New publication – a chapter by Laura Dev in: Plant Medicines, Healing and Psychedelic Science, edited by Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Clancy Cavnar

Abstract

The ayahuasca research community is familiar with the concept of plant intelligences; however, they have yet to be adequately accounted for by commonly used research practices. This chapter is a call to examine the ontological and epistemological assumptions that underlie research practices and how these practices and assumptions may reinforce hierarchies of knowledge and animacy.

The first part of this chapter describes some absences created by following a “methods as usual” approach when researching ayahuasca, based on ethnographic fieldwork at the World Ayahuasca Conference in 2016. This highlights the need for researchers to acknowledge the methodological, disciplinary, and identity-based limitations on our abilities to produce and represent certain knowledges.

The chapter then calls for serious and humble engagement with Indigenous sciences and epistemologies, including an honest reckoning with how research has contributed to colonial appropriation and marginalization of Indigenous knowledges. It concludes by discussing possibilities for including multispecies sensibilities and Indigenous standpoints in research practices to create more collaborative and decolonial knowledges.

Related project: Ayahuasca and the Cosmopolitics of Healing

Published in: Plant Medicines, Healing and Psychedelic Science, edited by Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Clancy Cavnar, Springer, 2018, pp. 185–204.

Ninawa Pai da Mata, Huni Kuin, watching the sunrise in Bahia. Photo by Laura Dev.