No abstract

During the last decades, ayahuasca gained much popularity among non-Indigenous and out-of-Amazonia based populations. In popular culture, it has been advertised as a natural remedy that was discovered by Indigenous peoples ante millennia and that has been used for shamanic healing of all kinds of ailments. This “neo-shamanic,” and often recreational, use of ayahuasca, however, has to be distinguished from traditional Indigenous praxes on the one hand, and, on the other hand, from medical investigation in the modern world. The former, Indigenous use mainly understands ayahuasca as an amplifying power for interacting with non-human beings in the animal, plant, or spirit realms. Within this paradigm, efficacy is not dependent on the drug, but on the correct communication between the healer (or sorcerer) and the non-human powers that are considered real and powerful also without resorting to ayahuasca. The latter, modern mode of understanding, contrastingly treats the neurochemical processes of MAO inhibition and dimethyltryptamine activity as trigger mechanisms for a series of psychological as well as somatic responses, including positive outcomes in the treatment of various mental conditions. I argue that there is an ontological incommensurability occurring especially between the Indigenous and medicinal concepts of ayahuasca use (with recreational use in its widest understanding trying to make sense from both sides). Modern medical applications of ayahuasca are so fundamentally different from Indigenous concepts that the latter cannot be used to legitimate or confirm the former (and vice versa). Finally, the deep coloniality in the process of appropriation of the Indigenous by the modern has to be questioned and resolved in any case of ayahuasca application.

Shipibo indigenous people perform a sophisticated array of vocal musical genres, including short 'laughing songs' called osanti. These song-jokes make fun of certain non-humans, mostly animals. They are by definition sung from within the nonhumans' perspective. Osanti are only performed by trained specialists in indigenous medicine and sorcery (médicos), because it is crucial that the performer owns the faculty of transforming into the animal in question, although in osanti the singers do not transform. Songs involving actual transformation are not meant for laughing: these are magical songs including interaction with and transformation into animals or spirits that possess a more ample radius of perception and action than 'Real Human' beings.Osanti songs, with their position between secular and magical songs, allow for an analysis of humour and laughing in the construction of the indigenous ontology, thereby questioning some generalisations made in theories of animism and perspectivism.

The authors discuss their methodologies for creating and relistening to recordings in collaboration with Indigenous People in Peru and Venezuela and contextualize them within the discourse about overcoming power structures that shape divides between the Global North and South, in both urban and rural trajectories, and in Western and Indigenous knowledges. When it comes to giving back or sharing sound recordings, we suggest the term resocialization rather than restitution or repatriation. In Indigenous lifeworlds, sound works much differently than in modern conceptualizations of music as art or entertainment. Indigenous theories of sound complement frameworks of copyright, which are still mainly based on modern views of human creativity. Working in archives and exhibitions, we seek collaboration with Indigenous experts when archiving, publishing, displaying, or playing recordings. We show how Indigenous and European specialists can foster eye‐level bilateral knowledge transfer by fruitfully cocurating sound and multimedia installations in exhibition contexts.