Consciousness Cafe - Entheogens and Psychedelic Cultural Transmissions

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A REINVENÇÃO DO USO DA AYAHUASCA NOS CENTROS URBANOS
Beatriz Caiuby Labate

Publisher: Editora Mercado de Letras, Campinas/SP - Brazil
Tel: 55 + 19 + 3241 7514
ISBN 85-7591-037-X
Format 16 x 23 cm * 536 pp.
Support from the Fapesp (Research Support Foundation of the State of São Paulo)
Price: R$ 65,00 (US$ 24,50 + shipping fee)

ANPOCS (National Post-secondary Association of Social Sciences) Prize for best Masters Thesis in Social Sciences in 2000.

Categories: psychedelic, entheogens, ayahuasca

Summary:

From its beginnings, the phenomenon of the Brazilian ayahuasca religions has involved strong intercultural transits, with constant migratory flows leading to fusions of northeastern traditions with the Amazonian universe, where beliefs and practices of indigenous populations were creatively retranslated by diverse types of forest peoples, from the rubber tappers to modern environmentalists.

The work of Bia Labate emphasizes this fact, showing that the inventive possibilities of the use of ayahuasca are extensive, and marked by the dissolution of boundaries between indigenous and white, rural and urban, forest and city, tradition and modernity or old and neo. Labate tells us how, in the practice of urban neo-ayahuasqueiros these domains interpenetrate one another, using examples in which art, therapy, political intervention, play, magic, and religion commingle through the use of ayahuasca, a drink that seems to operate here as a mediator or communicator of diverse perspectives, perceptions, experiences, and sensations. Known variously as Cipó, Daime, or Vegetal, it permits the translation and resignification of different cultural practices from the point of view of the other. That is what A Reinvenção do Uso da Ayahuasca nos Centros Urbanos makes clear, thus highlighting the right to alterity, the fundamental principle of anthropology.
In pointing to the new modalities of ayahuasca use, the author ends up questioning monopolies on legitimacy, putting in focus the priority of certain types of uses above others, or of privileges pertaining to this substance belonging to groups, cultures, and subjects. She analyzes how these new uses, despite their originality, are inserted into a Brazilian ayahuasca field, expressing its logic and motivating many of its elements. The author notes that the diversity of practices in the ayahuasca field do not imply disorder, but to the contrary, manifests forms of control proper to this religious universe. Thus, through Labates work one sees that ritual and the religious can assume innumerable faces and forms, involving a dynamic process of transformation, or, in other words, of invention and reinvention. At the same time that it makes a lucid criticism of religious intolerance, the book is in implicit dialogue with the premises of anti-drug policy, indicating that informal and cultural controls of the uses of psychoactive drugs tend to be more effective than external controls based only on state and legal standardization
Six years since her research began, empirical reality confirms many of the hypotheses put forward by the author. We witness a proliferation, in Brazils large cities, of new modes of consuming this drink of Amazonian origin, always inserted within the logic identified by the author. The dimensions and varieties assumed by the ayahuasca field seem to be a signal that, instead of the death of religion, as some have predicted, we are witnessing an extension of the sacred to dimensions previously unimaginable, and a multiplication of the possibilities of ritualization of contemporary life (Translated to English by Matthew Meyer).

Contact in Brazil: livros ~~~AT~~~ mercado-de-letras.com.br
Foreign contacts: Livraria Pontes * compras ~~~AT~~~ livrariapontes.com.br
http://www.mercado-de-letras.com.br


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O U S O R I T U A L D A A Y A H U A S C A

[THE RITUAL USE OF AYAHUASCA]



Editors: Beatriz Caiuby Labate, PhD candidate in Social Science at UNICAMP (Awarded best master thesis in Social Science by ANPOCS, 2000) and Wladimyr Sena Araújo, PhD candidate in Social History at UNICAMP.

Publisher: Editora Mercado de Letras, Campinas/SP - Brazil
Tel: 55 + 19 + 3241 7514
Format: 16 X 23 cm, illustrated
Support from the Fapesp (Research Support Foundation of the State of São Paulo)
736 pp.
Second edition, revised and updated: 2004 (1st. Ed.: 2002)
Price: R$ 75,00 (US$ 28,00 + shipping fee)


Summary:

This collection consists of 26 articles written by authors from 7 different countries. It represents the most important effort at reflection undertaken in Brazil until today on the consumption of ayahuasca, the vine of the dead, an age-old sacred drink made from two Amazonian plants: the vine Banisteriopsis caapi and the shrub Psychotria viridis. The book offers a combined panel on the spectrum of the ritual uses of this psychoactive substance in South America. The first part deals with its uses by indigenous populations and rubber-workers in Amazonia. The central part of the work deals with the original and quite controversial Brazilian ayahuascan religions, popularly known as Santo Daime, União do Vegetal and Barquinha. These religions extrapolate the limits of their origin, having been exported to the major urban centers of the country and even abroad, currently including more than ten thousand followers. This rich and dynamic cultural phenomenon is contemplated in dialogue, also, with the debate over the utilization of psychoactive substances in our society. Finally, the last part of the work brings together the perspectives of medicine, psychology, and ethnopharmacology on these diverse ritual uses of the substance. The volume presents a focus that is both comparative and multidisciplinary, providing a panorama that is impressive for its wealth of information and perspectives, including both the opinions of diverse academic specialists and the point of view of ayahuasca users themselves. The work is of interest to Anthropology, History, Religion, Psychology, Philosophy, Law and the new area called Entheobotany, or the study of sacred plants (Translated by Robin Wright).

Contact in Brazil: livros ~~~AT~~~ mercado-de-letras.com.br
Foreign contacts: Livraria Pontes * compras ~~~AT~~~ livrariapontes.com.br
http://www.mercado-de-letras.com.br

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O USO RITUAL DAS PLANTAS DE PODER

[THE RITUAL USE OF POWER PLANTS]


Editors: Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Ph.D candidate in Social Sciences at UNICAMP, MA in Anthropology from Unicamp (2000 ANPOCS prize for best thesis in the Social Sciences), Researcher with NEIP (Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Psychoactives) and Sandra Lucia Goulart, Ph.D in Social Sciences from Unicamp, MA in Social Anthropology from USP, Researcher with NEIP.
Publisher: Editora Mercado de Letras, Campinas/SP - Brazil
Tel: 55 + 19 + 3241 7514
Format: 16 x 23 cm, illustrated * 520 pp.
(Support from the Fapesp - Research Support Foundation of the State of São Paulo)
Price: R$ 65 (US$ 24,50 + shipping fee)

Press release:

This volume brings together fourteen chapters by collaborators from five countries to fill a void in the Social Sciences around the theme of drugs or psychoactive plants. Through its focus on the ethnology, anthropology, history, and ethnobotany the book analyzes the various contexts in which psychoactive substances are consumed. Subjects include the various snuffs used by Amazonian indigenous peoples, roots such as the northeastern Brazilian jurema and Gabons iboga, coca leaf in the Andes and Amazonia, Cannabis in Afro- and indigenous contexts, ayahuasca from the Peruvian jungle to Brazils large cities, and other, lesser-known species. The book highlights the ways the consumption of such power plants is linked to the organization of cosmological systems, the rise of rich syncretic religions, the assertion of social identity, the management of religious or tribal conflicts, artistic creation, and self-knowledge, among other things. The use of these substances implies an articulation among various areas of life, such as politics, curing, shamanism, aesthetics, and culture. The analysis of the various agents and contexts makes explicit continuities and discontinuities between various modes of usage, from religious to profane, modern to traditional, and between natural and artificial substances, thus rupturing dichotomies of little use to reflections about drugs. While the book emphasizes the ritual and religious uses of psychoactives substances practiced in different cultures and historical moments, it is also useful for thinking about the consumption of drugs in contemporary society, indicating alternatives to the merely prohibitionist policies linked to the illicit market that simply disseminate ever greater levels of violence, misery, exclusion, and war (Translated to English by Matthew Meyer).

Contact in Brazil: livros (AT) mercado-de-letras.com.br
Foreign contacts: Livraria Pontes * compras (AT) livrariapontes.com.br
http://www.mercado-de-letras.com.br