ABSTRACT
This investigation explores the beliefs and practices of a Canadian branch of Santo Daime, a syncretic religion founded in Brazil and structured around the ritualistic consumption of Santo Daime, a psychoactive plant decoction – referred to outside the religion as “ayahuasca” – indigenous to the Amazonian Basin. In spite of legal and political obstacles to the growth of ayahuasca practices, the brew is rapidly becoming a global phenomenon as traditional and syncretic South American ayahuasca practices establish themselves throughout the world, and as ayahuasca tourism grows in South America (Harris & Gurel, 2012; Feeney & Labate, 2014; Fotiou, 2014; Peluso, 2014). In this chapter, I examine Santo Daime’s adaptation to the Canadian context through a focus on alterity; that is to say, I look at the ways in which members of Santo Daime, at individual and collective levels, understand themselves and their practice as “other” vis-à-vis contemporary Canadian society. To elicit evidence of alterity, I use the concepts of ontology, the study of what there is, and epistemology, the study of ways of knowing, to shed light on the radically different worlds and worldviews of Santo Daime. The limitations of current positivistic epistemological conceptualizations of ayahuasca and its effects have been identified as one of the most significant challenges facing scientific research on ayahuasca (Tupper, 2011a; 2011b). By conducting participant observation and a series of in-depth, semistructured interviews with the members of the Céu do Montréal church, a Canadian chapter of Santo Daime, this research aims to document an aspect of Santo Daime practice that is underrepresented both in the ayahuasca literature and in contemporary Canadian drug discourses. More than a discussion about the globalization of an Amazonian plant-medicine, the case of ayahuasca in Canada speaks to the dynamics of alterity in a pluralistic society and the navigation of co-existing – yet diverging – perspectives on health, identity, and spirituality.
