ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the use of tobacco by two Arawakan-speaking peoples of southwestern Amazonia, the Piro (Yine) people of the Urubamba River in Peru and their eastern neighbours the Apurina on the Purus River in Brazil. The spread of ayahuasca seems to be connected to the expansion of the rubber extraction industry in the late nineteenth century: this pattern is fairly clear for Peru and fully demonstrable for Brazil. It therefore raises an important phenomenon that has been severely downplayed in recent anthropological work, namely diffusion. If the use of ayahuasca is demonstrably novel in southwestern Amazonia, the product of a recent diffusion from further north, the use of tobacco is clearly very much older. The chapter originally intends to explore the extent to which ayahuasca use inserted itself into earlier shamanic uses of tobacco as a psychoactive throughout the region.
