ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the shamanic and the neo-shamanic populations analysed in this book, highlighting historic and socio-cultural aspects that culminated in the development of the Santo Daime doctrine (Brazil) and of the neo-shamanic movement that spread around Europe. In this way, it posits that the emergence of the former is mainly connected to the exploitation of the body as a machine, a result of the ‘evolution’ of the export of capital (agricultural products) in the Brazilian territory, which demanded the maximum use of individuals’ productive forces and the displacement of indigenous populations, disrupting their community structures, while the latter is exposed as surging as a resistance against already more refined techniques of financial capitalism, that, in a way, through material struggles, or the lack of them, massified or hollowed individuals’ imagination. In this way, the Ayahuasca as utilized in [neo]shamanic rituals by Brazilians or Europeans was taken as a possibility that, departing from very distinct reasons, had the objective of reaching modes of interpretation of reality that allowed them to go beyond that which was taken as an immutable reality, that is, permitting them to envision alternative capacities of ascribing meaning to what was felt as physically and/or psychically unbearable.
