Encountering Ayahuasca in the devil's paradise: Amazonian science and Victorian violence in the nineteenth century

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• Taylor E. Dysart (University of Pennsylvania)
• Monday 13 February 2023, 13:00-14:00
• Zoom.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Silvia M. Marchiori.

This talk explores how nineteenth-century naturalists simultaneously characterized caapí, a liana, or thick woody vine, as a valuable global botanical specimen and a potent Amazonian narcotic. After Richard Spruce (1817–1893), a British botanist, first observed the Tukano peoples consuming caapí in 1852, he eagerly began to collect and classify plant specimens as well as accompanying cultural artifacts and ethnographic observations. Along with the Yorkshireman, naturalists from along the Americas speculated as to which Indigenous tribes consumed caapí and for what purpose, and which plants were responsible for the remarkable effects that they had observed. Informed by debates about the abolition of slavery in Brazil and the violent extractive economies of the Amazon, these naturalists came to understand caapí as intertwined with tropical degeneration, primitivism, and the infamous ‘narcotics’ of the nineteenth century.

This talk is part of the Cabinet of Natural History series.

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