Ayahuasca in China, Peru, and Australia: 5 Questions for anthropologist Alex Gearin
Gearin discusses what he’s learned through his research and the differences and similarities in how people across these three contexts approached ayahuasca use.
Alex Gearin grew up in rural Australia, a place where psychedelics were not at all a part of mainstream culture. But through his two older sisters and their cool arty friends, he got into musicians influenced by psychedelics includingThe Beatles and Aphex Twin. Then, he stumbled upon a vibrant psychonautic underground after moving to Melbourne for university studies. When an anthropology professor assigned his class to read a paper about ayahuasca, he became absorbed in the topic. “I just became so fascinated that a brew of plants could be at the center of so many facets of Amazonian life and culture–from art and hunting to social welfare and identity formation–but that it was also a banned, criminalized substance in most countries around the world,” he said.
From there, Gearin set his sights on studying psychedelics. His first project was on cosmological narratives of ayahuasca use in the Amazon, and he then decided he wanted to get a doctorate degree studying Amazonian shamanism. He’d gone as far as to buy boots to tromp around the Amazon, but his advisor encouraged him to stay in Australia to study the globalization of ayahuasca, given the lack of research on the brew outside Amazonia. He embedded himself in local communities in Australia to understand who was using these substances, how, and why.
After receiving his PhD from the University of Queensland, he was offered a job at Xiamen University, and began studying ayahuasca use in Peru, spending several months at a renowned Shipibo-led retreat centre, and then in China among an underground network of ayahuasca users. Now an assistant professor at Hong Kong University, Gearin published his first book, Global Ayahuasca, in 2024, an ethnography of ayahuasca use in Peru, Australia, and China. The Microdose spoke with him about what he’s learned through his research and the differences and similarities in how people across these three contexts approached ayahuasca use.
You began your studies observing ayahuasca use in Peru and Australia. What did you notice about people’s approaches to the substance in those places, and how do they compare to one another?
People are attracted to ayahuasca in Australia for lots of different reasons. But at its core, I think a lot of people there are trying to overcome a kind of malaise or a meaning crisis, feeling like they don’t fit into society, or simply feeling existentially thirsty. Then you've also got people dealing with very serious trauma, whether it's sexual abuse, veteran trauma, or a whole range of other issues. Those two elements — the meaning crisis and the therapeutic element — are the main trends I observed in Australia during fieldwork in 2011 to 2015.
In Amazonia, it's hard to generalize because there's quite a diversity, but what you see is a far more pragmatic and instrumental use of these states of consciousness, including things like deciding where to go hunting or how much to hunt. Anthropologists have seen it used for finding lost objects, mediating social disputes, and understanding ecological rhythms and animal behavior, like analyzing the stars and how celestial movements reflect the seasonal flow of fish up the river. There’s also sorcery, or dealing with social antagonism and injustices and imbalances of power, which is another really practical application of these states of consciousness.
Interestingly, ayahuasca drinkers in Australia tend to have a different view of what is happening in Amazonia — they imagine shamans healing trauma or connecting with benevolent plant spirits. But ayahuasca use in Amazonia has historically been far more ambiguous in terms of the moral position of these plant spirits and the healing work that they do for shamans or against shamans. And as anthropologists, we're trained to take people's beliefs and ideas seriously, even if we don't happen to believe them ourselves; there's a kind of ontological humility built into a good ethnography. So when I would see people in Australia cultivating a meaningful relationship to Mother Ayahuasca in a way that's really different to what you see in, say, remote Peru, I was taking that seriously without telling them how different their practices are to what we see across Amazonian societies historically.
Australia is also an interesting case study because it has really strict immigration policies. When I started researching this in 2012, it was really hard for touring Amazonian shamans to come. There was this one time that people put a lot of money on the table to welcome a group of Shipibo healers, but their visas got blocked at the last minute. That created a kind of insularity to the Australian scene compared to Europe or North America, where you see more of a traffic of shamans coming on these healing tours or near shamanic tours. And that insulation perhaps created more creativity in a Western or new age neo-Shamanic model. We need more ethnographic research in Europe, North America, urban Brazil, and other places to really look at those differences.
What brought you to China, and how did you end up studying ayahuasca in the country?
I was working at a Chinese university teaching anthropology; I didn't go to China to study psychedelics. I didn't even know what was happening there! But I was always really curious and interested in Chinese culture and society, and from an anthropological view, it's a space that is really under-researched compared to, say, the anthropology of African societies, South American societies, or Aboriginal Australian societies. Almost twenty percent of the human population lives in China and yet the anthropological canon is quite small.
I stumbled upon a small ayahuasca network in 2019, but it’s no longer active. It was mostly occurring in major cities, and the driving force of these retreats came from the corporate world. I was surprised that it was happening at all, given the very strict drug policies in China.
Those who were willing to talk to me about their practice were motivated by a genuine drive to share with me what had been a healing, useful, and meaningful practice to them. People were attracted to ayahuasca sessions or retreats for different reasons, but for my research, I targeted those who were more interested in improving their workplace finesse and managerial techniques through ayahuasca, because it is unique and an under-represented modality in the literature on psychedelics. I didn’t try to come up with a central, grand theory about how Chinese culture and society responds to psychedelic use, but rather, the research highlights how contextual factors, beliefs, and styles of ayahuasca sessions can shape the types of meaning and benefits that people get from them. The Chinese material contributes to a larger argument I make on the importance of recognising socio-cultural context when trying to make sense of ayahuasca experience narratives.
What meaning did people find in it?
Practical meaning. For example, in my book, I tell the story about a young Chinese manager who describes overcoming the trauma of neglecting her family when her father passed away, because she was overwhelmed by the loss. A decade later, after he passed, she drank ayahuasca, and she said it was good to confront this trauma. She described to me just how much relief it gave her, and how releasing all this tension in her body around that trauma, enabled her to be more fluid in her workplace. She said she was respected more, and could climb the ladder more easily; it was beneficial to her career advancement. I noticed that some people were motivated towards healing not simply in an intrinsic sense — to heal their pain or trauma — but also because that can translate into what I call “world mastery”: people building up their skills and capacities to improve. In this case, the context was the workplace.
It’s very much a neoliberal form of ayahuasca use in the sense of people seeking to improve their entrepreneurial selves. Not only did the groups include sessions of drinking ayahuasca, but also meditation, breathwork, ecstatic dance. We would be taken out into a park before drinking ayahuasca to do group bonding, which kind of felt a little bit like the corporate bonding techniques; like, someone would stand in the middle of a circle blindfolded, and “trust fall” into the group. One of the participants told me he really liked this type of pre-ceremony activity because it reminded him of having a good job interview where the employer takes you out of the office and you can informally socialize. This was clearly a space in which people were motivated for reasons other than healing, to connect with like-minded people to improve their business skills. And the person who enabled all this, a European man, had developed a metaphysical system to introduce people to what he called the “Amazonian Emotional Process.” Ayahuasca was just one aspect of a much larger package he offered for transformative experiences. That metaphysical system is based on the notion that everyone has an inner monk and an outer suit — an intuitive side versus a more external public side — and that ayahuasca can help bridge those two parts to produce a more unified person, which can bring grace and tact to business decision making, as well as a sense of love and tenderness to their family life.
I thought that was really important, too, that there was this elaborate metaphysical system being built, which people were opting into. I wasn't surprised to learn that their use of these states of consciousness was far more utilitarian and pragmatic compared to what I was seeing in Australia, and in the book I trace this practical approach to Chinese religiosity, especially folk Daoism, which provides a fertile ground for a more pragmatic attitude towards psychedelic states. That enabled me to contextualize the meaning crisis or the psychologization of ayahuasca in Western societies as a relatively unique approach or trend of ayahuasca use.
What other psychedelic subcultures exist outside this more neoliberal, corporate-focused group?
China's a huge, diverse place and there’s a lot going on. There’s the outdoor psychedelic music scene, which is pretty small in mainland China. But events like the Dragon Burn, which is based on Burning Man, and similar electronic music events have been under extreme pressure in the last few years; they’ve been raided and people's hair has even been tested for substance use. So as far as I can tell from speaking with people who participated in them, a lot of these subcultures have really broken down lately; it's a very tough time for anything like a psychedelic scene to exist in China.
On the flip side, Taiwan has some ketamine clinics in operation, as well as an underground ayahuasca scene that has been around for quite some time– there are currently several PhD projects examining these topics, so look out for that research. It’s an interesting space in Taiwan because there’s some cultural work happening there; for instance, there are debates about what they should call ayahuasca. In Mandarin Chinese, it's typically translated as 死藤水 (sǐ téng shuǐ), which essentially means “death, vine, water.” It's got quite a negative connotation and the propaganda that has been published perpetuates that negative connotation. But in Taiwan, they’re calling it 相思汤 (xiāngsī tang); xiāngsī tree is acacia confusa, a native plant that has a very romantic association in Chinese literary history; it literally means “mutual, miss, tree,” and evokes a sense of sweet sadness or a mourning for things to come back together. It offers a far more beautiful association, and I think that's important cultural work showing how these local concepts are being constructed.
At the same time, the psychiatric medication Spravato is on target to being a $1 billion drug in 2024 and the reps have been cruising across China. There are some esketamine clinics in psychiatry in mainland China, and there are some getting set up here in Hong Kong. There's a little bit of work happening in labs in Shanghai on psychoplastogens, or so-called “non psychedelic” psychedelics. And this is all happening at the same time that there’s a really intense crackdown on illicit drug use in China.
How has your work on China been received by people in the country, as well as out of it?
I just got back from the mainland where I gave some talks at major Chinese universities about psychedelic psychiatry. I was really struck by how academics responded; it reminded me of when I first started presenting my work in Australia in 2011. At that time, the reactions of people in the highest echelons of anthropology in Australia were very polarized: some rejected the research as being not important, but others were extremely fascinated and interested, often mixing personal hopes with professional interests. Now when I present my work in Australia, there’s far more of a middle ground and balanced terrain. But my presentations in China reminded me of Australia in the early 2010s; some scholars clearly didn’t even want to think about these topics whereas others were really over-the-top fascinated by it.
Outside academia, I've been hesitant to talk about my Chinese ethnography, especially with journalists, partly because there's just so much negative bias towards Chinese culture and Chinese society within Western journalism. Earlier this year, I gave a talk in New York on my work, and a journalist wrote a kind of sensationalist piece on tech bros in China. And it reminds me of when I was playing around with Midjourney, the AI generation tool that creates images. If you type in something like, “beautiful celestial Chinese goddess” — something really positive — very quickly, the iterations start to produce a negative image: a femme fatale with dark purple, dark reds. It reflects this kind of irrational fear. You see this bias produced in both AI images and in journalism. I'm hoping that over time, more realistic representations of these topics can emerge, and I think the field of psychedelic humanities is positioned really well to help with.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
