Ayahuasca Cosmotecnics

plant Alliances and Ethnographic Experimentation in Urban Contexts

Abstract

This paper emerges from an ongoing doctoral research project concerned with the cosmologies and cosmotechnics involved in urban ayahuasca rituals. The research asks which forms of knowledge are brought into articulation, which come into dispute, and how ayahuasca rituals are resignedified in urban contexts. It also seeks to problematize the ethnographic experiment itself by interrogating the possibilities of translation—and the inevitable equivocations—involved in attempting to ethnographically engage with ineffable experiences that exceed language. Its main objective is to examine how alliances with plants operate as cosmotechnologies of mediation and knowledge production. The study draws on perspectives from multinaturalism and ontological anarchism. The notion of vegetalism (Luna, 1986) is revisited as an analytical key for repositioning master plants as active, relational beings endowed with agency and capable of affecting and being affected. Methodologically, the research adopts the ethnographic experiment, conceiving the field not as a pre-existing given, but as a practice of co-presence and openness, woven through intra-actions (Barad, 2017), assemblages, and multispecies alliances with other-than-human beings. At its exploratory stage, the study invests in the development of conceptual and sensory tools capable of sustaining future field immersion, proposing a collaborative and responsive ethnography guided by an exercise in unlearning, in which knowledge is understood as a task shared with companion species.