Article ID: CBB961943288

The ‘enigma’ of Richard Schultes, Amazonian hallucinogenic plants, and the limits of ethnobotany (June 2020)

unapi

This story is about the twentieth-century ethnobotanist, Richard Evans Schultes (1915–2001), and his research on hallucinogenic plants. Ethnobotany can contribute directly to science and technology studies in that the discipline makes cultural ways of knowing its scientific subject. Ethnobotanists must learn about plants through people, and are not able to conceal their interactions with indigenous informants and other ethnobotanists. I focus on an ‘enigma’ that Schultes presented, concerning the peculiar ability of indigenous Amazonians to distinguish between local varieties of vine that he was unable to tell apart, notably those used to prepare the hallucinogenic beverage ayahuasca. The enigma describes a complicated and irresolvable question thrown up at the uneasy intersection between different ways of knowing about the world, and shows how modern scientific travellers might navigate – or fail to navigate – the uncertain passage between them. Together with Schultes’s accounts of his own non-ordinary states of consciousness elicited by ayahuasca, and his writings on the Victorian botanist Richard Spruce, I chart an epistemological gulf between Schultes’s modern scientific cosmology and that of his Amazonian informants. In describing his inability to learn about the ayahuasca varieties from Amazonians, Schultes’s enigma traces the very limits of the ethnobotanical discipline and reveals the fragility of the processes by which scientific naturalists might impose categories such as ‘nature’ and ‘culture’.

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB961943288/

Similar Citations

Book Oscar de la Torre; (2018)
The People of the River: Nature and Identity in Black Amazonia, 1835–1945 (/isis/citation/CBB716355605/)

Article Nelson Sanjad; Ermelinda Pataca; Rafael Rogério Nascimento dos Santos; (2021)
Knowledge and Circulation of Plants: Unveiling the Participation of Amazonian Indigenous Peoples in the Construction of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Botany (/isis/citation/CBB714153328/)

Book Oscar De la Torre; (2018)
The people of the river : Nature and identity in Black Amazonia, 1835-1945 (/isis/citation/CBB610762716/)

Article Barreto, Ivan Farias; (2013)
O uso da folha de coca em comunidades tradicionais: perspectivas em saúde, sociedade e cultura (/isis/citation/CBB001420658/)

Article Henrique, Márcio Couto; (2009)
Folclore e medicina popular na Amazônia (/isis/citation/CBB000932984/)

Article Hecht, Susanna B.; (April 2019)
Beyond Fordlandia: An Environmental Account of Henry Ford's Adventure in the Amazon (/isis/citation/CBB490890769/)

Book Sandra Khor Manickam; (2015)
Taming the Wild: Aborigines and Racial Knowledge in Colonial Malaya (/isis/citation/CBB428089897/)

Article Garnelo, Luiza; (2011)
Aspectos socioculturais de vacinação em área indígena (/isis/citation/CBB001420515/)

Article Rosanna Dent; (2022)
Whose Home Is the Field? (/isis/citation/CBB450240332/)

Article TallBear, Kim; (August 2013)
Genomic articulations of indigeneity (/isis/citation/CBB368828568/)

Article Kent, Michael; (August 2013)
The importance of being Uros: Indigenous identity politics in the genomic age (/isis/citation/CBB539143812/)

Article Andrade, Rômulo de Paula; Hochman, Gilberto; (2007)
O Plano de Saneamento da Amazônia (1940--1942) (/isis/citation/CBB000831581/)

Article Teixeira, Luiz Antonio; Löwy, Ilana; (August 2011)
Imperfect tools for a difficult job: Colposcopy, ‘colpocytology’ and screening for cervical cancer in Brazil (/isis/citation/CBB003851329/)

Authors & Contributors
de la Torre, Oscar
Dent, Rosanna
Cristina Rodríguez Marcos
Turner, Nancy J
Rafael Rogério Nascimento dos Santos
Kent, Michael
Concepts
Indigenous peoples; indigeneity
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Public health
Botany
Traditional knowledge
Environment
Time Periods
20th century
21st century
19th century
20th century, late
20th century, early
18th century
Places
Brazil
Amazon River Region (South America)
Andes
Arctic regions
Peru
North America
Institutions
Ford Motor Company
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment