Oni pae mera: Ayawaska among the Shipibo-Konibo and the crisis of western universalism

The visionary beverage known as ayawaska (yage, oni, caapi, camaranti, etc.) among the Indigenous Nations of the Amazon has, over the past century, generated increasing academic interest and popular fascination, leading to a boom in psychedelic tourism and “neo-shamanism”. This article attempts to account for the uses of ayawaska within the contemporary cultural context of the Shipibo-Konibo Indigenous Nation (Ucayali, Peru) including influences associated with Western neo-shamanic or spiritual tourism. Our interpretation draws on testimonies collected over 15 years of fieldwork among the Shipibo-Konibo, alongside excerpts from ancestral narratives, medicinal songs, and various ethnographic sources. We argue that the Indigenous use of ayawaska cannot be considered apart from the complex cultural framework—linguistic, cosmogonic, and spiritual—in which it occurs, despite the dominance of Western approaches and their presumptive monopoly on onto-epistemic understandings. While this article does not seek to discredit insights emerging from Western psychology and biomedical engagements with psychedelics, it calls attention to the ethnographic thinness and conceptual impositions often found in such approaches—impositions that risk reducing Indigenous ontologies to psychological projections, and in doing so, obscure the sovereign integrity of Amazonian worlds. In contrast, this work centers the voices of Shipibo visionary healers (Onanyabo), articulating their visions of legitimate use and the ecological and philosophical resonances of their healing practices—resonances that may enter into careful and reciprocal dialogue with Western onto-ethico-epistemologies, but not be subsumed by them.