Ayahuasca News

"Ethnography as we know it began in the 1920s in both its written and cinematic incarnations. Though important ethnographic texts had been written before this decade, 1922, with the publication of Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific and the worldwide hit that was Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, was a watershed year for ethnography, effectively launching it as a popular and credible form of writing and film-making (Heider 18). To those familiar with the cinema, the story of Robert Flaherty and his ethnographic film-making is so widely known that it hardly needs lengthy description here. While much ink has been spilled criticizing the representational politics of Flaherty’s films, what I’d like to stress here is that Flaherty himself was aware of the salvage impulse in his work, and that this impulse is largely characteristic of documentary ethnography in this period." (from the article)

As a young doctor of neurology and psychiatry in various hospitals in Austria and Germany he was confronted by the inefficiency of the drugs used to treat psychiatric and psychosomatic disorders. In his view the aim of orthodox Western medicine s not the healing of patients but the life-long suppression of symptoms through medication. He eventually found this situation unbearable and began to look for alternative methods of treatment.....

hear ye shamanism students: "The two problems are: taking notions and elevating them to analytic status almost always results in you realizing half way through that the notion can’t make sense of the evidence without being stretched so out of shape that it either falls apart (like ‘totemism’) or morphs into something else (as the literature on ‘ritual’ very fruitfully turned into a study of ‘performativity’). The second problem is that most of the time the things that you think of as actually existing don’t actually exist — kinship systems, for instance, are now pretty universally understood not to be ‘out there’ in the sense that Fortes thought they were. So the concept can’t bear the weight, and the phenomena don’t exist. Which can be ok if you are all about the journey, but not if you’re focused on the destination."

In Ghana traditional healers are required to register and follow a code of ethics...

¿COMO ES ESO DE LA OFICIALIZACION DEL CURANDERISMO Y BRUJERIA EN EL SISTEMA DE SALUD?,Tratados sobre los Procesos de Servicios, conceptos, análisis, opinión y casos.