Sending out Your Soul: An Entheogenic Forum Community Explored through Language
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Authors
Frias, Erin E.
Issue Date
2011
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
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Abstract
The purpose of this thesis is to examine the discourse of an online forum community centered on
an entheogenic medicine called ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is an indigenous brew made out of two
hallucinogenic plants used by shaman of the upper Amazon regions of South America to send
their souls to the supernatural world. The purpose of taking ayahuasca is to receive guidance and
knowledge from ancestral and plant spirits in order to heal mental and physical illnesses.
Globalization and the World Wide Web have contributed to the spread of ayahuasca to
mainstream society where spiritual discourse and alternative medicinal practices are recontextualized
to fit within the domain of contemporary ayahuasca use. I will analyze three ways
the ayahuasca.com forum community has re-contextualized ayahuasca through language. The
first discursive strategy is the use of alternative words in place of common words used by
mainstream society to characterize psychedelic drugs and the people who use them. The
formation of the forum register creates a new meaning for ayahuasca and the experience that
disassociates them from the discourse associated with recreational drug users; secondly, the use
of spiritual discourse, which further separates the forum members from recreational drug users,
in order to build a foundation that justifies their use of an illegal substance under the auspices of
freedom of religion in the United States; thirdly, the discourse surrounding modern ailments,
modern medicine and motivations for participating in an alternative form of healing are
understood as the growing disenchantment of Western medicinal practices like long term drug
treatments that focus on symptoms rather than internal or psychological causes.
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In Copyright(All Rights Reserved)