the one hand, a view of these knowledge systems as radically different, cum-incommensurable and, on the other, rendering selected parts of Indigenous science (those that do not disrupt or jostle Western scientific premises) available for appropriation as sources of 'innovation.' It is time to move beyond these tired polarities. Over-stating such differences runs the risk of losing precious

opportunities to build bridges and alliances where these are possible, desirable and consensual. As Stengers (2018) argued in *Another Science is Possible*, this requires a radical slowing down which would enable scientists to conduct their work in a way that does not do violence to the ways and worlds of others. To recognize that others also have their matters of concern and their own ways of having their world matter.

## Statement on interdisciplinaryarity

This article proposes an ethnographically-informed discussion of the politics of interdisciplinary knowledge in the field Western biomedicine has dubbed "psychedelic." It does so by drawing on Science and Technology Studies theorisations of disciplinary knowledge and anthropology of science. My hope is that the present discussion will contribute to opening the way towards a form of radical interdisciplinarity that includes non-Western, Indigenous sciences.

## CRediT authorship contribution statement

**Emilia Sanabria:** Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Validation, Supervision, Project administration, Methodology, Investigation, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization.

## Funding

This research was made possible by generous support from the European Research Council Grant number 757589 "Healing Encounters: reinventing an indigenous medicine in the clinic and beyond".

## Declaration of Competing Interest

I am employed in a public research institution and declare an explicit interest in public health as a common good. I have never accepted financial support for my research from corporate or pharmaceutical organisations. I have never sought to obtain any patents, and will continue to endeavour to not do so.

## Data availability

The authors do not have permission to share data.

## References

* Benedito, Pietro, & Sanabria, Emilia (2024). Psychedelic nation? (De)Provincializing the psychedelic renaissance from Brazil. *Science, Technology, Human Values*. https://doi.org/10.1177/016224392421300210

* Biagioli, Mario (1998). The scientific revolution is undead. *Configurations*, 6(2), 141–148.
* C.Bowker, Geoffrey, Timmermans, Stefan, Clarke, Adele, & Balka, Ellen (Eds.). (2016). *Boundary objects and beyond: Working with Leigh Star*. MIT Press.

* Buchborn, Tobias, Kettner, Hannes S., Kärtner, Laura, & Meinhardt, Marcus W. (2023). The ego in psychedelic drug action – Ego defenses, ego boundaries, and the therapeutic role of regression. *Frontiers in Neuroscience*, 17. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2023.1232459

* Bynum, Helen (2022). Plant agency and planetary health. *The Lancet*, 400(10346), 90–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)01243-0

* Calvo, Paco, Gagliano, Monica, Souza, Gustavo M., & Trewavas, Anthony (2020). Plants are intelligent, Here's how. *Annals of Botany*, 125(1), 11–28. https://doi.org/10.1093/aob/mcz155

* Carhart-Harris, Robin L., Leech, Robert, Hellyer, Peter J., et al. (2014). The entropic brain: A theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs, 20–20 *Frontiers in Human Neuroscience*, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00020.

* Celidwen, Yuria, Redvers, Nicole, Githaiga, Cicilia, et al. (2023). Ethical principles of traditional indigenous Medicine to guide Western psychedelic research and practice. *The Lancet Regional Health – Americas*, 18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lana.2022.100410

* Cunha, Manuela Carneiro da (2009). *Culture and culture: Traditional knowledge and intellectual rights*. Prickly Paradigm Press.

* Davis, Alan K., & Noorani, Tehseen (2025). A new season, A new psychedelic journal. *Psychedelics*, 1(June), 1. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychhe.2025.100001
Deloria, Philip J., Tsianina Lomawaima, K., Brayboy, Bryan Mc. Kinley Jones, et al. (2018). Unfolding futures: Indigenous ways of knowing for the Twenty-First century. *Daedalus*, 147(2), 6–16. https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00485

Devenot, Ne.še, Conner, Trey, & Doyle, Richard (2022). Dark side of the shroom: Erasing indigenous and counterculture wisdoms with psychedelic capitalism, and the open source alternative. *Anthropology of Consciousness*, 33(2), 476–505. https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.12154

Doyle, Richard (2012). Healing with plant intelligence: A report from ayahuasca. *Anthropology of Consciousness*, 23(1), 28–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1556-3537.2012.01055.x

Dupuis, David (2022). The socialization of hallucinations: Cultural priors, social interactions, and contextual factors in the use of psychodelics. *Transcultural Psychiatry*, 59(5), 625–637. https://doi.org/10.1177/13634615211036388

Fortier, Martin (2018). Sense of reality, metacognition, and culture in schizophrenic and Drug-Induced hallucinations: An interdisciplinary approach. *Metacognitive diversity: An interdisciplinary approach*. Oxford University Press.

Fotiou, Evgenia (2025). The body as a battleground: Embodiment and sorcery in shamanic tourism. In *Sorcery in Amazonia: A comparative exploration of magical assault, Biblioteca Antropológica Americana* (pp. 177–191). Berlin: Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut. https://doi.org/10.57727/106.

Fotiou, Evgenia (2020). The role of indigenous knowledges in psychedelic science. *Journal of Psychedelic Studies*, 4(1), 16–23. https://doi.org/10.1556/2054.2019.031

Fotiou, Evgenia (2016). The globalization of ayahuasca shamanism and the erasure of indigenous shamanism. *Anthropology of Consciousness*, 27, 151–179. https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.12056

Gagliano, Monica (2017). The mind of plants: Thinking the unthinkable. *Communicative Integrative Biology*, 10(2), Article e1288333. https://doi.org/10.1080/19420889.2017.1288333

Gattuso, James J., Perkins, Daniel, Ruffell, Simon, et al. (2022). Default mode network modulation by psychodelics: A systematic review. *International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology*, 26(3), 155–188. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijnp/pyac074

Gattuso, James J., Perkins, Daniel, Ruffell, Simon, et al. (2023). Default mode network modulation by psychodelics: A systematic review. *International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology*, 26(3), 155–188. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijnp/pyac074

Gearin, A. K. (2022). Primitivist Medicine and capitalist anxieties in ayahuasca tourism Peru. *Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute*, 28, 496–515. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13705

George, Daniel R., Hanson, Ryan, Wilkinson, Darryl, & Garcia-Romeu, Albert (2022). Ancient roots of Today's emerging renaissance in psychedelic Medicine. *Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry*, 46(4), 890–903. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-021-09749-y

Haraway, Donna (1991). *Simians, cyborgs and wome: The reinvention of nature*. Free Association Books.

Harding, Sandra (2016). Latin American decolonial social studies of scientific knowledge: Alliances and tensions. *Science, Technology, Human Values*, 41(6), 1063–1087.

Kambeba, Adana, Lima, Jairo, & Loures de Assis, Glauber (2025). Psychedelic confluence at PS2025: The watershed beyond the renaissance. *DoubleBind*. July 14.

Keel, Mat (2022). Neuro-Plastic shamanism? Towards a political ontology of whiteness and the psychedelic zeitgeist. *Anthropology of Consciousness*, 33(2), 412–442. https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.12159

Kimmerer, Robin Wall (2014). *Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants*. Milkweed Editions.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall, & Kyle, A. Artelle (2024). Time to support indigenous science, 243–243 *Science*, 383(6680). https://doi.org/10.1126/science ado0684.

Kohn, Eduardo (2022). Forest forms and ethical life. *Environmental Humanities*, 14(2), 401–418. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9712478

la paperson. (2017). *A third university is possible*. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Lebedev, Alexander V., Lövdén, Martin, Rosenthal, Gidon, Feilding, Amanda, Nutt, David J., & Carhart-Harris, Robin L. (2015). Finding the self by losing the self: Neural correlates of ego-dissolution under psilocybin. *Human Brain Mapping*, 3153. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.22833

Lee, Jonny (2023). What is cognitive about 'Plant Cognition'? *Biology Philosophy*, 38(3), 18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-023-09907-z

Liboiron, Max (2021). Decolonizing geoscience requires more than equity and inclusion. *Nature Geoscience*, 14(12), 876–877. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00861-7

Lloyd, Geoffrey E. R. (2019). "The clash of ontologies and the problems of translation and mutual intelligibility. *Introduction to the Special Issue Science in the Forest, Science in the Past. Haw: Journal of Ethnographic Theory*, 9(1), 36–43.

Lopez Sanchez, José; Mesturini, Silvia. & Sanabria, Emilia. 2024. *Trabajar con plantas que tienen madres. Diálogos con un Onanya Shipibo*. Fineo Editorial. 304pp.

Luna, Luis Eduardo (1984). The concept of plants as teachers among four mestizo shamans of iguitos, northeastern Peru. *Journal of Ethnopharmacology*, 11(2), 135–156.

Mignolo, Walter D. (2011). *Geopolitics of sensing and knowing: on (De)Coloniality, border thinking and epistemic disobedience*. *Postcolonial Studies*, 14(3), 273–283. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2011.613105

Myers, Natasha (2015). Conversations on plant sensing. *NatureCultures*, 3, 53–66 (Special Issue: Acting with Non-Human Entities).

Ong, Aihwa, & Collier, Stephen J. (Eds.). (2007). *Global assemblages: Technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems*. Blackwell.

Palhano-Fontes, Fernanda, Andrade, Katia C., Tofoli, Luis F., et al. (2015). The psychedelic state induced by ayahuasca modulates the activity and connectivity of the default mode network. *PLoS One*. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0118143

Pfeiffer, Jeanine. 2022. We need indigenous science. OpenMind: Tackling science controversies and deceptions, online.

Pickering, Andrew (1992). *Science as practice and culture*. University of Chicago Press. University of Chicago Press.

Reardon, Sara (2023). Psychedelic treatments are speeding towards approval — But no one knows how they work. *Nature*, 623(7985), 22–24. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03334-6

Sanabria, Emilia (2016). *Plastic bodies: Sex hormones and menstrual suppression in Brazil*. Duke University Press. Duke University Press.

Sanabria, Emilia. 2020. (Psychedelics) Beyond the “Neuro”. Hot Spots, Fieldsights, July 21. https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/psychedelics-beyond-the-neuro.

Sanabria, Emilia. 2019. *Towards an anthropology of encounters: Ayahuasca's multiplicity and the politics of knowledge*. Habilitation à diriger des recherches. Ecole normale supérieure de Lyon.

Sanabria, Emilia (2021). Vegetative value: Promissory horizons of therapeutic innovation in the global circulation of ayahuasca. *BioSocieties*, 16(3), 387–410. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-020-00222-4

Schiebinger, Londa (2007). *Plants and empire: Colonial bioprospecting in the atlantic world*. Harvard University Press. Harvard University Press.

Segundo-Ortin, Miguel, & Calvo, Paco (2022). Consciousness and cognition in plants. *WIREs Cognitive Science*, 13(2), Article e1578. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1578

Shanon, Benny (2002). *The antipodes of the mind: Charting the phenomenology of the ayahuasca experience*. Oxford University Press. Oxford University Press.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai (2012). *Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples* (2nd ed.) Zed Books Ltd.

Stein, Sharon, Ahenakew, Cash, Valley, Will, et al. (2024). Toward more ethical engagements between Western and indigenous sciences. *FACETS*, 9, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1139/facets-2023-0071

Stengers, Isabelle. 2018. *Another Science is Possible: Manifesto for a Slow Science*, trans. Stephen Muecke, Cambridge: Polity, 2017, 163 pp.

Stewart-Harawira, Makere (2013). Challenging knowledge capitalism: Indigenous research in the 21st century. *Socialist Studies/Etudes Socialistes*. https://doi.org/10.18740/S43S3V

Stoliker, Devon, Egan, Gary F., Friston, Karl J., & Razi, Adeel (2022). Neural mechanisms and psychology of psychedelic ego dissolution. *Pharmacological Reviews*, 74(4), 876–917. https://doi.org/10.1124/pharmrev.121.000508

Subramaniam, Banu (2024). *Botany of empire: Plant worlds and the scientific legacies of colonialism*. University of Washington Press. University of Washington Press.

Taussig, Michael T. (1987). *Shamanism, colonialism, and the wild man: A study in terror and healing*. University of Chicago Press. University of Chicago Press.

Tilley, Helen (2011). *Africa as a living laboratory: Empire, development, and the problem of scientific knowledge, 1870-1950*. Chicago University Press. Chicago University Press.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph (2003). Anthropology and the savage slot: The poetics and politics of otherness. *Global transformations: Anthropology and the modern world*. Palgrave Macmillan.

Turnbull, David (1997). Reframing science and other local knowledge traditions. *Futures*, 29(6), 551–562. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0016-3287(97)00030-X

Tvorun-Dunn, Maxim (2022). Acid liberalism: Silicon Valley's enlightened technocrats, and the legalization of psychodelics. *International Journal of Drug Policy*, 110. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0955395922003061.

UMIYAC. 2019. Declaration about cultural appropriation from the spiritual authorities, representatives and indigenous organizations of the amazon region. https://umiya.c. org/2019/11/01/declaration-about-cultural-appropriation-from-the-spiritual -authorities-representatives-and-indigenous-organizations-of-the-amazon-region/? lang=en (consulted 26/09/2025).

Wynter, Sylvia (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: towards the human, after man, its Overrepresentation—An argument. CR: *The New Centennial Review*, 3(3), 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015

Williams, Keith, Romero, Osiris Sinuhé González, Braunstein, Michelle, & Brant, Suzanne (2022). *Indigenous Philosophies and the 'Psychedelic Renaissance' Anthropology of Consciousness*, 33(2), 506–527. https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.12161

Whitt, Laurelyn (2009). *Science, colonialism, and indigenous peoples: The cultural politics of law and knowledge*. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge University Press.

Yehuda, Rachel, & Lehrner, Amy (2023). Psychedelic therapy—A new paradigm of care for mental health. *JAMA*, 330(9), 813–814. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2023.12900