Ayahuasca crossroads An ethnography of the circulation of ayahuasca rituals between urban Brazil and Europe

This research examines emergent formations of ayahuasca ritual use, an Amazonian herbal brew with psychoactive properties, as it travels from traditional contexts to urban cosmopolite settings. The analysis focuses on specific examples of transformation and reinvention; namely groups developing innovative, artistic and hybrid ritual and therapeutic practices to address social justice, access and gender, and the adaptations of ayahuasca plants, materials and formulas in its circulations between Brazil and Europe. This research is grounded in multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork realised in Brazil, Italy and the Netherlands, and multi-dimensional ethnographic research design (Peterson & Olson, 2024).
The vast and eclectic landscape of ayahuasca diffusion, characterised by multiple encounters between different ontologies and healing paradigms, and abundance of rituals and formulations, can hardly be understood from a single lens. The analysis proposes to look at these ethnographic cases through the lens of the Afro-Brazilian concept of encruzilhada. Literally meaning crossroads, encruzilhada is a core polysemic concept and epistemological approach in Afro-Brazilian thought. The encruzilhada sheds light on the circulations and ongoing transformations of ayahuasca, as a peculiar case of how plant medicines from the Global South circulate. This concept illuminates the politics entangled in aesthetic, performative and material transformations, so to address the inherent and ambivalent multiplicities in the contemporary diffusion of ayahuasca. Through the analysis of these crossroads, this study looks at what ayahuasca can tell us about ritual, social and material change.