Description:

Join anthropologists, geographers, and artists in a discussion of indigenous and contemporary use of altered states of consciousness. This Salon will explore the cultural traditions of indigenous peoples in California and the Southwestern deserts who used trance-inducing plant-based entheogens. From Santa Barbara to the Sierra Madre Mountains of Nayarit people used entheogens such as datura, peyote, and tobacco to connect to alternative realities. These traditions have been sustained among indigenous peoples and recontextualized among contemporary artists and therapists. Our salon will explore the background, the tensions, and efforts to bring such entheogens into urban worlds without coopting or colonizing those practices.