Agenda

20 Jan 2026 15:00

An Illicit Path to Postcolonial Healing

Online

CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF LIVED RELIGION
Lecture Series Illicit Objects, Lived Religion: Materiality, Performance, and Power

Joseph Calabrese, University College London
An Illicit Path to Postcolonial Healing: Exploring the Centuries-Long Paradigm Clash Surrounding the Therapeutic Use of Peyote by Native Americans

Abstract: This lecture explores Joseph Calabrese's clinical ethnographic research on the therapeutic use of the psychedelic Peyote cactus by Native Americans with a specific focus on clashing cultural paradigms, ethnocentric misunderstandings, and criminalization. Peyote forms the heart of a very effective path of postcolonial healing for Native Americans, generating 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. However, Peyote use has been attacked by Euro-Americans since their arrival in North America. Peyote is traditionally used in family/community contexts but Calabrese also observed its use in clinical care for Native Americans during his year of volunteer clinical practice at a Navajo-run treatment facility. Local clinical practice revealed the ironic fact that the same U.S. government that includes Peyote on its Schedule I (for dangerous substances with no therapeutic uses) also codes and reimburses the Peyote Ceremony as an accepted therapeutic intervention for substance abuse. Therapeutic efficacy is also supported by a variety of observations and independent studies, so Peyote’s Schedule I status as an illicit drug reflects distinct Euro-American ethnocentric assumptions and purity doctrines and not the realities of Native American use.

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 with training in developmental and clinical psychology.  His anthropological monograph, A Different Medicine: Postcolonial Healing in the Native American Church explores a ritual-based postcolonial healing movement centered on the use of the psychedelic Peyote cactus.  Calabrese studied community/family-based use and the incorporation of the Peyote Ceremony into clinical programs serving Native Americans (including one in which he treated patients for a year as a volunteer).  His current research focuses on mental illness and psychiatric care in the Kingdom of Bhutan in South Asia

 

Friday 20th February 2026, 3.00pm-4.00pm CET
Online - For online participation please register at this link Zoom

For information please contact the Center for the Study of Lived Religion cslr@unive.it

Organized by

Department of Asian and North African Studies; Center for the Study of Lived Religion

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