Abstract:

This lecture will explore Joe Calabrese's clinical ethnographic research on the therapeutic use of the psychedelic Peyote cactus by Native Americans.  Peyote is traditionally used in family/community contexts but Calabrese also observed its use as a component of clinical care for Native Americans during his year of volunteer clinical practice at a Navajo-run treatment facility.  Peyote is framed by Native Americans as a sacred medicine and as an omniscient and morally evaluative guardian spirit.  From a more scientific perspective, the psychopharmacological properties of Peyote produce self-reflective experiential states which are steered in positive directions by the structure of ritual symbolism, emphasizing a mythic language of transformative rebirth guided by the NAC worldview. Peyote experiences generate insight and therapeutic behavior change through a psychopharmacological approach that is experiential, aimed at higher-order mental processes and guided by cultural plot structures.  Calabrese calls this a semiotic/reflexive paradigm of psychopharmacology which contrasts with the standard bio-reductionist agonist/antagonist paradigm. 

Bio:

Joseph Calabrese is Reader of Medical Anthropology at UCL.  A medical and psychological anthropologist and UK-registered clinical psychologist, he holds a PhD from the University of Chicago’s interdisciplinary Committee on Human Development, where he combined study of anthropology and developmental/clinical psychology.  His anthropological monograph, A Different Medicine: Postcolonial Healing in the Native American Church explores a ritual-based postcolonial healing movement based on use of the psychedelic Peyote cactus and its incorporation into clinical programmes serving Native Americans (including one in which he treated patients for a year as a volunteer).  He is currently studying mental illness and psychiatric care in the Kingdom of Bhutan.