PAST PROBLEMS, PAST ANTHROPOLOGIES
Uses of hallucinogens, not in the laboratory, but in religious settings, have been studied by anthropologists since the late nineteenth century (Mooney 1896; Lumholtz 1902; Slotkin 1955; Perrine 2001; Zieger 2008). Until the 1950s, the literature focused on the diffusion of peyotism among Native American tribes (LaBarre 1960). The social and political problem to which this body of scholarship responded was the role of the peyote cult in the formation of a so-called pan-Indian religion. Penned up with other tribes in reservations, groups that previously had not used any hallucinogens began to concoct a syncretic assemblage of their own time-honored ideas and ceremonies, peyote rituals as traditionally practiced by other indigenous groups, and Christian elements adopted from white missionaries. The emergence of these composite forms of religiosity, which would soon be institutionalized by the Native American Church, was either interpreted as an attempt at cultural adaptation and assimilation (e.g., Petrullo 1934; Barber 1941) or as resistance to acculturation and white domination (e.g., Jones 1953; Kluckhon and Leighton 1946; Thompson 1948). In the conflicts between Native Americans and the US government, prominent anthropologists publicly and successfully pleaded for the indigenous population’s right to continue using the otherwise prohibited plant drug peyote for religious purposes: an exclusive right based on race and cultural identity (Boas et al. 1937; LaBarre et al. 1951; Boller 2005: 71).
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, hallucinogens continued to attract scholarly attention against a new sociopolitical background. This time anthropologists responded to the spreading use of hallucinogenic drugs among white and educated members of the middle class who felt alienated from their own Euro-American societies. As this group had previously not been associated with deviant drug consumption—and deviant the consumption of psychedelics had become after their prohibition in the late 1960s—this social problem raised public concern and, thus, funding opportunities for social scientists. As the population most affected by the problematic happened to be the group from which the majority of academics were recruited, some of those entranced by their own drug experiences found a way to give their preoccupation with these substances a socially acceptable form by making them the subject matter of scientific inquiry. Before “going native” and becoming a shaman himself, anthropologist Michael Harner claimed that his discipline had long underestimated the importance of hallucinogens in shamanism and religious experience, because few of his older colleagues had experienced the mind-altering effects of these substances themselves (Harner 1973: vii). However, considering that James Mooney (1896) and Carl Lumholtz (1902) had already taken part in peyote rituals in the late nineteenth century, it rather seems that Harner’s generation of anthropologists just immersed themselves in exotic drug rituals for different reasons: sharing a widespread discontent with their own culture, they not only wanted to understand other ethnic groups but were looking to them for better ways of life.5 The most famous example of this kind of anthropology as cultural critique is Carlos Castaneda’s (1968) supposedly ethnographic, but largely fictive, master’s thesis on his apprenticeship with the Yaqui shaman Don Juan, which became a major source of inspiration for the counterculture.
Other anthropologists studying the use of hallucinogens in so-called traditional societies reported that the drugs’ embedment in ritual settings and cosmological worldviews prevented the disruptive effects they had on American and European youth. Elsewhere, it seemed, psychedelics even served to stabilize the social order. In a Huichol initiation ceremony, for example, the ingestion of peyote turned the adolescent into a full member of his tribe. The drug experience allowed the young person to get to know for himself the supernatural spirit realm that provided the group with a normative structure and ethical orientation. In these settings, “doing drugs” validated the moral and religious order according to which the tribe lived (Furst 1972; Myerhoff 1975, 1976; Dobkin de Rios and Smith 1977). Against this background, anthropological studies of drug use in other cultures appeared to be a promising and timely way of counteracting the aggravating drug problem Western governments were facing. In nonmodern societies, ritual rather than legal means sufficed to control the consumption of mind-altering substances (Dobkin de Rios 1984: 205–214). Instead of prohibiting their use altogether, such ritual guided it toward specific cultural goals. Thus, somewhere far from home, anthropologists might learn from other peoples how to integrate hallucinogens into their own societies, rendering the recently declared and ultimately futile “War on Drugs” superfluous.
Furthermore, broadly based cross-cultural comparisons were meant to reveal an almost universal use of intoxicants by different ethnic groups all over the world and in all periods of human history. By demonstrating that, from a global perspective, Western opposition to ecstatic states was the exception rather than the rule, anthropology helped to legitimate the pharmacological quest for altered states of consciousness and corroborated the assumption of a perennial philosophy (Weil 1972; Bourguignon 1973; Furst 1976; Dobkin de Rios 1984). The cultural historian Andy Letcher (2006: 25–48) argues that these claims to the universality of hallucinogen use might tell us more about the utopian sentiments accompanying the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s than about other cultures or the human condition.
HALLUCINOGENS TODAY: FROM WONDER AND SHAME TO INQUIRY
Irrespective of these scholarly endeavors, both hallucinogen hype and scare eventually took care of themselves. The drugs did not bring about the cultural revolution announced by Timothy Leary and other proselytizers. Alongside the high hopes of the countercultural sixties, the widespread enthusiasm for these odd substances simply waned. By now, despite the revival of psychedelic research, hallucinogens are no cause for major public concern anymore. Their consumption has been reported to have stagnated or declined since the mid-1970s. Even in the neopsychedelic techno and rave scene emerging in the 1980s, the drugs of choice were amphetamines and especially MDMA (ecstasy), while psychedelics proper remained marginal (Reynolds 1999). The German authorities noticed a decline of LSD seizures (Amendt 2008: 103–104). Although concerned about their marketing on the Internet and by so-called smartshops, an EU report from 2006 stated: “The proportion of current users among those who have ever used is lower for the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms than it is for cannabis and ecstasy. It has been reported that the effects of hallucinogenic mushrooms limit the appeal of regular use” (Hillebrand et al. 2006: 9).6 In the same year, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (2006) announced that “LSD trafficking and abuse have decreased sharply since 2000, and a resurgence does not appear likely in the near term.” The resumption of a moral panic would sound different.7
Today, hallucinogens are located in a problem space very different from those of the early ethnographies of peyotism or the anthropological cultural critiques of the 1960s and 1970s. This inquiry departs from a less timely problematic and follows a very different anthropological trajectory. It grew out of an existential rather than political concern. When I took LSD for the first time in 1993, shortly after my eighteenth birthday, I temporarily suffered from a loss of self. But I did not become one with the universe. It is a sociological commonplace that peer leaders are members of a group that others identify with. Under the influence of LSD, however, I literally mistook myself for the classmate whom I was emulating by taking the drug. As I resurfaced from the depths of this deeply delusional experience, I was filled with joy about being me rather than the other person. I felt reconciled with myself and the world. Everything is as it should be, I thought. “This sense of happiness,” I wrote into my adolescent diary, even though I was taking pride in my materialism and abhorred all things ecclesiastical, “must have something to do with God.” As a fervent rationalist, I was dumbstruck by this experience of cosmic comfort. In its wake, I prayed for the first time since my childhood (for my mother and her partner who were about to separate). In the diary entry, I was quick to counteract this awkward piety with a set of slightly precocious and naïve scientific questions: “How about the activity of the locus coeruleus in children? Is it stronger than in adults? Do children experience the world like adults under LSD?” These questions merged Huxley’s (2009/1954: 25) claim that a drug-induced breakdown of what he called the “cerebral reducing valve” enabled the eye to recover some of the perceptual innocence of childhood with what Solomon Snyder’s popular science book Drugs and the Brain (1986) had taught me about
