Consultorio con plantas maestras: hacia una antropología experimental. Experimentación del Cactus San Pedro con psicoterapeutas

Abstract

The following ethnography describes the interspecific relation between humans and the San Pedro cactus. The cactus is conceived as a medicine, while humans use the plant to learn how to activate its self-healing potential. The text goes through stories of this cactus in southern Ecuador and the healers working with it, the story of the use of it as a medicinal plant and its uses in psychotherapy. It´s a description of a social experiment, where the participants make use of the San Pedro cactus and they tell us about their experiences. This ethnography shows an existential-phenomenological position that allows us to report the whole process, begining with the harvest, cooking and how it is served. The rituals around it took place in the Andean mountains.Two psychotherapists, chosen for their years of professional practice, experimented with the San Pedro for one day. They let the plant think for them to generate ontologies that translate the experience with the medicine. They were made under the effect of the plant and interpreted when it has passed. It ends with an analysis of the de-colonial pedagogical action of the cactus. Because the mentioned is a way of learning, unusual, forgotten, and stigmatized in Ecuador since the entry of the new Western order. This worldview reappears as a way in which contemporaneity claims the knowledge of places. The context is urban, western, mestizo, patriarchal, rational, and scientific