The Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness is affiliated with the American Anthropological Association, and since 1990 has published a quarterly refereed journal, Anthropology of Consciousness. Members of the Society investigate cultural manifestations of psychological phenomena of all sorts — awareness, attention, memory, mood, feeling, intention, volition.

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We have talked earlier about healing by sucking out the sickness — the phlegmosity, the pathogenic object, the dart that was projected into the patient by a sorcerer. But how does the shaman know where to suck?

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The potent hallucinogen DMT, when taken orally, is inactivated by peripheral monoamine oxidase-A, an enzyme found in the lining of the stomach, whose function is precisely to oxidize molecules containing an NH2 amine group, like DMT. There are thus two ways to ingest DMT, or plants containing DMT, and experience psychoactive effects — by parenteral ingestion through nasal inhalation, smoking, injection, or rectal insertion; or by mixing the DMT with an MAO inhibitor that prevents the breakdown of DMT in the digestive tract. Let’s look at these one at a time.

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I once asked don Rómulo Magin about his awareness of the spirits when not drinking ayahuasca. Don Rómulo said that he is constantly aware of being surrounded by the spirits, but he sees them roughly, vaguely; drinking ayahuasca, he said, is “like putting on glasses.” Doña María Tuesta agrees; ayahuasca makes the spirits bien claro, really clear.

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The foundational triad of mestizo shamanism in the Amazon is shacapar, rattling; chupar, sucking; and soplar, blowing tobacco smoke. Amazonian healers are classic sucking shamans. Sucking out a disease is risky, dramatic, frightening, unpredictable.

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Mestizo shamanism in the Upper Amazon is expanding and declining at the same time. It is expanding at the expense of other indigenous shamanisms, and it is declining in the face of biomedicine and the reluctance of the young to undergo the sufferings required to become a shaman.

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I really wish we would all just stop talking about the shamanic state of consciousness. States of consciousness occur in people, and people occur in cultures. Thus what we should be talking about are the experiences of shamans in their global, postcolonial, historical, cultural setting, rather than about some hypothetical, abstract, discrete, contextless, monadic entity.

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The Society for Shamanic Practitoners has announced a new journal, The Journal of Shamanic Practice: Exploring Traditional and Contemporary Shamanism, with a first issue due out in February, 2008. The journal is intended to provide an international forum for publication and discussion of scholarly, peer-reviewed, and methodologically sound work focusing on the practice of traditional and contemporary shamanism in historical and cultural context.

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Susana Bustos is a graduate student in East-West Psychology at the California Inistitute of Integral Studies. In 2004, she began research in the Peruvian Amazonian Rainforest, working as a counselor at Takiwasi, a center for the research of traditional medicine and drug abuse rehabilitation using ayahuasca and other indigenous healing methods.

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Transpersonal psychology has two distinctive features: first, it is interested in a broad range of human experiences, including those marginalized by other psychologies; and, second, it is willing to incorporate these understandings into its clinical practice. Thus, transpersonal clinicians have worked with meditation, active imagination, guided imagery, dream sharing, breathwork, and psychoactive substances; and they have looked at clinical phenomena in light of their expanded interest in such areas as shamanism. Thus we have the clinical concept of the shamanic crisis.

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