ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the relationship between people and tobacco in lowland South America in order to understand the place of tobacco in this particular world, and its implications for a non-human ethnography of tobacco worldwide. Shamanism is the blanket term given to a range of activities that involve certain people moving between spiritual and physical worlds in order to effect change. The anthropologist Johannes Wilbert is insistent that shamanism must have come first, and envisions hunter and gatherer groups originally relying “on endogenous and ascetic techniques of mystic ecstasy rather than on drug-induced trance”. The long history of tobacco use in lowland South America and the respect it is accorded by many indigenous peoples gives us further clues about what Wilbert intended the term ‘tobacco ideology’ to encapsulate. Tobacco undermines its own binary in failing to consider modes of production and consumption of tobacco that are not dependent on it being dried, burnt and inhaled.
