Interspecies Entwinements in the Peruvian Amazon

My first book, Ayahuasca and the Cosmopolitics of Healing: Interspecies Entwinements in the Peruvian Amazon, examines the relations, practices, and economies surrounding ayahuasca in Ucayali, Peru.

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with Shipibo healers and communities, the book traces how the international expansion of ayahuasca has transformed local economies, ecologies, and relationships between Indigenous communities and outsiders.

Interspecies entwinements

The book develops the concept of interspecies entwinements to examine how healing emerges through relationships among people, medicinal plants, embodied practices, and more-than-human beings.

Rather than treating ayahuasca simply as a commodity or psychoactive substance, I examine how healing depends on practices of dieting, discipline, care, knowledge, and relational obligation that bring plants and people into particular forms of relation.

Extraction and healing

The ayahuasca boom has emerged within a regional economy historically structured by extractive industries and the exploitation of Indigenous labor. The book asks how new healing economies reproduce, transform, or offer alternatives to these extractive relations.

I follow two interconnected transformations: changing relationships between plants and people, and changing relationships between Shipibo communities and outsiders. Despite ayahuasca’s transformation into a global commodity, Indigenous healers continue to face significant barriers to benefiting from the commodity networks built around their knowledge and practices.

Cosmopolitics of healing

The book argues that healing is not only an individual therapeutic process but also a cosmopolitical one: it involves negotiations over what kinds of beings, relationships, knowledge, and worlds are recognized and sustained.

Through these entwinements, the book asks what more reciprocal forms of engagement with Indigenous healing practices and more-than-human worlds might look like.

Related work

• Dissertation research
• Book Chapter: Plant Knowledges: Interspecies listening and Indigenous standpoints toward decolonizing ayahuasca research