Smoky Boundaries, Permeable Selves: Exploring the Self in Relationship with the Amazonian Jungle Tobacco, Mapacho

ABSTRACT

As more Westerners travel to the Amazon jungle to seek healing through the increasingly popular plant medicine, ayahuasca, they are exposed to an environment pervaded by the use of tobacco smoke. Mapacho is the name of the potent jungle tobacco that is central to the shamanic practices of Amazonian plant medicine healing, regarded locally not as a pathogen but rather as a potent ally: a spirit that can be co-opted as a purifier, healer, protector and teacher. In order to render these functions available to patients, Mapacho must be smoked, its efficacy, along with that of the shaman, activated through the absorption of each into the other. By means of this relationship, Mapacho smoke pervades culturally recognised boundaries of the Western Self, simultaneously permeating both the internal and external realms that constitute the healing environment. In this paper, I explore the relationship between Mapacho, Peruvian Shipibo shamans and Western patients, suggesting that the boundaries that are often conceived by Westerners to distinguish each from the other may well be as smoky as the medicine practices they engage in.

KEYWORDS:

• Smoke
• Mapacho
• Shipibo
• boundaries
• Self-permeability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Dena Sharrock http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1222-0890

Notes

1 Many other admixture plants can be included in the ayahuasca brew (see Schultes, Hofmann, and Rätsch 2001, 134), however these two basic ingredients were the only ones used at the Temple.

2 For a description of the complex chemical activity central to ayahuasca's effects, see Callaway et al. (1999). For the latest overview of the possible therapeutic benefits of ayahuasca, see Frecska, Bokor, and Winkelman (2016). For an in-depth account of the phenomenology of the ayahuasca experience, see Shanon (2010) and Metzner (1999). For an overview of the many and diverse ways ayahuasca has been historically used throughout South America, see Harner (1973).

3 The Onanya holds sacred the learning they receive from the plants during their dietas and most are reluctant to share it. My discussion is based on the information that was shared from Westerners who dieted Mapacho and from my own experience. It should be noted that our dietas were usually ‘introductory’ in nature; descriptions from researchers such as Wilbert (1991) indicate that tobacco initiations can be extreme, often involving near-death and ‘ego loss’ or ‘ego death’ experiences (for further information on ‘ego loss’ see Leary, Metzner, and Alpert [1964] 2008; and for ‘ego death’ see Grof and Halifax 1978).

4 The notable exception to this is the necessity to imbibe the ayahuasca brew for the purpose of mobilising its effects.

5 The Spanish suffix, ito, indicates either smallness or, as in this case, an affectionate reference: ‘my little tobacco’.

6 While I did not hear it mentioned in the field, Wilbert (1987, 190) indicates that the skin of a patient is understood to become relatively permeable to tobacco smoke due to the affinity between the smoke and the ‘pathogenic spirits inside the patient, who take pleasure in partaking of the drug’. Through this relationship, the malevolent energy is mobilised, enhancing the possibility of easier extraction.

7 It is important to note that the concept that entities exist separately from the Self is culturally informed. In discourses derived from Eastern mysticism, for example, the ‘soul’ that constitutes the essence of the individual Self is indistinguishable from all else in creation, which is equally born of the same essence. Based on such conceptualisations, and further incorporating rationalist Western scientific understandings, some Westerners at the Temple maintained the notion of the Self as a locus of the entire Universe where everything exists within. Rather than recognising the connection with a discrete ‘plant spirit’, they were inclined to interpret such experiences in terms of chemically enabled access to other aspects of their own consciousness; other aspects of the Self. While this interpretation is valuable in considering theories of the relative permeability of the Self, space limitations necessitate that I limit this discussion to Shipibo understandings that posit plant spirits as discrete (which were largely adopted by many Westerners in my fieldsite).