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Shamans’ gardens: sites of creative equivocation between Indigenous and internationalized ayahuasca shamanism

Les jardins des chamanes : des lieux d’équivoque créative entre chamanisme d’ayahuasca indigène et internationalisé
Jardines de Chamanes: lugares de equívoco creativo entre el chamanismo ayahuasquero indígena e internacionalizado
Françoise Barbira-Freedman et Stephen Hugh-Jones
p. 141-192

Résumés

Si le chamanisme d’ayahuasca a déjà été bien étudié, les jardins de plantes médicinales qui constituent un élément standard des centres d’ayahuasca ont reçu moins d’attention. Basé sur une cartographie détaillée, des commentaires enregistrés, et un site web qui l’accompagne (https://yakumamaylivepharmacy.org), cet article fournit des données concises sur la gamme de plantes trouvées dans un de ces jardins. En explorant les relations des jardins médicinaux avec les jardins familiaux et les abatis, nous identifions un ensemble de plantes relativement stables, typiques du vegetalismo amazonien, qui définissent les « jardins des chamanes » comme un genre caractéristique des centres de chamanisme de l’ayahuasca. Les visiteurs développent des relations personnelles avec les plantes et les chamanes adoptent le vocabulaire de la biomédecine et de la psychothérapie, si bien que les « jardins ethnobotaniques » deviennent des lieux d’équivoque constructive où des hypothèses culturelles contrastées réussissent à s’accommoder partiellement.

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Notes de la rédaction

Manuscrit reçu en septembre 2024, accepté pour publication en mars 2025.

Texte intégral

Acknowledgement – The field research on which this paper is based was funded by the British Academy (grant no. SG-37289). This support is gratefully acknowledged.

1The expansion of ayahuasca shamanism in Western Amazonia, with its global ramifications and associated tourism boom, has been a main cultural transformation marking the turn of the 21st century. While the phenomenon has been extensively researched (Labate and Cavnar 2014; Fotiou 2016), the forms which define it as a field within the history and political economy of Amazonia have been less studied. The reconfiguration of collective ayahuasca sessions as “ceremonies” for tourists held in purpose-built, Indigenous-style houses (malocas) gave rise to a generic design now found in all the ayahuasca lodges and healing centers (albergues) in the region (Barbira-Freedman 2014). In this paper, we focus on a feature of current ayahuasca shamanism receiving even less attention: the “shamans’ gardens,” also referred to locally as “botanical” or “ethnobotanical gardens,” that have become a standard element in the recent proliferation of ayahuasca centers. These gardens are intrinsically interesting in that they are similar to but differ from the home gardens (huertas) and swiddens (chakras) in which domesticated plants are cultivated, and from formal botanical gardens or forest reserves. In a contextualized, historical perspective, we argue that shamans’ gardens are central to the understanding of how local shamans and international “operators” converge in the ayahuasca shamanism enterprise.

2The dominance of horizontal, inspirational shamanism in the region, with its reliance on a variety of medicinal plants for healing and curing, has clearly facilitated the development of ayahuasca shamanism. This contrasts with the vertical, more doctrinal shamanism of Northwest Amazonian Tukanoan speakers (Hugh-Jones 1994), who make relatively little use of plant medicines and, (pace Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975) do not use ayahuasca for curing. Correspondingly, they neither engage in ayahuasca shamanism nor maintain gardens of the kind described here.

  • 1 The spread of the term chamán in Western Amazonia dates from the late 1990s, when it became a mark (...)
  • 2 Plant diets (dietas) refer to a focused ascesis and study of shamanic “master plants” with the aim (...)

3These peculiar gardens lie outside the parameters of dichotomies such as native/other, forest/urban, shaman/scientist, or drug/medicine, blurring the boundaries of these labels and rendering them problematic. In their complex aims, which range from public display to controlled secrecy, the gardens reveal a concatenation of plant exchanges, borrowings, experiments, unchanging traits, and codified practices underlying Western Amazonian shamanism in its evolution through time, ongoing in front of our eyes. Reflecting the dialogic adjustments of shamanic practice to successive cultural hegemonies, including colonial botanical gardens, selected plants are presented by shamans1 and their international or non-local sponsors as visible signs of an Indigenous engagement with the forest as cosmos. Plant expertise is widely invoked and sometimes romanticized in representations of shamans as rainforest “knowledge keepers,” but the practical foundations of their ecological and plant knowledge are often under-represented in the literature. This romanticization often ignores women’s knowledge and that of other specialists. Besides brewing ayahuasca or preparing tobacco, healers involved in the ayahuasca shamanism boom are often commonly horticulturalists who have developed close relationships with a diverse range of plants extending beyond well-known entheogens (spirit-endowed “plants of the gods”). Yet even with the recent interest in plants used as admixtures of ayahuasca and “plant diets” in ayahuasca tourism (Fotiou and Gearin 2019),2 this expertise has been overlooked in the literature.

4Shamans’ gardens manifest both individual and generalized plant knowledge as an authoritative foundation of practice, with combined and distinctive values for insiders and outsiders. In several, interrelated ways that index a convergence of contrasting cultural assumptions, a shaman’s garden is a nexus of a two-sided “equivocation” (Viveiros de Castro 2004) where, in seeking to understand the nature of plants in terms of contrasting cultural assumptions, both local Amazonians and gringos are engaged in converging and comparable intellectual operations.

  • 3 The 75-km Iquitos-Nauta road, completed in 2006, was built on a pre-existing trail allowing people (...)

5While we have visited many shamans’ gardens, particularly around Iquitos, the mecca of ayahuasca shamanism, in this paper, we aim to explore local understandings through an ethnobotanical study of one particular garden, based on detailed mapping and recorded commentaries. The life history of this garden, called Yakumamay (1997-2014), is typical of the region, where projects involving local and outsider actors either cease or transform within the same space over a couple of decades. In the early years, the concept of a “shaman’s garden” was imported from existing prototypes in the suburbs of Iquitos where mestizo vegetalistas grew plants, prepared medicines, and attended to clients (Luna 1984). Built as an extension of the trail along which these plots were located,3 the Iquitos-Nauta road has become the central hub of shamanic lodges in the region (see Figure 1; Guislain 2007, p. 22; Barbira-Freedman 2014).

Fig. 1 – Map of the Iquitos-Nauta road

Fig. 1 – Map of the Iquitos-Nauta road

(map: Orenaike Oluwatosin, 24/11/2023; base map: Esri ArcGIS Living Atlas, 10/2014)

  • 4 Quechua-speaking forest people along the Huallaga and Mayo river valleys are now recognized and se (...)

6Until the 1990s, forested areas along the Nauta trail were mostly abandoned state rubber-tapping concessions, which various Indigenous groups used as hunting territories. Following the standard model of expansion in Peruvian Amazonia (Barbira-Freedman 1979), seasonal stays gradually led to the formation of state-recognized, mixed communities with a school and health post, but their mixed composition debarred access to the formal legal status of Comunidades Nativas with land claims. Instead, they became “residential associations” of owners of spontaneously occupied, “colonist” plots of 80 hectares per listed family member. Gilber Chufandama (Figure 2), a Huallaga Kichwa migrant4 founder of the Nuevo Triunfo community (Km 47 on the Iquitos-Nauta road) in 1994, initiated a garden in 1997. His family-owned 489 hectares were part of 3,000 hectares of community plots backing onto state-owned forest. Through the Iquitos-Nauta colonization scheme linked to road building, rights of ownership acquired by settlers such as Gilber were transformed into property titles lodged with the Ministry of Agriculture. As in many colonization programs along Amazonian roads, some settlers chose to sell their plots to non-Indigenous private buyers for purposes ranging from cattle ranches to leisure centers for Iquitos’ residents and including ayahuasca lodges. In promotional literature, cash purchases, legal costs, and complex transactions with foreign sponsors not entitled to buy land under Peruvian law are carefully hidden behind idyllic descriptions of the lodges’ forest locations and gardens.

Fig. 2 – Gilber Chufandama in Shipibo outfit re-enacting his prize-winning ayahuasca shamanism performance for his grandsons and the anthropologists

Fig. 2 – Gilber Chufandama in Shipibo outfit re-enacting his prize-winning ayahuasca shamanism performance for his grandsons and the anthropologists

(photo S. Hugh-Jones, Yakumamay, 05/2004)

  • 5 Farmácia Viva Type I, one of the three identified by Professor Francisco José de Abreu Matos (Antu (...)
  • 6 Live pharmacies were an identified area of interest in the Traditional Medicine Research Project i (...)

7The Yakumamay garden was created with and for the Nuevo Triunfo community, unanimously endorsed as a “live pharmacy”5 and community forest reserve in 1997. While the garden was created as a community medicinal plant garden rather than as part of an ayahuasca lodge purchased by outsiders, it shared the characteristics of other shamans’ gardens near Iquitos. The creation of a live pharmacy by a local shaman-cum-community founder and leader, Gilber Chufandama, with foreign sponsorship—albeit without dedicated funds—by University of Cambridge researchers,6 set it outright at the interface between local residents and the international clientele of ayahuasca shamanism. Yakumamay became subsumed in the rapidly rising, dominant model of shamans’ gardens surrounding the ayahuasca centers proliferating along the road.

  • 7 “Plantas con madres” (also “plantas maestras,” “master plants”) enable curanderos to access and cr (...)

8As we mapped Yakumamay in 2004, when the garden was in full expansion, we were keen to document the vision and rationale of its Huallaga Kichwa founder given his Indigenous ancestry, his ties with local community members, and the burgeoning phenomenon of ayahuasca shamanism to which he was judiciously adjusting. Our study documents a particular historical turning point in the evolution of Western Amazonian shamanism concerning plant knowledge, plant use, and the new genre of shamans’ gardens. With the spread of ayahuasca tourism, centers require complex supply chains to secure sufficient quantities for visitors’ consumption. Simultaneously, there is a desire to display on site the plants that shamans use, including the “master plants” whose curing powers are derived from an association with spirit owners, often referred to as “mothers.”7

9As a hybrid form, the gardens draw as much on the historical modalities of plant cultivation culturally shared among shamans from various ethnic groups as on the colonial and post-colonial history of plant trade and gardens (Boumediene 2016; Barbira-Freedman n.d.) The wild/domesticated continuum, central to Amazonian ontologies, creates a dynamic hybridity since shamans, as horticulturalists, attribute different qualities to plants according to where they are sourced and grown. Simplistic classifications or labels, such as production/procurement, domesticated/wild, or garden/forest, tend to obscure our grasp of the complexity and dynamism inherent in this emerging genre. Interacting flows of the five elements which Pierre Lemonnier (1992, p. 5-6) identified as involved in any technological creation: matter, energy, objects, knowledge and gestures, are at play in shamans’ gardens.

Yakumamay: the garden’s entangled history

  • 8 https://yakumamaylivepharmacy.org.

10Before presenting our website map of the Yakumamay garden,8 a rapid sketch of Gilber Chufandama as a Huallaga Kichwa shaman in Iquitos at the turn of the millennium can help situate his creation in the historical context of shamanism in Western Amazonia.

11Gilber, in his late 50s in 1997, comes from an extensive lineage of yachak runakuna (“Forest Kichwa men-of-knowledge/healers”). His father, Aquilino Chufandama, began receiving foreign patients and apprentices in the 1970s in his native community of Chazuta, a site near the Huallaga River rapids reputed and feared for the power of its healer-sorcerers.9 Several of Gilber’s Chazuta relatives now engage in ayahuasca shamanism, some within their own healing center, Yukanayaku, and others travel to treat clients in the US and Canada. The combination of membership in an extensive kinship network of strong curanderos (healers) and religious education as a leading choirboy in the local Mercedarian mission, where he learnt to write beautiful Spanish, gave Gilber the mixed social foundation shared by many Amazonian shamans, past and present.

12After military service in Iquitos, Gilber opted for an interface with health services by training as an army sanitario (“primary health worker”). In Amazonian border posts, he experimented with mixing primary care with the plant-based treatments learnt in his community of origin. After marrying the daughter of Huallaga Kichwa immigrants settled near Iquitos, Gilber worked as an assistant to the Spanish Aid Mission health post of Paujil, which served all the migrants along the Nauta trail at Km 35. He used his dual sets of healing skills to support his growing family, supplementing a traditional horticulturalist/hunter lifestyle with periodic cash-earning jobs ranging from vaccination campaigns to health worker for mining companies. He was quick to realize the potential of the forest areas along the Nauta trail not only as a source of abundant game but also as an area unusually well suited for mixed horticulture. As a reputed shaman’s son, Gilber had first-hand knowledge of the extensive medicinal flora of the Upper Amazon region, the cradle of vegetalismo. As he revealed again and again in his commentaries during our mapping, the strength and the limitations of his post-colonial heritage made him an “invisible Indian,” thriving in the world as an educated health worker, astute political leader, land-owning colonist, and plant medicine expert, yet carrying a still shameful and socially inferior Indigenous identity.

13The label “vegetalista,” used chiefly by mestizo, urban curanderos to avoid the opprobrium of sorcery accusations by a reference to plant medicine, did not suit Gilber. Understanding the appeal of markers of “hyperreal indigeneity” (Ramos 1994) in ayahuasca shamanism, he entered and won the Regional Shamans’ Competition (Campeonato Regional de Chamanes) established by the Iquitos Office of Tourism in 2003. Donning a tourist-trade Shipibo outfit and a feather crown to exoticize his performance while calling plant spirit allies with his leaf rattle and genuine Kichwa shaman’s pipe, Gilber was not fooled by the event’s futility but gained the confidence to call himself a chamán among his competitors. He saw the Yakumamay garden reserve project as the potential concrete foundation of his Kichwa shamanic expertise and legitimacy, in rivalry with new Shipibo shamanic centers and gardens around Iquitos, operating with an overlapping yet distinct set of master plants (Polesna et al. 2011; Tournon 2014).

14In his Nuevo Triunfo community, Gilber claimed his father’s heritage as a yachak, an owner of inherently ambivalent knowledge used for curing and/or harming. Yet he did not have the illness, accident, or vision encounter that is still the legitimizing source of shamanic practice, the calling of a sinchi yachak or powerful healer. Why, then, did Gilber enthusiastically accept to demarcate part of the forest colonization area he controlled to create a garden? Coming together in his decision were his awareness of several incipient trends: ayahuasca tourism; the expansion of local healers’ practices in parallel with the formal health services; and the new value given to the forest and its conservation. At the same time, in training courses he attended as a primary health worker, he learned new concepts such as “nature,” “environment,” and “biodiversity.” He linked these concepts positively to plant-based shamanism, which he called la ciencia del Vegetal (“Vegetal science”), overriding the rejection of ayahuasca use in both healthcare and religious circles.

  • 10 Eduardo Luna’s (1986b) film describes Don Emilio Andrade’s plot in detail and records his commenta (...)
  • 11 Posey (1985), for the Kayapo, and Heckler (2004), for the Piaroa, both mention hidden gardens main (...)

15While urban curanderos/vegetalistas like Don Emilio Andrade (Luna 1986a) had long kept small gardens on the outskirts of Iquitos, where they prepared ayahuasca and other plant remedies for their clients,10 these chakras, interspersed among urban homesteads, were not connected with a forest environment as they were in Gilber’s community of origin, where some plants were grown in backyards, some in gardens, and others hidden in forest “spot gardens.” The urban vegetalistas’ gardens lacked the intent of display and connection with an international audience that characterizes the new genre of shamans’ gardens within ayahuasca shamanism.11

  • 12 In response to the brief of Kathleen Harrison, co-founder of Botanical Dimensions (http://botanica (...)

16Gilber had visited Sacha Mama (“Anaconda Mother of the Forest”), a garden created in the 1980s by Francisco Montes, from a lineage of mixed Kichwa and Capanahua curanderos, to gather, cultivate, and display the plants shown in the paintings by his uncle Pablo Amaringo’s ayahuasca visions (Luna and Amaringo 1991). This was the first large garden showing inspiration from the model of a scientific botanical garden, established in a then-forested area at Km 18 on the Nauta trail and explicitly dedicated to the cultivation, propagation, and conservation of shamanic plants in a garden encompassing their forest environment. Since one of the garden’s aims was to display—and occasionally supply—plants of potential interest for pharmacological research,12 Francisco called his creation a “Jardín Botánico” (“botanical garden”), fastidiously creating botanical labels so his visitors could quickly identify the plants around the large, traditional-style ceremonial house at the center of the site where foreign visitors came to experience ayahuasca.

  • 13 This project did not elicit the interest of migrant settlers along the Iquitos-Nauta road and was (...)

17Through the networks of Kichwa assistant gardeners and healers working there, Gilber was well informed of the various aspects of the enterprise. The shaman’s garden concept was of particular interest to him as he had been involved in a misguided project of the Spanish Agency for International Development for reviving the cultivation and use of medicinal plants in home gardens around the health center of Paujil, where he worked as a health promotor.13 As a local healer, he knew that his neighbors sought what the project leaders called “magic plants” rather than common herbals. Gilber had also visited the new formal botanical garden created in the extensive forest reserve acquired by the Peruvian Amazon Research Institute in 1999, off Km 23 on the Iquitos-Nauta road. The garden was established to maintain and preserve a living collection of Amazonian medicinal species under cultivation ex situ, serving mixed purposes of conservation, research, education, and tourism.

18All gardens have genealogies. Yakumamay was initially conceived as an expansion of Sacha Mama’s response to sponsors’ demand for bulk plant materials for lab testing in the USA. Francisco Montes, however, also envisaged a garden more symbiotic with the surrounding forest, perhaps initially more challenging to protect from animal predators but where plants would benefit from the more powerful energies of sacha, the “wild” forest. This was no longer available as Sacha Mama’s 25 hectares were now hemmed in by a battery chicken farm, a garbage dump, and a cement factory.

  • 14 A document was circulated to collect community members’ signatures or crosses against their names.
  • 15 Inatituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonía Peruana (Peruvian Amazon Research Institute).

19In parallel with shamanic rituals to ensure a legitimate human occupation of “wild” forest in the eyes of spirits, the area selected for the new garden had to be legitimized on the colonization map. Four 80-hectare border plots (320 hectares) on the edge of the vast state-owned forest area extending to the Nanay River were marked as an extension of the Nuevo Triunfo community for official registration and entry on the land registry (Figure 1). The garden design, its purpose, its future value to colonists, and its monetary value as a potential source of income had to be carefully presented to the Assembly of Parents in the school of Nuevo Triunfo. The consultation resulted in majority approval14 for the garden as an “ecological” visiting center for tourists, local students, and national and foreign researchers, a kind of community-owned version of the IIAP15 medicinal garden.

20Initially funded through a donation from one of Francisco Montes’ North American philanthropist clients, the garden’s creation evidenced the familiar steps that Kichwa people follow when opening a new settlement in a hunting colony. Subsistence crops (plantains, manioc) and fruit trees were first planted to support a more sustained occupation. The tambo (“temporary hunting shelter”) was replaced by a well-built open house on stilts in a one-hectare clearing where Francisco and Gilber identified crucial medicinal tree species along the edges. Despite his careful preparation of spots for selected plants imported from Sacha Mama,16 Francisco had not reckoned on the shading and daily care required in this elevated clearing. Young helpers from the Triunfo community planted shade trees and enjoyed hunting, but despite the attraction of abundant game, the new site proved too distant and still unsafe for families.

21If Sacha Mama had become polluted by suppliers of urban necessities, Yakumamay was not yet “tamed” enough to sustain fragile imported plant life in a clearing that required constant vigilance day and night. The arrival of cash-loaded logging operators, who had spotted the opportunity of using the new trail to access trees, soon divided the community, resulting in the destruction of the house by arson and a death. Following unwritten Forest Kichwa rules, the site had to then be abandoned and returned to forest spirits for regeneration. Keeping loggers and invading squatters at bay, however, continued to be a constant task for Gilber and the community faction supporting the “Upper Yakumamay Reserve,” as the site became known. Local narratives suggest that four out of five attempts to create eco-lodges and gardens are short-lived, especially those opened in “pristine, untamed” forest locations. By 2004, the Upper Yakumamay Reserve served as hunting base for Triunfo residents and shelter for scant eco-tourists guided by Gilber’s sons.

22Gilber attributed the failure of “Upper Yakumamay” to a misguided tinkering with the cosmic landscape where powerful forest beings controlling large salt licks (colpas) and underground river tunnels had been angered by human intrusion. He was determined to create a Huallaga Kichwa shaman’s garden of his own design, in a more “tamed” location. Inspired by the memory of his father Aquilino, he set out to create what Forest Kichwa call their chakra wasi, the home where they spend most of their time surrounded by forest gardens, in contrast with their main house near their community center. With his main house at the entrance of Nuevo Triunfo and close to the road, he had already selected two colonization plots—a 160-hectare site, 4 km inland—for his and his family’s use. Set in a protected landscape with a well-built open house on stilts, close to a river pool suitable for fishing, paddling, and swimming, the selected site was well suited for housing resident laborers, receiving local visitors, and hosting prospective foreign guests seeking short to medium stays.

  • 17 Instituto Nacional de Recursos Naturales (National Institute of Natural Resources).

23Spurred on by the goal of creating a flourishing shaman’s garden, Gilber enlarged his collection of plants through exchange and imports from other gardens around Iquitos, asking relatives traveling further afield to bring back plants known to him. His compounded interests included prestige as a local healer/community leader and economic gain through the planting of commercial tree species (supplied at no cost to colonists) for both garden shade and sustainable exploitation. He saw the garden as furthering his shamanic activities in ways that would serve the needs of the local population, on the one hand, and potential foreign visitors, on the other. Gilber’s mature ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi) vines, grown in a protected but visible spot near the chakra house, where he also grew the plants he used most frequently to treat his local patients, pointed to an already established “shaman’s garden.” Yet this would now be extended as a “forest reserve,” where conservation of plants and animals worked as a source of legitimacy to a Western audience. “Flora y Fauna, a motto disseminated by INRENA17 in Nauta road communities, became Gilber’s mantra. While upholding conservation, Gilber had an eye on rentability and maximized envisaged returns on a diversified basis, a strategy that Forest Kichwa people have long used for survival. Many Iquitos shamans engage in activities that are objectionable if we essentialize and idealize them as sabios: wise owners of traditional Indigenous plant knowledge. Shamans’ lives are precarious, and upholding legitimacy can take many forms, as shown in the biography of the famous mid-20th-century Iquitos shaman Manuel Córdova Rios. He ran a cockfighting arena, enjoyed the support of the Masonic lodge, and worked for the US Astoria lumber company while incessantly expanding his knowledge and healing activities in shamanic plant medicine (Lamb 1971).

Mapping and documenting the Yakumamay garden

24Our collaborative field research was mostly carried out between April and June 2004. Neither of us has formal training in botany, but both of us have spent a lifetime of work on shamanism and allied topics, Barbira-Freedman in Peru and Hugh-Jones in Colombian Amazonia. We have also both worked with botanists and collected herbarium specimens. For the Yakumamay garden, we first measured out a virtual meter grid with stakes and trees as reference points, using a tape measure in cleared areas with high planting concentrations, and pacing in more forested areas, where access was more challenging and plants of interest more dispersed. We then visited each square with Gilber, recording his identifications of plants and other comments and making an extensive photographic record. The information was later plotted on graph paper to produce our map. We admit that the absolute placing of plants is always an approximation. However, the map provides a reasonably accurate picture of the relative placing of relevant plants throughout the whole garden space with the use of georeferencing.18

25To identify the plants, we used Duke and Vasquez (1994), Jauregui et al. (2011) and other published sources19 that match vernacular names with botanical genera and species, supplementing this with published sources on botany and ethnobotany such as the Kew Plant Index20 and drawing on our own previous field experience. Standard scientific databases, including Pubmed, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar, were used to access peer-reviewed publications to acquire up-to-date information on specific plants.

  • 21 Sacha Mama, Santa Fe, Tamshiyaku, and Spirit of the Anaconda in Iquitos; Takiwasi in Tarapoto.
  • 22 Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonía Peruana (Peruvian Amazonian Research Institute).

26In tandem with our mapping work, we visited several shamans’ gardens and healing centers in the areas of Iquitos and Tarapoto.21 We also visited the botanical garden at the IIAP,22 interviewing some of the botanists working there and participating in a seminar where botanists and shamans exchanged views and information. Finally, we accompanied Gilber on a visit to his kinsfolk in the mid-Huallaga region, returning in an airplane filled with cardboard boxes containing Gilber’s collection of cuttings and potted specimens to expand his personal plant repertoire.

27Gilber’s garden was created with the help of his four sons and daughters-in-law, his daughter, his son-in-law, and a couple of resident workers. In its full expansion, the garden had three principal areas (Figure 3). Area 1 is a multi-purpose, central home garden near the house, extended into various micro-areas harboring plants grouped according to soil. Alerted to the potential commercial value of medicinal plant species such as Sangre de Drago (Dragon’s Blood, Croton lechleri)23 and Cat’s Claw (Uncaria tomentosa)24 in courses held at the local health post, Gilber had started planting them in the site now becoming his garden. In his pragmatic outlook, there was no contradiction. Dragon’s Blood resin is widely used in the local pharmacopeia for the healing of external and internal wounds, in alternative or complementary treatments to biomedical care. Curanderos in Western Amazonia have long used Cat’s Claw to treat arthritis. Gilber’s 10-year investment was successful for Dragon’s Blood as prices rose but failed for Cat’s Claw as clinical research did not confirm promises of anti-cancer drug discovery.

Fig. 3 – The three areas of Yakumamay

Fig. 3 – The three areas of Yakumamay

(map by authors)

28Areas 1 and 2 constituted the garden proper, including more cultigens and “tamed” plants than wild plants. Mature trees left standing shaded young shrubs and trees, with the rotting trunks of felled trees used to transplant seedlings. Numerous clumps of banana plants, including uncommon varieties of Musa, provided abundant staples as well as fixing nitrogen and preventing soil erosion. The chakra house and the Yakumamay garden were located at roughly 1.5 Km from staple crop gardens where Gilber’s female relatives grew sweet manioc, gourds, and peanuts. Chickens were contained in an open coop close to the house, protecting them at night and protecting the plants from them. While Areas 1 and 2 were not formally banned to the women, shared regional beliefs about the deleterious effects of menstruating, pregnant, or lactating women on plants meant that access was tacitly restricted.

  • 25 For example, sacha tabaku (“wild” varieties of Nicotiana spp.) probably evolved as escapes from ol (...)
  • 26 The pan-Amazonian folk category of piripiri corresponds to Cyperus articulatus. Shamans often keep (...)

29In Area 2, the hilly part from where the trail leading to Upper Yakumamay starts, other plants were cultivated or tended, including tree species used for extracting medicinal roots and barks. This area was an old purma (“secondary regrowth”) where Gilber engaged in more secretive activities of “taming” and entertaining personal relationships with selected plants. There is a Western Amazonian tradition of small plots where local healers grow or tend their master plants away from the prying eyes of others. Blood, most particularly from menstruation or childbirth, is the substance most opposed to tobacco smoke, the preferred food of plant spirits: strict behavioral rules of contact with wilderness (sacha) shared by hunters and shamans apply. These plots vary in size from “spot gardens,” tiny patches of forest cleared of undergrowth to tend “wild” specimens,25 which shamans visit and feed regularly with tobacco, to larger chakra-like clearings partly or fully dedicated to the cultivation of the plants which the shaman uses, including tobacco and coca. Shamans may also tend plant species separately from family gardens cultivated by women. For example, varieties of shambu (“achiote,” Bixa orellana) and of tutumo (calabash tree, Crescentia cujete) were grown in Yakumamay for specific medicinal uses, some known to science and others not. Gilber pointed to the exclusive shamanic handling of some plants categorized as “piripiri” (many of them Cyperaceae) due to their potency and toxicity.26

30In the wetland Area 3, below the house, plants were not cultivated but “tended” for their uses as non-timber forest resources and/or medicines with cosmological relevance. The distribution of plants tended in Area 3, like the plants in Areas 1 and 2, corresponds to Gilber’s combined horticultural expertise and symbolic knowledge.

31Gilber was aware of his visitors’ interest in seeing the vines, palms, and trees that he used to prepare remedies, based on his mixed Huallaga Kichwa and lowlands plant knowledge. Unlike his pusanga plants (hunting, love and luck medicine) from Areas 1 and 2, which were mostly used raw or in infusions, woody vines, tree barks, seeds, and woody roots from Area 3 required more elaboration. The stilt roots of cashapona (Socratea exhorriza) and pona (Iriartea deltoidea), two species valued for their wood, are both medicine and pusanga. Gilber opened a path to facilitate access along the winding stream without disturbing the habitat of symbiotic plant species. Among various kinds of vines categorized as tamshi, growing as tree parasites from seeds dropped by birds in the canopy, he was able to propagate the Lamas tamshi favored by his Huallaga Kichwa ancestors for basketry, which to him is also a medicine. The vine was “adopted” (wiwa) into the community of hanging vines. He saw Area 3 as a vital part of the garden in that it had “urmana,” a Kichwa concept defining an essential criterion of a shamanic site as opening out to the river system, even by way of a small tributary, here leading to the Itaya and Amazon rivers. Area 3 was the most biodiverse of the three areas, providing a border zone between “humanized” spaces and wild forest, particularly for birds, frogs, rodents, and monkeys, whose habits and interactions with plants, both diurnal and nocturnal, Gilber knew well. This was the garden’s most potent area due to the greater power attributed to water spirits, the moon, and the rainbow. It was also the most dangerous to women because of the risk of predation by water spirits. Yakumamay, the giant anaconda and “Grandmother of the water,” presides over the water domain of the Amazonian cosmos with otters as her children, the Yaku Runa (Master of the water domain in human form) as her consort, and the pink water dolphins and mermaids as her retinue.

Convergence between Western Amazonian shamanism and internationalized Ayahuasca shamanism: Gilber as pusanguero

32Urban curanderos, often of mixed Indigenous-Hispanic descent, use the term “vegetalismo” to signal their practice as legitimately plant-based, in distinction both from that of more traditional, upriver, or forest-dwelling Indigenous peoples, who use few plants, and from urban, spiritist healers (Luna 1986a; Beyer 2009). In vegetalismo, shamans’ power and expertise are expressed through ikaros: songs specific to each master plant and assumed to be transmitted to shamans directly by the plants, even though apprentices can acquire them from shaman teachers. While the plant ikaro repertoire of individual shamans varies between 10 and 40 songs, the number of plants known through the mediation of their plant allies often amounts to several hundred, depending on the ecological status of the forest environment from where their shamanic knowledge originated.

33Vegetalismo covers five main paths: ayahuasquero, ayahuasca practitioner; tabaquero, tobacco specialist; palero, tree specialist; pusanguero, specialist in good fortune; and perfumero, expert in plant essences. The first two paths have become dominant in internationalized practice, while the path of pusanga, prevailing in local popular urban shamanic practice, is little acknowledged. Ayahuasca centers around Iquitos refer to a shared set of plants inherited from vegetalismo. Their shamans’ gardens include plants corresponding to all five paths of practice, but shamans have personal plant repertoires reflecting their special expertise. Every shaman uses ayahuasca for visionary purposes at least some of the time; uses tobacco every day and for all interaction with master plants; knows how to prepare the main barks; relies on pusangas to seduce and tame the plant spirits; and works with certain plant essences to alter patients’ moods. Based on Barbira-Freedman’s longitudinal field studies (1978, 1979), our 2004 visits to gardens in the Iquitos region, a review of the literature, and a 2022 survey of nine ayahuasca center websites, plants selected by Gilber to create his Yakumamay garden correspond to a generic and relatively stable plant set which represents a consensual coding of Western Amazonian vegetalismo and defines shamans’ gardens in the region as a genre (see Table 1). Both Indigenous Kichwa and mixed settlers from the Upper Amazon San Martín province (Lamas, Tarapoto, Chazuta), who colonized the Peruvian lowlands in the first half of the 20th century during and after the rubber boom, disseminated vegetalismo in Western Amazonia. Both Luis Luna’s (1984) urban shaman informants and those of Stephan Beyer (2009) in Iquitos were disciples of vegetalistas from San Martín, using similar master plants, songs, and therapeutic practices, and typically addressed as “Don” or “Maestro” to honor their plant expertise and deflect their potential sorcerers’ skills.

Table 1 – The vegetalismo plant set in ayahuasca centers around Iquitos, Peru

Vegetalismo plant set Ayahuasca centers
Tamshiyaku Sacha Runa/
Otorongo
Ceiba Tops Luz Cosmica Rainforest Healing Center Kawsay Yakumamay Isidoro’s garden Sacha Mama Nihue Rao Center Ayahuasca Healing DAS Center
Purging plants (purification)
Yawar panga
Aristolochia didyma
x x x
Oje Ficus insipida
or Ficus schultesii
x x x x x x x x x
Paico
Dysphania ambrosioides
x x x x x x x x x
Ayahuasca preparation
Tabaco mapacho
Nicotiana rustica
x v v v v v v v v v
Cielo ayahuasca
Banisteriopsis caapi var.
x x x x x x x x
Lucero ayahuasca
Banisteriopsis caapi var.
x x x x x
Common vine
Banisteriopsis caapi
x x x x x x x x x
Yana ayhuasca
Banisteriopsis sp. var.
x x x x
Admixtures of ayahuasca
Chacruna
Psychotria viridis
x v v x v x x
Guavahuasca* x x x
Murcielago chacruna
Macfadyena unguiscati
x x x x x
Chacruna roja
(same as Chagropanga?)
x
Chagropanga
Diplopterys cabrerana
x x x x x x x x x
Marosa
Pfaffia Iresinoides
x x x x x
Toe blanco
Brugmansia suaveolens
x x x x x x x x x x
Toe colorado
Brugmansia sanguínea
x x x x x x x x x
Coca
Erythroxylum coca
x x x x x x
Piripiri plants
(see below)
x x x x x x x x x x
Master plant set
Ajo sacha macho
Mansoa alliacea
x x x x x x x x x
Ajo sacha hembra
Pseudocalymma alliaceum?
x x x x x x x x x
Chirik sanango
Brunfelsia grandiflora
x x x x x x x x x x
Uchu sanango
Tabaernemontana sananho
x x x x x x
Lobo sanango
Coussarea brevicaulis
x x x
Achuñi sanango
Strychnos rondeletioides
x
Caballo sanango
Tabaernemontana angulata
x
Ushpawasha sanango
Rawolfia sp.
x x
Patiquina negra
Xanthosoma violaceum
x x x x x x
Piñón blanco
Jatropha curcas L.
x x x x x x
Piñón colorado
Jatropha gossypiifolia
Piñón negro
Jatropha gossypiifolia var.
x x x x x x
Ñukñu pichana
Scoparia dulcis
x x x x x x
Mucura hembra
Petiveria alliacea var.
Mucura macho
Petiveria alliacea var.
x x x x x x x x x x
Jergón sacha
Dracontium spruceanum
x x x x x x
Cordoncillo negro (matico)
Piper aduncum
x x x x x x
Punga
Justicia pectoralis
x x x x x
Aire sacha
Kalanchoe pinnata
x x x x x x
Spirit plants water domain
Yawar piripiri
Eleutherine bulbosa
x x x x x x
Bufeo piripiri
Cyperus sp.
x x
Raya piripiri
Cyperus articulatus
x x x x
Bobinsana
Calliandra angustifolia
x x
Yaku shapana
Terminalia amazonia
x x x
Vines (Sogas)
Abuta
Cissampelos pereira
x x x x x x x x x x
Boahuasca
Gouania lupuloides**
x x x
Clavo huasca
Tynanthus panurensis
x x x x x x
Renaquilla
Clusia rosea
x x x x x x x x x
Master trees
Ajos Kiru
Gallesia integrifolia
x x x x x x
Bellaco caspi
Himantanthus sucuuba
x x x x
Bola kiru
Pouteria Ucuqui
x x x x x
Capirona
Calycophyllum spruceanum
x x x x x x x x x x
Capirona blanca, negra, colorada, de altura (differences debated)
Calycophyllum spruceanum var.
x
Chuchuwasi Maytenus krukovii
or Maytenus ebenifolia
x x x x x x x x
Chuchuwasha
Maytenus aff. macrocarpa
x x
Ayahuma
Couroupita guaianensis
x x x x x x x
Chullachaki Kaspi hembra
Tovomita sp. var.
Chullachaki Kaspi macho
Tovomita sp. var.
x x x x x x x x x
Renaco
Ficus trigona
x x x x x x x x x x
Came renaco
Ficus ypsilophlebia
Warmi renaco
(unidentified)
Sapote renaco
Ficus nymphaeifolia
Wakra renaco
Ficus caballina
Lupuna blanca
Ceiba pentandra
x x x x x x x
Lupuna colorada
Cavanillesia hylogeiton
x x x x x x
Lupuna negra (unidentified) x
Ubos
Spondias mombin
x x x x x x x x x x
Icoja rojo
Uonopsis floribunda
Icoja negro
Uonopsis aff. spectabilis
x x x
Shacapa
Pariana sp.
x x x x x x x
Puma caspi
Roucheria punctata
x x
Remo caspi
Aspidosperma excelsum
x x x x x x x x
Huayra caspi
Cedrelinga catenaformis
x x
Huayruru
Ormosia coccinea
or O. velutina
x x x x x x x x x x
Annona
Annona muricata
x x x x
Copaiba
Copaifera langsdorffii
or C. officinalis
x x x x x x x
Cumaceba
Swartzia polyphylla
x x x x
Catahua
Hura crepitans
x x x x x x
Nihue Rao
(unidentified)
x x
Palo sangre
Brosimum rubescens
x x x x x
Shiwawako
Dipteryx micrantha/Dipteryx charapilla
x x x x
Tortuga caspi
Duguetia hadrantha
x x x
Ishpingo
Amburana cearensis
x x x x x x x x
Tamamuri
Brosimum acutifolium
x x x

x: indicates on-site cultivated plants
v: plants obtained from outside
*Guavahuasca: Banisteriopsis caapi vines grown on fast-growing guava trees with chacruna in their shade, giving the brew a special flavor.
**Boahuasca: the phlegm-like resin of this vine is used as an admixture of ayahuasca.

34Most, though not all, master plants are psychoactive, conferring visions, dreams, or altered states. Their attribution to guardian owners or spirit mothers (madres) differentiates them from “simple,” powerless plants that anyone can handle safely, the domain of expertise of herbalists or family members who provide home care. Everyone agrees that herbs such as basil, wild or cultivated, lack madres. There is a consensus about plants with strong, potentially dangerous madres, for example the chullachaki tree (Tovomita sp.) associated with the forest trickster of the same name throughout Western Amazonia. There is, however, a gray area around the spirit owners of certain plants, for example the psychoactive shrubby vine ajo sacha (Mansoa alliacea [Lam], Bignoniaceae), whose leaves have a garlic odor and flavor. The consensus as to which animal or spirit is the madre of a specific plant is also variable. Gilber did not have the same elaborate grasp of cosmology as Francisco Montes, who gained international fame for his bark cloth paintings of plant spirits.27 Gilber was pragmatic, carefully placing offerings of tobacco around plants he considered to be master plants and blowing tobacco smoke on them to feed their spirits and express his care. Not doing so would signal a lack of nurture, leading the spirits to seek redress, perhaps causing sickness. Other precautions taken when moving or harvesting power plants included bathing carefully to remove sweat, abstaining from sex, and fasting: all widespread practices in Amazonian shamanism.

35Our mapping of Gilber’s garden was not subject to restrictions, although he always carried tobacco for emergency use if one of us infringed some unknown taboo. Like most curanderos in or near Iquitos, Gilber did not grow enough plants to prepare the tobacco he needed for his practice. He exchanged barks for the rough tobacco (mapacho) sold in the Iquitos market. Ayahuasca shamanism has caused a rise in imports of mapacho from the San Martín and Ucayali provinces where it is grown and prepared, but a few Nicotiana spp. plants are often cultivated and displayed in shamans’ gardens for the attention of foreign visitors.

  • 28 Luna and Amaringo 1991. McKenna, Luna and Towers 1995. See also “Ayahuasca Admixtures,” in Steve B (...)

36The relationships between shamans and their master plants rest upon sedimented layers of social relations, personal experimentation, and trials. These layers are part of plant ownership, inscribed in the biography and evolving knowledge acquisition of the garden owner. While the transmission and exchange of plants in Amazonia has been generally documented across networks of kinship, locality, and ethnicity (Lenaerts 2006), the exchange of master plants between (usually) male shamans has been less researched. Historically, as social mediators between “pacified” and “rebel” Indigenous people of colonial Western Amazonia, Kichwa shamans have been eager to exchange plants and knowledge through networks of amity and trade. The persons from whom master plants were acquired are remembered and sometimes named in shamans’ incantations at the onset of ayahuasca sessions. Since the 1990s, more plant admixtures28 have been circulating through both local and international networks of ayahuasca shamanism and some are now available worldwide on the internet. Ethnobotanical and biochemical research on the species and varieties of plants used in ayahuasca rituals has filtered through shamanic practice around Iquitos in remarkable processes of experimentation and plant exchanges.

37In this dialogic process, Indigenous shamans have been relocating plants that have fallen into disuse and adopting combinations preferred by the international clientele of ayahuasca centers. The vegetalismo master plant set, however, remains an integral base upon which shamans build their individual repertoires according to their specialties and to the opportunities provided by their networks of contacts, their travels, and their life histories.

  • 29 https://cayashobo.com/master-plants/#marosa, accessed 11/07/2025.

38As vegetalistas, shamans are indefatigable plant collectors and experimentalists, taking great pleasure in acquiring, assessing, and crossbreeding new varieties. With a preoccupation to expand his collection of ayahuasca admixtures in the context of a shaman’s garden, Gilber exchanged chakruna plants for pusanga plants with Artidoro Aro Cardenas, an ayahuasquero who previously worked for Francisco Montes in Sacha Mama. In 2006, Artidoro was the officiating shaman in Santa Fe, a neighboring center created with young Europeans who funded the purchase of colonist plots in the hinterland of Km 47.5 along the Iquitos-Nauta road. Among Artidoro’s various apprenticeships as an ayahuasquero, he spent time with Wampis shamans near the Ecuadorian border, following historical patterns of long-distance shamanic exchanges. From Artidoro, Gilber obtained “wambisa chakruna” (the preferred Wampi additive), also known as chalipanga or chagropanga (Diplopterys cabrerana), and murcielago chakruna (Macfadyena unguiscati). Cuttings were transplanted in Yakumamay after being rooted in water. From relatives working in the Pacaya Samiria reserve, he obtained lana chacruna (unidentified). From Ashaninka shaman partners, Gilber obtained chakruna roja, also called maroasa or marosa (Calathea allouia), which he used for the treatment of repeated pregnancy loss and associated misfortune. In turn, he exchanged this with Shipibo shamans, who use it as a heart-opening and self-esteem-restoring plant in the new Ayahuasca centers.29 While Artidoro used raya piripiri (Cyperus articulatus var.) to treat diseases categorized as caused by rainbows pertaining to the water domain in the cosmos, Gilber was interested in using the plant as a pusanga to promote women’s fertility. Gilber also used dreams and visions to seek new chakruna plants in the wild, which he tamed in his spot gardens: two of these, unnamed, were integrated in the garden and figure on our map as chakruna. His taming was secret knowledge, reserved for future exchanges with other shamans.

Yakumamay as a multidimensional plant world

  • 30 See, for example, “Plant Teachers and Master Trees of the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest; Plant teache (...)

39We had a special interest in the way in which Gilber organized his garden and in the logic behind the distribution of the plants. As far as we can tell, the choice and distribution of plants in a garden is usually left to the initiative of the shaman concerned. Some shamans’ gardens and ayahuasca centers’ websites are more systematic than others in their display of botanical species, depending on the clienteles they wish to attract.30 Unlike some of the gardens we visited in the region (Tamshiyaku, Takiwasi), and to a greater degree than Francisco Montes’ Sacha Mama, Yakumamay looked more like a dense Amazonian forest garden with plants growing between or in logs under protective layers of shading trees.

40Gilber spontaneously contrasted his design with that of the botanical garden at the IIAP, describing the systematic beds of the latter as “a cemetery for plants, as if they were not live beings.” Unlike Francisco Montes, Gilber chose not to use botanical labels. He clearly expressed his relationships to the plants as those of an Indigenous shaman: this mattered to him. His perception of plants as relatives or antagonists enabled him to know where to place them in his garden and how to experiment with their cultivation and preparation according to both his horticultural knowledge and skills and his embodied shamanic knowledge.

41Imported plants were parked in temporary places until they felt assimilated. Gilber arranged plants in “families” (familias) according to his understanding of their habits, gained from intuition, observation, and comparison. In so doing, he referred to categories of plant knowledge and classification inherited from his Huallaga Kichwa ancestors and still widely shared in the region.

42The social plantscape that Gilber created was based on several intersecting binary oppositions: male/female, red/black, domesticated/wild, hot/cold, besides the differentiation between master plants and simple plants. Yet all these oppositions, including plant gender, could be bridged through the perception of a continuum between them or possible transformations into one another, however contradictory this may appear from a naturalist perspective. While this sociologically informed categorization of plants, widely shared with variations throughout Amazonia, raises many issues for taxonomists using a Linnean scheme, especially in its treatment of unrelated species as plant pairs, it may also open a space of reflection about Indigenous logic, returning us to Lévi-Strauss’s interrogations in his La Pensée sauvage (1962).

43In the garden, Gilber juxtaposed other plants in complementary opposition of color: for example toe blanco and toe colorado, white and red varieties of Brugmansia suaveolens. Plants and trees identified as colorado, red, in relation to white or black “relatives,” qualify, at least potentially, as useful in sorcery. These pairs may be varieties of the same botanical species or different plants. Gilber saw it as important to have the plants close together. Color symbolism, intersecting with gender, produces red (female, potent, and vital but potentially danger-ridden), black (male, sorcery), and red-and-black (ambivalence between female and male, healing and sorcery). Red, the vital color, combines with black to signify the ambivalent power of shamans as healers and sorcerers, with red and white connoting female and healing. Although not necessarily articulated with color, the perception of plants attributed the same name as female or male is perhaps the most prevailing principle of plant classification in Western Amazonian shamanism (Barbira-Freedman 2010).

  • 31 Tabernaemontana sananho/sanango has been for many years a panacea in the uppermost Amazon. The nam (...)
  • 32 Uchu sanango’s alkaloids identified in pharmacological research confirm uses by Forest Kichwa sham (...)

44Gender differences may be based on growing habits: the shrubby vine ajo sacha is “male” when climbing and “female” when creeping along the ground. Gendered pairs may be differentiated by differences in the flowers of the same species: purple-flowered chirik sanango (Brunfelsia grandiflora) is “male” but female when white-flowered. In gendered pairs, gender may also intersect with hot/cold oppositions and with the modality of teaching offered by the plant if it is recognized as a master plant. Chirik sanango is paired with uchu sanango (or lobo sanango, Tabaernaemontana sananho)31 in a cold/hot, female/male opposition, although the two shrubs are botanically unrelated. Both shrubs are part of the vegetalismo set displayed in shamans’ gardens and used as ayahuasca additives. Gilber commented that the roots of uchu sanango, which he uses to treat rheumatism,32 evoke a forest spirit appearing as an old human healer who teaches people dieting with the plant through dreams. Dream-enhancing plants are now better known and valued in the diversification of services offered by ayahuasca shamanism centers near Iquitos.

45In mapping the garden, we aimed to avoid introducing our assumptions about empirical versus symbolic criteria by which Gilber understood and used his plants. It was clear to us that there was a double process at play in the mapping of the garden: Gilber was also attentive to our presumed naturalist ideology. The category of pusanga plants, which touches on the shamanic ambivalence between healing and sorcery and invokes belief in magic, interrogated the relation between animist and naturalist ontologies without ever naming it. To confront the two in the context of the garden would have ruptured the very basis of its design: productive equivocation.

46Gilber’s personal plant repertoire corresponded to his pusanga path as a shaman. Formerly associated with the promotion of hunting success and the treatment of hunters’ bad luck (afasi), one of the most serious illnesses presented to shamans, pusangas now extend to business, love matters, and personal good fortune. Dobkin de Rios (1992) identified pusangas as the least studied part of shamanism and yet of central importance. Pusanga plants are operators in seduction, predation, and taming. As such, they merge the two relational forms of predation and familiarization, which Philippe Erikson (1987, 2000 [1987]), and later Carlos Fausto (2008, 2016), identified as dialectically intertwined in Amazonia.

47In his commentaries to us, Gilber offered prolific explanations on some topics while remaining secretive about others—notably pusangas. Used to promote good fortune, pusangas reverse bad luck but sometimes cause it. They are also associated with harmful revenge and retaliation. Referred to in popular medicine as “magic plants,” they are frowned upon in social circles linked to health services, the Catholic Church, and ayahuasca shamanism, in which Gilber wanted to be respected. With his pusanguero identity, he operated in Belén, the old popular port of Iquitos where fortune tellers and soothsayers rub shoulders with disreputable curanderos, despite the social stigma attached to the place. In a previous field visit (2003), Barbira-Freedman was alerted to Gilber’s therapy room (consultorio) through the gossip of market herbalists whom he supplied and who referred a mixed clientele of respectable Iquitos women, sex workers, police officers, and small traders to him. His pusanga-based treatments of sexual disorders and troubled sexual relationships were renowned along the Nauta road. His small room in a corner of the Belén market was supplemented by a rooftop where he stored potted plants brought from Yakumamay. This activity was a source of income which Gilber acknowledged but was reserved about while we mapped the garden with him.

  • 33 According to the doctrine of signatures (or doctrine of similitude), dating from Dioscorides, char (...)

48In Area 1 of his Yakumamay garden (see Figure 3), behind several potted plants and looking like the innocent ornamentals to be found in any tropical Iquitos garden, Gilber kept an unusual collection of pusangas, some endemic to the region and others imported, which he used in the preparation of remedies, charms, and treatments. The selection and spatial arrangement of the pusanga plants in this area illuminate some of the principles underpinning the display of plants in a shaman’s garden. Each plant is juxtaposed with others in accordance with perceived properties of similarity or difference and its sensory or affective connections with the garden owner. Pusanga plants highlight the interplay of sensory attributes in the semiotics of dual oppositions based on color, gender, scent, and origin, as well as the values attributed to wild or domesticated plants and criteria related to the “doctrine of signatures”.33 This interplay extends to the garden as a whole, but among pusangas, the patkina plants, plants of predilection in Gilber’s shamanic activity in a less studied path of shamanism, offer an apt illustration.

49Patkina (also called Patikina or Patinguina) plants range across categories of ornamental plants grown in Amazonian homes, gardens, and parks, pusangas used in popular medicine by many Indigenous and non-Indigenous Amazonians living in forest or urban communities, and shamanic plants, assimilated or not to master plants in their use to combat and remedy sorcery attacks. Gilber differentiated six kinds of patkinas based on the classic colors of black, white, red, and the less usual colors of green and variegated (pintada, Dieffenbachia seguine), colors related to white and red, respectively. Pablo Amaringo painted four patkina plants, each with its spirit owner, which shamans need to befriend before they can use them (Charing, Cloudsley and Amaringo 2011; Patinguina Samai vision). The Quechua samay denotes the life force and personal power associated with the plants.

50Thirty species—and varieties—of Dieffenbachia (Araceae) are listed as vernacular patkinas, but Xanthosoma poeppigii, another species of Araceae, is also called patkina (or patikina) in Iquitos. The prevalence of black patkina plants in Yakumamay, some in Area 1 and others in Area 2, indicates Don Gilber’s reliance on this plant to counter sorcery, while he used white and green patkina leaves, in poultices or vaporizations, to treat mycoses. He emphasized the toxicity of all patkinas, which can cause inflammation when touched. The mother spirit of the black patkina, which Gilber said could be seen as an old woman sitting on a rotting tree trunk near the plants, is watchful that the right care should be provided to them and their offspring. She requires offerings of tobacco and camalonga (Strychnos sp.) to cleanse and protect people, homes, and businesses from persistent bad luck. Gilber insisted that both black and white patkina plants could be male or female. He described his use of female white patkinas with their permission (con permiso) to treat envidia (negative effects of rivalry) plaguing market stalls and small businesses, and male black patkinas to “seal” as well as treat the bodies of victims of sorcery attacks. He then mentioned that after these actions he needed to use the plants himself to get rid of the afflictions with which his clients contaminated him, combined with camalonga and the resin of copal sacha (Bursera copallifera), one of the Bursera species of copal that he tended in Yakumanay and valued in his shamanic practice.

51While Gilber was not aware of the toxic compounds identified in Dieffenbachia species, and did not relate pusanga plants such as labios de novia (Psychotria peopigiana, Psychotria elata) or teta de vaca (Solanum mammosum) to each other, he associated them on the basis of his experience of their psychotropic effects, revealing guardianship by a subjectivity he had to contend with for using them.

52The power of other pusanga plants, however, appeared to rest on multiple associations within Gilber’s cosmo-ontology. Many animals were invoked for their attributes: toucan, for “long tongue” and “paired for life”; male birds with a spectacular red crest for virility. Colonial associations with the name of the Virgin Mary signaled protection against or healing of sorcery. Like many healers worldwide, Gilber also appealed to the doctrine of signatures in comments about efficacy. The buceta paired plants are an odd pusanga. Whilst “female” buceta (Xanthosoma sp.) and “male” buceta (Anthurium sp.) both resemble human female genitals (“buceta”), they are nonetheless used equally to enhance sexual attraction across genders. Shamans also use signature plants in applications that may or may not be related to their appearance. For example, while many Peruvian curanderos prepare the rhizome of jergón sacha (Dracontium longipes) as an antidote for the poisonous snakebite of the fer-de-lance, which it resembles with its mottled stem, Gilber used the same rhizome to treat immune-depressant conditions attributed to sorcery, for which no medical treatment was available. While Artidoro used raya piripiri (Cyperus articulatus var.) to treat diseases categorized as caused by rainbows pertaining to the water domain in the cosmos, Gilber was interested in using the plant as a pusanga to promote women’s fertility. Like patkinas, plants categorized as “piripiri” may or may not be considered as master plants, yet Gilber perceived them all to be pusangas.

  • 34 Chinese immigrants moved to Peruvian Amazonia after freeing themselves from Pacific coastal sugar (...)

53In their cultural adaptations, from plant preparations to attract and successfully hunt game or fish, to urban applications in personal magic to seduce or deter lovers and to promote good fortune in business, pusangas have recently been enriched with imported plants from influential external traditions. Chinese concepts of luck and misfortune related to prosperity have been superimposed on the Peruvian Amazonian folk misfortune syndrome of saladera (Dobkin de Rios 1981). Introducing home plants for good luck in the pusanga range has gained purchase in Peruvian Amazonian popular culture.34 These include the perennial Aglaonema (Araceae) plants, with red-and-white leaves, both toxic and medicinal. “Treatment” of plants by a pusanguero is sought to increase the plants’ efficacy in protecting homes and businesses. Dracaenia trifasciata, known as “espada de Jorge,” is native to Nigeria but has made its way from Belém do Pará to Iquitos along the Amazon River as part of an Afro-Amazonian pharmacopeia associated with Brazilian influence. Gilber valued this plant highly as a protector against sorcery attacks.

54That Gilber is not an ayahuasquero does not mean that he ignored ayahuasca’s use. He used it consistently to diagnose his clients’ underlying causes of illness, to “study” plants he had seen in visions or dreams, and to better understand their properties. As we traveled together to the middle Huallaga valley, where he grew up, he was keen to locate the secret spot where his father Aquilino tended his ayahuasca vines. This vine had been transmitted through cuttings along several generations of Kichwa ayahuasqueros in the region, constituting a mallki (“ancestral stem”), a term used both for plant stocks and for local Kichwa kinship networks (ayllukuna). There was great emotion when Gilber came back with cuttings of the vine after venturing by himself into the forest area where he had accompanied his father as a boy. Once in Iquitos, the cuttings were planted separately from the already thick vines growing near his house.

55While Gilber’s father preferred using Psychotria viridis as a vision-inducing chakruna (additive to the Banisteriopsis vine), Gilber experimented with various plants to test their effects in his ayahuasca brews. Yet the focus on visionary experience, which prevails in ayahuasca centers due to visitors’ demands, did not capture his attention. He grew cielo ayahuasca, the variety of Banisteriopsis most valued by gringos, but the diverse origins of his chakruna plants testify to his preoccupation with pusanga for balancing healing and sorcery in the mixed clientele he served as a shaman, with a constant process of plant exchange and experimentation. For example, paired toe blanco and toe colorado are masha (affines) to toe plants attributed a different origin (toe brasilero).

56Sensory qualities, to which Gilber referred regarding most of the plants in the Yakumamay garden, indexed a contrast he was aware of between knowing scientifically and Indigenous knowledge. His organoleptic repertoire was also implicated in the classification and location of plant friends or antagonists and he took visible pleasure in exposing our deficiencies not only in sensing plants but also in memorizing detailed observations that might help us overcome them.

  • 35 Jernigan (2008) was one of the first ethnobotanists to note local sensory principles of tree class (...)

57Tree barks are often identified by scent or taste, color, and texture.35 In Quechua, mishki (“sweet-smelling, fragrant”) is opposed to asna (“fetid, pungent”). Western Amazonian curanderos are attentive not only to plant scents but also to plant-animal interactions mediated by scent. Orchids, many known to shamans as medicinal, have a large register of scents associated with their pollinators. Gilber’s success with the propagation of medicinal orchids in the Yakumamay garden, after scientists from the IIAP had failed, led to his and other local shamans’ interest in including some of these orchids in their gardens. He shared his observations with the IIAP scientists and was curious about their research findings, but found himself excluded. His contribution was elided as that of many shaman plant experts in scientific research projects. “To accept sensuous scholarship,” notes Paul Stoller (1997, p. xvii), “is to reject the conceit of control in which mind and body, self and other are considered separate.” His statement highlights the fact that acknowledging, measuring, and respecting sensorial experience remains a contested work in the practice of science.

58We cannot address here the whole complex topic of plant domestication in Amazonia. However, a few interesting aspects stand out in the Yakumamay garden. Over and beyond a distinction between forest and garden plants, Gilber used the concept of sacha (“wild”) as a source of shamanic power for healing or harming. He did not treat domestication as the “endpoint of a continuum that starts with exploitation of wild plants, continues through cultivation of plants selected from the wild but not yet genetically different from wild plants, and terminates in fixation, through human selection, of morphological and hence genetic differences” (Pickersgill 2007, p. 925). Rather, he was interested in a continued relation between wild plants, semi-domesticates, and domesticates, pairing them and often placing them side by side as a systematic feature of his garden.

59The process of domestication corresponds to the familiarization of animic beings discussed by Erikson (2000 [1987]) and Fausto (2008). As with the other categorical oppositions referred to above, there are many nuances. Wild plants can be truly wild or naturalized garden escapes issued from cultivars in abandoned gardens. For example, wild basil or sacha albahaca” is contrasted with “albahaca” cultivars in gardens, but basil was introduced to Amazonian home gardens in colonial times. Sacha culantro (Eryngium foetidum), wild coriander, smells and tastes like garden coriander (Coriandrum sativum), but shamans only use the former in plant baths. Cultivated malva (Malva silvestris) with purple flowers is differentiated from wild malva, or “malva legítima” (Malachra ruderalis), with white flowers. Both are mallows of European origin. Plants considered to be sacha are attributed stronger scents and flavors, and greater efficacy. Other plants, like ishanga (“stinging nettles”), are more genuinely divided into wild (Laportea aestuans) and cultivated specimens (Urtica dioica). A qualifier that intersects with sacha is legítimo (“authentic”), to denote plant species or morphotypes that are given higher value among related others. Gilber emphatically signaled “barbasco legítimo” among other varieties of Deguelia utilis grown in Yakumamay as both fishing poisons and medicines.

60In the tradition of his Chazuta ancestors, Gilber “tamed” the plants he considered as his most personal spirit allies by cultivating them in spot gardens in Area 2. Regenerated forest, three to 15 years old, is seen as the most fertile environment for medicinal plants that favor disturbed soils, like the Solaneaceae. Gilber visited these spot gardens most days on his own. Shamans consider their master plant cultigens as children needing nurture and love to support positive relationships with spirit owners. Their rapport with the plants which they are studying, watching them day by day, developing an intimate sensory grasp and a careful observation of their habits and responses to other plants, goes beyond the documented affection that Amazonians—both men and women—have for the plants they cultivate. Shamans’ engagements with plants in their gardens are closer to cathexis: emotional investment is required to receive the plant songs (ikaros), threads that confer shamanic agency in the cosmos. With non-domesticates tended and befriended in the forest as special allies, this bond is even more potent as their taming is more precarious. Familiarization with plant spirit owners in the idiom of quasi-filiation is never a secure bond. By transferring the plants to a domesticated space, shamans also familiarize their spirits.

61In the forest-as-cosmos, associations with animals and elements are encoded in the shamanic lore of Western Amazonia. In gardens that extend into forest reserves, direct observation of plants and plant-animal interactions complement stories, myths, and insights shared to illuminate visitors’ experiences of ingesting master plants. In his design of the Yakumamay garden, Gilber also manifested a widespread Western Amazonian contrast between plants of the upper forest (urku) and plants of the water (yaku), with corresponding contrasted spirits. Following the pattern of his Kichwa shaman ancestors, Gilber kept a mental inventory of medicinal trees in the areas where he “actively walked through” (puri-ku), around the garden and along the path leading to the Upper Yakumamay site. The swamp area near the stream, which provided clean water for the household, was gradually turned into an extension of the garden (Area 3 on Figure 3). But there, plants pertaining to the water cosmic domain were tended rather than cultivated, and Gilber clearly entertained a different relationship with them. He was freer, in some ways happier and less protective, while still showing signs of being careful and respectful.

  • 36 It can be assumed that these medicinal liqueurs were introduced using recipes transmitted from Eur (...)

62As he opened more paths in Area 3, crisscrossing the old path to the original Upper Yakumamay, Gilber was attentive to species which he knew to be useful not only as master plants but also as plants assisting pollinators and supporting seed-dispersing animals. Without having followed the rigorous training of a palero (“tree shaman”) to use trees as media to connect with and act in the cosmos, he had an extensive ecological knowledge of trees acquired in his youth. Since tree barks and roots sold in the Iquitos market are mostly imported from the Huallaga River area on balsa rafts, often becoming over-dry or rotten, Gilber occasionally sold his freshly harvested barks at a good price. Alcohol macerations of tree barks and roots, “five barks” and “seven barks” liqueurs,36 are extremely popular as part of folk medicine in Western Amazonia but mostly excluded from ayahuasca shamanism due to their alcohol content. As a master tree, chuchuwasi (Maytenus spp.) is central to the vegetalismo plant set and a main ingredient in bark potions and liqueurs. Besides the documented properties of its bark and root bark for treating arthritis (Gonzalez et al. 1982; Niero, Andrade, and Cechinel Filho 2011), it is one of the first master trees that shaman apprentices engage with in their initiatory diets, ingesting the bark as an ayahuasca admixture. Gilber also collected resins, saps, and other exudates on an ad hoc basis when required for specific treatments. He knew exactly where to find them, how and when to best obtain them, and how to apply them in poultices or neat on wounds.

63Not all shamans’ gardens include as many diverse species of trees, palms, vines, and epiphytes as Yakumamay’s Area 3. Early urban shamans’ plots were within easy access to older secondary forest areas with their large palos abuelos (“ancestor trees”) from which barks and roots were obtained for urban clients. Now, shamans’ gardens have extended into secondary forest in response to visitors’ interests in ecology and preference for ayahuasca centers near forest reserves. Guided forest walks have become a standardized element of ayahuasca tourism, with specific trees labeled and their properties explained. The Nihue Rao Center’s website explains: “Some of the plants mentioned below are used in conjunction with ayahuasca diets and some are prescribed by our healers to address specific ailments. All our guests have the unique opportunity to learn more about these plants on jungle walks accompanied by a local guide. All of them are found on our property.”37 Gilber did not signpost medicinal trees in Area 3 but took pride in demonstrating to visitors how to differentiate between tree species similar in appearance, such as moenas, the common name for various Lauraceae species, by their scent and the taste of their inner bark resembling those of well-known plants: camphor moena, cinnamon moena, yellow moena, avocado moena, anise moena, and so on.38

64In Area 3, even more than in Areas 1 and 2, black, white, and red, gender categories, and the doctrine of signatures served to classify plants in complementary oppositions. For example, the seeds of huayruro (Ormosia coccinea), a 25- to 30-m-high tree native to Peruvian Amazonia, have been used as good-luck charms since pre-Inca times. The smaller red seeds are classified as female and the larger red-and-black seeds as male. Huallaga Kichwa shamans continue to wear cross-bandoliers of red-and-black seeds, and both seed types are essential ingredients of luck charms. Both contain toxic alkaloids and are used with the tree bark in medicinal preparations.

65Some “teacher trees,” like lupuna (Ceiba spp), are central to the ambivalence of shamanic power and to the power of plants as a pharmakon with the potential to heal or kill according to dosage and other modalities of use. Relating to their spirit allies as “metahumans”—a term proposed by Marshall Sahlins (2022) concerning Philippe Descola’s (2005) animist ontological scheme—, shamans use this “spiritual keystone species” (Tareau et al. 2022) to intercede with the “masters of the forest” thought to regulate access to game and other resources. Vegetalistas distinguish between black, red, and white lupuna trees. While the buttress roots and trunk base of the white lupuna (C. pentandra) index strong defenses, the kapok in its fruit pods, formerly wrapped around blowgun darts, connotes lightness and speed in attack. Its bark is used to prevent and treat sorcery-linked afflictions. Red lupuna (C. umbellata) is thought to cause potentially lethal abdominal swelling when sorcerers bury leftovers of food eaten by victims inside the trunk of this tree, mimicking its rounded shape. The black lupuna (unidentified Ceiba sp.), formerly used to control the weather, is now used to gain shamanic power. Its sweet-scented flowers, pollinated by nocturnal bats, are associated with sorcery. Visitors to ayahuasca centers are invited to draw power from the sheer size of ceiba trees as “ancestor trees,” even when they are not made aware of their uses by sorcerers. While ceiba trees are not sought for timber and do not produce edible fruit, many trees in Area 3, including palms, yield fruit for human and animal consumption.

  • 39 See Berlowitz et al. 2022 for the renewed interest in plant “diets” in ayahuasca shamanism near Iq (...)

66Uvos (Spondias mombin), a native of the neotropics, is a useful tree with confirmed medicinal properties as well as being a master tree. Its spirit owners, peccaries and tapirs, are fond of its fruit, which they share with human consumers. “Dieting” uvos—fasting while ingesting decoctions of its bark, roots, or leaves, and connecting with its spirit owners—empowers shamans to use the tree’s various parts for treating their patients (Ayoka et al. 2010, p. 129-136). Trees like uvos are now frequently included among the plants with which visitors to ayahuasca centers are invited to plan a personalized “diet.”39

  • 40 Pink dolphin, anaconda, rainbow, and moon bow are causes of women’s reproductive conditions treate (...)

67Gilber used uvos preparations to treat women’s reproductive ailments, a special expertise complementing his primary health worker’s care, and also supplied them to local midwives. But, when required by diagnosis, he used uvos in a shamanic capacity, calling upon its cosmic connections to treat conditions attributed to interference by elements or water spirits.40

68The Amazon region is a site of folklore and mythology, on the one hand, and intense eco-political debate, on the other, invoking the very same paradox between the otherworldliness and the this-worldliness that imbues the relationships of shamanic plants with their spirit owners. Many plants in Area 3 refer to connections between plants and other plants, animals, or elements in the cosmos as a reference for aspects of human behavior. Parasitic plants provide metaphors of insidious domination. For example, after its seeds have been dropped by birds, the strangler fig (Ficus benjamina) grows its roots down a tree trunk to the soil while its shoots grow up above the tree’s canopy, slowly killing the support tree like a prey.

69The three areas of the Yakumamay garden represent different micro-ecological niches requiring detailed knowledge of soils, drainage, and access to sunlight for sustainably cultivating or tending plants. Geography constrains the distribution of plants in the garden, but the garden also “shapes” the landscape through its reference to the cosmological domains of earth, water/rainbow, and an intermediate mud/marshy swamp. Topography, historical landscape, and shamanic “purikuna” (territories of personalized cosmic travel) overlap. Urban shamans trained in the vegetalismo tradition, like Luna and Beyer’s informants, and the Indigenous and mixed colonists living along the Nauta road are both aware of cosmic domains and the main categories of plants belonging to these domains, only incipiently extrapolated to the clientele of Ayahuasca shamanism centers.

Cycles of degeneration and regeneration

70A garden is never an object—always a process. This is especially the case for shamans’ gardens, where tropical agriculture, expanding colonization, and uncertain incomes combine to make such enterprises inherently unstable. The Yakumamay garden ended in 2014, 10 years after our field study and mapping. This exceeds the average lifespan of Amazonian chakras and home gardens, as soils get depleted after a four- to six-year peak. In Yakumamay, locusts destroyed many plants in Areas 1 and 2 in 2009. The effects of climate change became acutely felt, causing annual drought in Areas 1 and 2 and flooding in Area 3 from 2010 onwards. The chakras where residents of Nuevo Triunfo grew agricultural produce as a source of income ceased to be profitable.

71Trapped in the predictable colonization cycle along the Iquitos-Nauta road, once mobile logging units had exhausted the potential of trees in colonists’ plots, residents started selling their land rights to private buyers. Besides a few fish farms and cattle ranches, urban investors sought to build country houses outside Iquitos on land that could only increase in value. Gilber, consistent with his primary call to follow modernity, sold most of the family plots he had secured in the colonization scheme, including the three areas of the Yakumamay garden. He and his family members joined the many colonists who left the chaotic countryside produced by colonization for one of the service-deficient, violent, but alluring peri-urban slums that ring Iquitos as an affluent Amazonian city.

72Rupture and continuity mark the evolution of ayahuasca shamanism. Gilber kept his links to his shaman lineage as an urban pusanguero, still sourcing and cultivating pusangas with the help of Iquitos market herbalists to attend his urban clientele. For some time, he supported his youngest son Percy, who settled in the remaining forested plots of Upper Yakumamay, now flanked by a Mennonite community and an eco-village doubling as an ayahuasca healing center.41 Moreover, after moving downstream from Iquitos for some years, Francisco Montes has re-created his original Sacha Mama site as an ayahuasca lodge.42 The displacements of the Amazon River bed, leading to the dominance of Iquitos’ eastern port, have brought about a new salience for the Nanay River as an axis for the expansion of ayahuasca centers in forested environments .43 The number of healers in Iquitos has grown with the population, but the ratio probably remains unchanged, with roughly one in 20 household heads officiating as curandero/a.

73As Gilber decided that his Yakumamay garden was a source of diminishing returns and therefore unviable, a historical cycle well known in Amazonia was repeated. He chose to join the mixed precariate of Iquitos’ bulging periphery, indexing modernity, while some of his relatives and Nuevo Triunfo community members migrated further into the forest to open new colonies in game-rich areas along the Nanay River. Over the time span of the Yakumamay garden, Amazonian plant knowledge became globalized—with both direct and indirect commercial benefits—simultaneously with the internationalization of ayahuasca. Did the reciprocity we intended to create in the form of a community-based live pharmacy fail abysmally? Rather than evaluating it as a doomed naïve enterprise, we prefer to see it as a confirmation that shamanic plant knowledge continues to be transmitted, even as Indigenous youths migrate to towns, and that it can be reconstituted in forest environments through plant and knowledge exchange and, perhaps most importantly, through the teachings of the master plants. The idiom of shamanic healing with plants, underlining both popular Amazonian medicine and international uses of ayahuasca, may be the crucible of yet another phase of transformation at this time of great vulnerability for Indigenous Amazonians.

Shamans’ gardens as sites of creative equivocation

  • 44 In April 2018, the murder of well-known Shipibo elder healer Olivia Arévalo at the hands of a Cana (...)

74The concept of two-sided equivocation (Viveiros de Castro 2004), invoked to introduce this paper, points to the contrasting functions and understandings (unconscious, semi-conscious, or openly expressed) that shamans’ gardens have as an interface between local healers and the international clientele of the ayahuasca centers, between shamans and scientists, and between animist and naturalist ontologies. On the side of shamans and their sponsors, the gardens allude to the reassurance and prestige of science-based, cosmopolitan botanical gardens. They provide visible legitimacy to the ayahuasca centers as enterprises delivering plant-based experiences and therapies on the margins of the law and medicine. Despite the official recognition of shamanic practice as a national patrimony in Peru since 2008 and sporadic collaboration between shamans and botanists, recent incidents show that the historical persecution of healers as (Indigenous) counter-hegemonic agents is ongoing.44

75On the side of the visitors and the ayahuasca centers’ sponsors, gardens authenticate the centers’ close relation to the still mysterious rainforest, perceived at once as a fragile and threatened ecosystem, a “healing forest” (Schultes and Raffauf 1990), and a cosmos teeming with the other-than-human beings of animist ontology. On the side of scientist botanists, opinions vary. For some, these beings are mere noise that can be filtered out from the genuine insights that shamans can provide. Others find them to be compatible with their own spiritual orientations.

  • 45 Conferencias Indigenas da Ayahuasca, Acre (2017-2025). Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund.

76Sponsors’ awareness and manipulation of this equivocation are variable. For many, the asymmetrical character of historical relations between Westerners and Amazonians—both Indigenous and of mixed descent—is subsumed under ideal principles of rainforest conservation and benefit sharing, based on uncritical understandings of nature and extractive capitalism. As much today as in past centuries, science, hiding the ugly thefts of plants and Indigenous plant knowledge under the pretense of benefiting humanity, is knotted in the equivocation we describe. While Gilber believed in science as a lofty ideal, more critical young Indigenous activists and scientists are now defending the legitimate ownership of their knowledge and heritage related to ayahuasca.45 This was made clear in the musée du quai Branly exhibition (Dupuis 2023) which complements Indigenous conferences in Acre (2017-2025) to raise awareness of ayahuasca in this decolonizing perspective.

77An epistemological-ontological chasm characterizes all shamans’ gardens. The New Age, counter-hegemonic outlook of many visitors to ayahuasca centers reflects not only the appeal of psychedelic quests but also the recent spread of a generalized acceptance of animist perceptions from specialized anthropological literature to mainstream culture. Sahlins (2022) echoes the voices of young Indigenous scholars and activists in arguing that anthropologists and other social scientists must rethink cultures of immanence and study them by their own lights, taking seriously the enchanted universe and its transformations. Yet while visitors’ perceptions are—at least in some respects—compatible with shamans’ understandings of plants and their spirit owners, these understandings remain esoteric even among local, regional, and national educated populations.

  • 46 The Amazonian Center for Environmental Education and Research (see https://aceer.org/).

78If lip service is paid to multiculturalism and interculturality in Amazonian countries, the tenets of multinaturalism that underscore a shared outlook between visitors and shamans are not yet currently acceptable outside the ambit of the lodges. For most visitors, Nature remains an unquestioned paradigm. For shamans, la naturaleza, often equated with the environment (medio ambiente), is a concept difficult to reconcile with the transformative cosmos that the master plants show them. Research on ayahuasca shamanism, while producing remarkable insights, avoids direct reference to the tension that Richard Evans Schultes navigated, in a masterly way, as a professor of botany at Harvard, between local shamans’ accounts and the rigor expected from a botanist. Ghillean Prance has also engaged in a lifelong advocacy for the respect of indigenous healers’ knowledge, and, as a board member of the ACEER46 near Iquitos in the 1990s, Jim Duke often sought the plant expertise of local Iquitos curanderos and market herbalists.

79These three remarkable botanists of international repute respected their Indigenous counterparts, but they did not include them in the process of science-making. While scientists and international organizations will sometimes seek out shamans working in shamans’ gardens to identify varieties about which taxonomists are unsure—for example Francisco Montes’ identification of varieties of cordoncillo (Piper aduncum) for the Rainforest Alliance in the 1990s—their expertise is only temporarily acknowledged and old prejudices soon resurface. The perceived benefits of in situ plant conservation, bioassays, and pharmacological research on shamanic plants, which are perceived positively in national contexts, not only hide this systematic elision but also reveal an ontological dilemma for scientists taking an interest in Amazonian entheogens. The international Nagoya Protocol was ratified with high hopes to ensure the recognition of Indigenous plant knowledge and associated intellectual property rights. However, it has been disappointing in subsuming this knowledge and these rights under the patronage of national institutions concerned with preserving resources and heritage.

80In the last decade, the idea of a different realm of understanding conferred by direct experience with plants has gained traction, based on the expansion of cosmopolitan scientific literature on plant life, botanical ontologies, and the increasing therapeutic appeal of psychedelics. In this perspective, shamans’ gardens may provide sites of new dialogic encounters between cutting-edge plant scientists and local knowers.

81All ayahuasca centers’ websites emphasize that the power of a plant resides not so much in its biochemical properties, verified or not by science, as in the communication established between shaman, plant, and visitor-patient. For dominant naturalistic or scientific paradigms of personhood, health, and illness, the notion that a personal alliance with plant spirits and access to altered states of consciousness can result in healing or harming according to a shaman’s intent may seem unlikely or far-fetched. However, the foreign clientele of ayahuasca centers is predisposed towards this view and will mainly accept it.

  • 47 See Hugh-Jones (2020) for a discsussion of the problematic status of discrete ontologies in non-ac (...)

82If shamans’ gardens are sites of ontological encounter, at some times one of juxtaposition, at others one of partial convergence,47 the conventional divide between empirical and symbolic knowledge—the latter seen as irrelevant by orthodox botanists and agronomists—has so far proved unsurmountable. Shamans’ role as keepers of plant knowledge is, however, celebrated in ayahuasca centers, contributing to strengthening the associations between shamans and their gringo partners, sponsors, and visitors. After the pause of the Covid pandemic and the resumption of the tourist industry on which the lodges depend, resident shamans’ plant knowledge has been given more salience on web pages. Visitors familiar with recommended reading, like Beyer’s (2009) Singing to the Plants, are now open to the idea of exploring possible relationships with plant spirits, mediated not only by their experiences with ayahuasca brews but also with “plant diets” (Fotiou and Gearin 2019; Berlowitz et al. 2022). As shown by Gilber’s practical, dynamic, and personal engagement with plants in the three areas of Yakumamay, shamans’ gardens are sites of exchange shaped by interaction with outsiders and their needs, as well as with other curanderos operating as “shamans” or still working with local clienteles in their communities of origin.

  • 48 The Raintree Tropical Plant Database, first published in 1996 after its founder, Leslie Taylor, ha (...)
  • 49 Since the first international ayahuasca conference in Amsterdam (2002), conferences have been held (...)
  • 50 Mancuso 2021 among other authors.

83Based on shamans’ perceptions that visitors and some sponsors in ayahuasca centers share, at least partly, their understanding of plant use, the emerging genre of shamans’ gardens stimulates the evolution of ayahuasca shamanism as an integrated cosmovision and practices enhancing the understanding and sustainability of biodiversity in a more-than-human world. A plethora of published biochemical and pharmacological studies on Amazonian medicinal plants48 now substantiate shamans’ assertions about efficacy. Visitors can review extensive online information (sometimes conflictive) about plants displayed in shamans’ gardens. Since 2002, various conferences worldwide have been convened to bridge the gap between scientific and local knowledge related to ayahuasca shamanism.49 While this aim is still to be attained, ecological research, in conjunction with biochemical studies, points to new understandings of relations between plants and their spirit owners, as observable by visitors to shamans’ gardens. Recent findings in plant biology make explicit the synergic associations between plants and their animal spirit owners, throwing light on previously ignored agency and intentionality of plants.50 This offers new lines of interest about shamans’ gardens for visitors and arguments to validate shamans’ narratives as traditional ecological knowledge. Among confirmed symbioses, a striking example is the mutually advantageous relationship between Cecropia spp. and olichoderine ants of the genus Azteca that vigorously defend their host plants from being eaten.

84Myrmecophytism is a mutualistic relationship formed between trees and ant colonies, where the ants protect the tree from herbivores and the trees provide shelter and food for the ants. Along with protection against herbivory, the ants defend Cecropia from encroaching vines and other plants (Berg, Rosselli, and Davidson 2005). “Devils’ gardens” (Supay chakra) provide another example. As their name suggests, these distinctive stands of Duroia hirsuta, small trees standing alone in small clearings devoid of surrounding undergrowth, are traditionally attributed to the spirit world, but local curanderos have long been attentive to the active role of ants in producing this phenomenon in contrast with scientific explanations based on allelopathy, the local inhibition of plant growth by another plant. Experimental biology has recently confirmed local observations by demonstrating that Myrmelachista schumanni ants, nesting in D. hirsuta stems, use formic acid to poison all plants except their host. By killing other plants, ants provide their colonies with abundant nest sites—a long-lasting benefit as colonies can live for 800 years (Frederickson, Greene, and Gordon 2005). In studies of co-adaptations between plants and their animal spirit owners, the coincidence of shamanism and science shows equivocation in action: a single phenomenon cast in the language of two complementary points of view.

Conclusion

85Our description of the Yakumamay shaman’s garden brings a detailed empirical study of a genre that has been largely ignored in the literature on ayahuasca shamanism and allied topics. One of our aims has been to provide concise data about the range of plants found in this typical yet idiosyncratic garden, relating this, on the one hand, to a relatively stable set of plants common to all varieties of vegetalismo and, on the other, to the particularities of Gilber’s origins as a Huallaga Kichwa curandero, and his dual career path as a primary health worker and a pusanga practitioner. A well-educated man as well as a keen experimentalist in horticulture and medicinal plant use, Gilber learnt from his interactions with an eclectic mix of people, ranging from his local colonist clientele and gringo sponsors to an Iquitos social elite of religious teachers, medical doctors, botanists, ecologists, and state agents. Still, he remained close to his Kichwa roots. This helped us as we were concerned to document not only what plants were grown but also the different ecological, cosmological, and other factors that influenced the grouping of plants and their spatial arrangement in the garden. Finally, we have briefly examined how shamans’ gardens act as an arena for the interaction of different ontologies and systems of knowledge.

  • 51 Symposium “Towards an archaeological COP-30: engaging historical and traditional knowledge from th (...)

86Ayahuasca shamanism is itself an interstitial phenomenon steeped in colonial and post-colonial history. Derived from vegetalismo, new tropes of “indigeneity” and “authenticity” valued by gringos are now being used to fuel the two-sided equivocation characterizing shamans’ gardens. Midway between Indigenous horticulture and formal botanical gardens, these gardens exemplify an implicit or explicit attempt to break down the dichotomy between “traditional ecological knowledge” and Western science along lines identified by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha (2015). The 2024 International Meeting of Amazon Archaeology (EIAA)51 highlighted the importance of emic plant knowledge in linking past and present. Moreover, shamans like Gilber, in their interactions with visitors, are now—as they already were in colonial times—themselves anthropologist-scientist-observers and observed by us as anthropologist-scientists. The extent to which the more significant value given to Indigeneity increases or lessens the possibility of this breakdown from within the Indigenous movement is still unclear. Yet gardens clearly provide sites of an internal transformation of Amazonian shamanism supported by outsiders, just as happened in the medicinal gardens of the 18th-century Catholic missions.

87In shamans’ gardens attached to ayahuasca lodges, Amazonian shamans (frequently of mixed blood) and gringo sponsors use the display of categorized master plants to support and facilitate the aims of healing sickness and creating health. The two-sided equivocation that Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2004) highlighted in his analysis of the interface between local Amazonians and anthropologists is aptly illustrated in shamans’ gardens. These gardens provide a nexus of contrasting cultural assumptions and a site of convergence rather than one of direct translation. On the one hand, shamans use their master plants within their cosmologies while approximating their diagnoses of illness to the narratives of foreign visitors, sometimes referring to biomedical categories and the vocabulary of psychotherapy. On the other hand, gringos suspend doubt to accept the explanatory framework through which plant spirits are attributed healing agency, whether or not they or their shaman hosts are aware of the pharmacological properties of plants. In shamans’ gardens, visitors can develop personal relationships with plants, experience their sensory qualities, and sometimes enter shamans’ discourse about their operations. Yet an equivocation remains on both sides.

88The co-presence of seemingly irreconcilable ontologies in a two-sided equivocation is perhaps one of the defining features of ayahuasca shamanism in its current form, most concretely manifested in shamans’ gardens associated with ayahuasca tourism. In his desire to subvert extractivism and spoliation in Amazonia, Davi Kopenawa opted to become a shaman (Kopenawa and Albert 2013). The incipient convergence between cosmopolitan ecology, Indigenous activism, and art may already have inadvertently infiltrated the equivocation we have described, highlighting and interrogating its terms.

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Notes

1 The spread of the term chamán in Western Amazonia dates from the late 1990s, when it became a marker for curanderos (healers) using ayahuasca in ceremonies with gringos (“foreigners”, typically Anglo-Americans). The term connotes esoteric healing, in contrast with the pejorative brujo (“sorcerer”), denoting the ambivalent powers of curanderos. The 20th-century appellation of vegetalista legitimized the plant-based knowledge of curanderos as urban naturopaths working with plants. “Chamán” downplays the vegetalistas’ reliance on the plants’ spirit allies, although this remains the foundation of their practice. Here, we use “curandero” and “healer” interchangeably to denote those who heal with plants, although in the context of ayahuasca tourism, “shaman” or “chamán” is used as a synonym for “healer.”

2 Plant diets (dietas) refer to a focused ascesis and study of shamanic “master plants” with the aim of receiving and integrating their qualities in dreams or visions.

3 The 75-km Iquitos-Nauta road, completed in 2006, was built on a pre-existing trail allowing people traveling downstream on balsa rafts to bypass several bends of the Amazon when returning upstream to Nauta. See Harvey and Knox 2015, Part 1.

4 Quechua-speaking forest people along the Huallaga and Mayo river valleys are now recognized and self-identify as Kichwa. See Callicot 2020.

5 Farmácia Viva Type I, one of the three identified by Professor Francisco José de Abreu Matos (Antunes, Cassiano and Franco Verola 2016).

6 Live pharmacies were an identified area of interest in the Traditional Medicine Research Project in the University of Cambridge Department of Social Anthropology, of which we were both part. To support the creation of a live pharmacy, colonization plots needed to be registered and titled for this purpose, as a Nuevo Triunfo community initiative sponsored by UK university researchers. A Memorandum of Understanding signed by the heads of six Cambridge University departments endorsed the initiative. A British Academy grant covered our travel and field expenses and those of the Yakumamay team but not our or their salaries. Neither of us offered any guidance to Gilber about the design of the Yakumamay garden. After 2004, when Barbira-Freedman engaged in a Cambridge University-based drug-discovery project (Ampika) to develop clinical trials on a plant identified in her doctoral fieldwork in the Upper Amazon in the late 1970s, intellectual property rights agreements were strictly limited to this plant. To our knowledge, the Yakumamay garden remained true to its foundation principle as a live pharmacy and was never used as source of any plant exports or activities contravening the Nagoya Protocol (2014).

7 “Plantas con madres” (also “plantas maestras,” “master plants”) enable curanderos to access and create a nexus of relationships with animals, other plants, elements, and spirits in the cosmos. These relationships are typically facilitated by the consumption of ayahuasca and tobacco in various forms. In their study of 29 curanderos of indigenous and mixed origin in Peruvian Amazonia, Jauregui et al. (2011) identified 55 plant species belonging to 26 botanical families, used as “master plants” in initiation processes and apprenticeships.

8 https://yakumamaylivepharmacy.org.

9 See Curanderos de Chazuta (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovBmjPoKORM, accessed 11/07/2025) with Heriberto and Aquilino Chufandama, Gilber’s cousin and brother. Gilber’s father Aquilino was the main teacher of Jacques Mabit, founder of the Takiwasi Center in Tarapoto, https://takiwasi.com/en/publica01.php, accessed 11/07/2025.

10 Eduardo Luna’s (1986b) film describes Don Emilio Andrade’s plot in detail and records his commentaries on the plants grown there.

11 Posey (1985), for the Kayapo, and Heckler (2004), for the Piaroa, both mention hidden gardens maintained by shamans, but in neither case are these intended for display.

12 In response to the brief of Kathleen Harrison, co-founder of Botanical Dimensions (http://botanicaldimensions.org) with Terence McKenna, whose younger brother Dennis dedicated himself to ethnopharmacological research on psychotropic plants.

13 This project did not elicit the interest of migrant settlers along the Iquitos-Nauta road and was discontinued after two years (1993-1995) due to easier access to urban pharmacies by road transport.

14 A document was circulated to collect community members’ signatures or crosses against their names.

15 Inatituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonía Peruana (Peruvian Amazon Research Institute).

16 See www.yakumamaylivepharmacy.org for details of the plants that Francisco Montes selected for the creation of the initial garden reserve.

17 Instituto Nacional de Recursos Naturales (National Institute of Natural Resources).

18 https://yakumamaylivepharmacy.org/live-map/, accessed 11/07/2025. Numbers in circles on the live map refer to the numbers of plants in densely planted areas. Holding the cursor on a number reveals the shape of the area; increased magnification reveals the plants concerned.

19 Including Bennett and Prance 2000; Brack Egg 1999; Gentry 1993; Jernigan 2012; Mejía and Rengifo 2000; Odonne 2014; Sanz-Bizet et al. 2009; Vásquez 1992; Vega Orcacitas 2001.

20 See https://powo.science.kew.org/.

21 Sacha Mama, Santa Fe, Tamshiyaku, and Spirit of the Anaconda in Iquitos; Takiwasi in Tarapoto.

22 Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonía Peruana (Peruvian Amazonian Research Institute).

23 In 2013, under the trade name Mytesi, Croton lechleri latex was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of non-infectious diarrhea in HIV+ patients. Gilber was well aware of the bulk exports of Sangre de Grado resin to the USA by agents of the Shaman Pharmaceuticals company, who tightly controlled operations in Iquitos.

24 https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/cats-claw, accessed 11/07/2025.

25 For example, sacha tabaku (“wild” varieties of Nicotiana spp.) probably evolved as escapes from old gardens, was prized over Nicotiana tabacum for some shamanic treatments. Sacha curarina (Cissampelos pareira), a climber from the Menispermaceae family, is mostly tended in spot gardens within a forest environment. Huallaga Kichwa shamans use this toxic plant in last resort for treatment of snakebites, rabies, and cholera. For general reference, see Kumari et al. 2021.

26 The pan-Amazonian folk category of piripiri corresponds to Cyperus articulatus. Shamans often keep their piripiri plants secret, blowing tobacco smoke on them and occasionally singing to their master-owners, particularly in the preparation of spells, hunting magic, and love magic. Gilber’s piripiri plants, grown in Areas 1 and 2, correspond to his personal shamanic expertise. For comparative sources on Guiana and central Peruvian Amazonia, see Daly and Shepard 2019.

27 See, for example, https://www.edenproject.com/visit/things-to-do/spirits-of-the-rainforest, accessed 11/07/2025.

28 Luna and Amaringo 1991. McKenna, Luna and Towers 1995. See also “Ayahuasca Admixtures,” in Steve Beyer’s blog Singing to the Plants, 04/01/2008, https://singingtotheplants.com/2008/01/ayahuasca-admixtures/, accessed 11/07/2025.

29 https://cayashobo.com/master-plants/#marosa, accessed 11/07/2025.

30 See, for example, “Plant Teachers and Master Trees of the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest; Plant teachers: vernacular (Spanish-Quechua) and botanical names” on the Iquitos Mundo Magico shamanic tours website: https://www.elmundomagico.org/plant-teachers-of-the-peruvian-amazon-rainforest/, accessed 11/07/2025.

31 Tabernaemontana sananho/sanango has been for many years a panacea in the uppermost Amazon. The name sanango signifies an “almost all-purpose medicinal plant” (Van Beek et al. 1984). Uchu (“chilli”) refers to the burning sensation of drinking the infusion.

32 Uchu sanango’s alkaloids identified in pharmacological research confirm uses by Forest Kichwa shamans (Luzuriaga-Quichimbo et al. 2018).

33 According to the doctrine of signatures (or doctrine of similitude), dating from Dioscorides, characteristics displayed by plants, their shapes, colors, and habits, are indicative of their curative properties.

34 Chinese immigrants moved to Peruvian Amazonia after freeing themselves from Pacific coastal sugar plantations, filling the trade gap opened by the rubber boom, and disseminating products that merged with popular Amazonian medicine: kión (ginger) and mentol chino are still traded as essential basic products. Good-luck plants are widely displayed in Chinese shops and restaurants. The Peruvian Chinese community is now the largest and culturally most influential in Latin America (Rodriguez Pastor 2017).

35 Jernigan (2008) was one of the first ethnobotanists to note local sensory principles of tree classification. See also Shepard (2004) and Daly and Shepard (2019). These principles were also used in an innovative way in Ribeiro et al. (1999).

36 It can be assumed that these medicinal liqueurs were introduced using recipes transmitted from European settlers and missionaries when simple, mule-powered sugar-cane mills (trapiches) were introduced in the Upper Amazon in the 18th century and controlled by non-indigenous settlers. Migrants from the Upper Amazon to the lowlands in the 19th and 20th centuries took rum-based medicinal bark liqueurs with them as essential health products.

37 Nihue Rao Center: https://nihuerao.com/master-plant-diets/, accessed 11/07/2025.

38 See Jernigan 2008 for comparison with Awajún tree classification and identification.

39 See Berlowitz et al. 2022 for the renewed interest in plant “diets” in ayahuasca shamanism near Iquitos.

40 Pink dolphin, anaconda, rainbow, and moon bow are causes of women’s reproductive conditions treated shamanically in parallel or in conjunction with medical care.

41 Ecoaldea Arcoiris. https://rainbowamazonia.blogspot.com/, accessed 11/07/2025. The eco-village was built using some of the infrastructure of Artidoro Cardenas’s former site.

42 www.sachamamalodge.org, accessed 11/07/2025. Km 18, Iquitos-Nauta road.

43 The Upper Yakumamay Reserve is now accessible by a path from the Nanay. Several ayahuasca centers and eco-tourism centers have recently been developed along the Nanay River as it flows into the Amazon, opening new links with Yagua Indigenous people.

44 In April 2018, the murder of well-known Shipibo elder healer Olivia Arévalo at the hands of a Canadian citizen brought to the forefront of Peruvian debate the issues raised by shamans’ use of psychoactive substances at the request of foreign clients. Curanderos face condemnation of their practice by religious opponents rather than by health professionals.

45 Conferencias Indigenas da Ayahuasca, Acre (2017-2025). Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund.

46 The Amazonian Center for Environmental Education and Research (see https://aceer.org/).

47 See Hugh-Jones (2020) for a discsussion of the problematic status of discrete ontologies in non-academic, everyday contexts.

48 The Raintree Tropical Plant Database, first published in 1996 after its founder, Leslie Taylor, had recovered from cancer with the help of a shamanic plant treatment in Iquitos, includes references to pharmacological research as well as information collected from local healers, https://www.rain-tree.com/plants.htm, accessed 11/07/2025.

49 Since the first international ayahuasca conference in Amsterdam (2002), conferences have been held in many locations and in all continents. The world ayahuasca conferences in Spain (2019, 2020) have been particularly salient.

50 Mancuso 2021 among other authors.

51 Symposium “Towards an archaeological COP-30: engaging historical and traditional knowledge from the Global South for navigating the Anthropocene,” VI International Meeting of Amazonian Archaeology, [September 16th to 22nd, 2024, San José del Guaviare, Colombia], https://gs-anthropocene.org/vi-international-meeting-of-amazonian-archaeology/, accessed 11/07/2025.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 1 – Map of the Iquitos-Nauta road
Crédits (map: Orenaike Oluwatosin, 24/11/2023; base map: Esri ArcGIS Living Atlas, 10/2014)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/jsa/docannexe/image/24582/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 236k
Titre Fig. 2 – Gilber Chufandama in Shipibo outfit re-enacting his prize-winning ayahuasca shamanism performance for his grandsons and the anthropologists
Crédits (photo S. Hugh-Jones, Yakumamay, 05/2004)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/jsa/docannexe/image/24582/img-2.jpg
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Titre Fig. 3 – The three areas of Yakumamay
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Françoise Barbira-Freedman et Stephen Hugh-Jones, « Shamans’ gardens: sites of creative equivocation between Indigenous and internationalized ayahuasca shamanism »Journal de la Société des américanistes, 111-1 | 2025, 141-192.

Référence électronique

Françoise Barbira-Freedman et Stephen Hugh-Jones, « Shamans’ gardens: sites of creative equivocation between Indigenous and internationalized ayahuasca shamanism »Journal de la Société des américanistes [En ligne], 111-1 | 2025, mis en ligne le 30 septembre 2025, consulté le 07 novembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsa/24582 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/14ya0

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Auteurs

Françoise Barbira-Freedman

Cambridge University, Cambridge

Stephen Hugh-Jones

Cambridge University, Cambridge

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