I think it was Wade Davis that said if you were ever to find yourself lost amongst any Amazonian tribe that you could say Schultes' name and there was a high chance it would be recognised due to the number of cultures he contacted.
Embrace of the Serpent is a great film based around some of his exploits.
Interesting article. I understand what the author is saying here, but there's a lot of value to be found in taking Schultes' position:
> "For Schultes, the non-ordinary states of consciousness elicited by ayahuasca were ‘intoxications’ and ‘inebriations’ – curious for sure, but ultimately illusory. As a consequence, his altered states had to be stripped of ‘subjective’ content as part of their translation into ‘objective’, rational, and universally applicable scientific knowledge."
That's precisely the value that the objective scientific approach - measurement, observation, not subjective interpretation - brings to discussions of psychedelic substances (and to the knowledge of the world in general). Of course it's limited, but it does provide an unambigous foundation of knowledge - we should expect anyone, regardless of cultural history, to agree on the same measurements and scientific observations. The flowers have this pigment, the plants have these components, this DNA sequence distinguishes this subspecies from that subspecies, etc.
Certainly the subjuctive view has some interesting features and there's no need to discard it, but one must realize that other peoples and other cultures will have quite different interpretations of the effects of psychedelics than the original users. People create expectations of effects, culturally speaking, and then they experience those effects in the correct set and setting, as the author describes:
> "This was a classification entirely opposed to that of his informants. For Amazonians, it was exactly the subjective content of their visions that gave rise to knowledge and insight about plants in the first place. The Amazonian cosmologies he encountered were directly engaged, informed, and tested through the ritual ingestion of the plants in question. The non-ordinary states elicited by ayahuasca provided access to realms of reality that were perfectly real (Beyer, 2009).31 But because the Amazonians’ rich cosmological accounts did not fit within Schultes’s modern scientific world view, in his reading of the enigma he systematically undermined their epistemological importance and ontological validity by assuming that they could be explained in terms of his own metaphysical position. Within Schultes’s cosmology there was no way for ayahuasca visions to provide routes to genuine knowledge – unless they had been implausibly scrubbed clean of their subjective content by a trained analytical mind and reduced to bifurcating decision trees that mirrored the bifurcating taxonomic keys of naturalists guidebooks (narcotic, or non-narcotic? strong or weak?). There was no way that plants could speak to humans about themselves, no way for plants to teach people to sing, no matter how prevalent these accounts are among Amazonian holders of plant knowledge (Beyer, 2009)."
I have to agree with Schultes - the plants aren't teaching people to sing, but they do make it easier for people to pass on vivid cultural traditions to other people, by swinging open the doors of perception within the human mind.
I think it was Wade Davis that said if you were ever to find yourself lost amongst any Amazonian tribe that you could say Schultes' name and there was a high chance it would be recognised due to the number of cultures he contacted.
Embrace of the Serpent is a great film based around some of his exploits.