I was recently reading a news article on Jennifer Aniston's new movie 'Wanderlust', in which she drinks the South American holy plant brew of ayahuasca. The article describes how Jennifer through her movie character portrays the taking of the sacred brew in a stereotypical and reductionist light. For instance, the ayahuasca ceremony is filled with stereotypical hippies representing the 1960s LSD era.
The negative portrayal of ayahuasca ceremonies in the movie has caused outrage, as the spread of ayahuasca has reached as far as anthropologist and psychiatrist academics as well as lay people. Ayahuasca in its purest form is used in traditional healing ceremonies and for these to be portrayed as drug fueled hippie encampments angers ayahuasca drinkers and ceremonial attendees alike.
Ayahuasca in itself is the drinking of a tea brewed by several plants, one which contains dimethyltryptamine (DMT). I have learned from my own research that DMT occurs in the human brain but lies dormant until we die or almost die, then it is secreted into our brains. So by drinking DMT, it releases the DMT in our brains which one could argue creates a near death experience (NDE).
Far from hippie encampments with mindless drug taking, ayahuasca ceremonies combine nature spirituality with story telling, healing and guidance. The shaman of such ceremonies is someone 'capable of restoring order and harmony in the group. Someone who, when there is a dysfunction in a group-a tribe- he or she is capable of resynchronizing the elements of the group with nature and cosmos' (Narby, Kounen & Ravalee 2010, p. 9).
In Aniston's movie, 'Wanderlust' once she takes the ayahuasca as emotionlessly as a street drug, she suddenly appears perched on a tree singing a top forty song (Phillips 2012). This experience seems to emulate a street drug or acid trip, not a ceremonial medicinal plant. Ayahuasca drinkers who take the plant in shamanic ceremonies say that by all of us, even Western people taking ayahuasca it forces 'us to suddenly perceive the conditioning of the ideas we think are ours but in fact are artifacts implanted by culture, from childhood with your parents, in the end, all these things' (Narby, Kounen & Ravalee 2010, p31).
Far from being a drug addict, the shaman believes 'the vast majority of illnesses have a spiritual cause' and so when the shaman takes part in an ayahuasca ceremony, the 'trance forms part of the cure...by his ecstasy he finds the exact cause of the illness and learns the best treatment' (Eliade 1964, pp. 327-328).
The question to be posed is how damaging is such portrayals of traditional nature healing? Not only is the shamans nature spirituality threatened by such cavalier representations, his home is by the encroaching bulldozers in the Amazon. How can we preserve and or represent this nature spirituality without ethnocentrism or reductionist bias?
References
Eliade, M 1964, SHamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Princeton University Press, New Jersey.
Narby, J, Kounen, J & Ravalee, V 2010, The Psychotropic Mind: The World according to Ayahuasca, Iboga, and Shamanism, Park Street Press, Vermont.
Phillips, JT, 2012, Ayahuasca, What Jennifer Aniston May Not Know About the 'Spirit Vine', Huffington Post, 2/3/2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-talat-phillips/jennifer-aniston-and-ayahuasca-explained_b_1303999.html
Photo
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/904610
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