The Ayahuasca's shadow. Learning to be possessed in a shamanic centre of the Peruvian Amazon.

Takiwasi is both an addiction treatment clinic and one of the main shamanic centers of the Peruvian Amazon. Every year, an international clientele participates in courses involving the ritualized use of emetic preparations and the psychotropic beverage ayahuasca, retreats in the jungle, conferences and speech groups. The proposed practices seem to lead those who are willing to perceive themselves as inluenced, attacked and inhabited by malevolent forces that are usually invisible. Some of them also report the experience of possession sequences, occurring during ayahuasca rituals. In this article, the author proposes to question the surprising place occupied by possession in a cure presented as shamanic. Then, based on the ethnographic description of a participant's ritual journey, he tries to shed light on the underpinnings of the appropriation of these motifs and its implications, both in terms of symbolic recomposition of identity and the dynamics of cultural transmission.