A hallucinogenic brew called ayahuasca has increasingly played a role in drawing people from around the world to the Peruvian Amazon. They come seeking healing and spiritual encounters. As ayahuasca tourism has grown, it has exceeded its designation as mere tourism. Some of the foreigners (mostly Westerners) who come to the jungle for ayahuasca engage in long-term shamanic training with local people, most frequently with indigenous Shipibo healers. The interest in psychedelic substances has extended to an interest in non-psychoactive Amazonian plants and other Shipibo shamanic practices. Plant diets, in which a would-be-healer practices various forms of abstinence to gain knowledge from a teacher plant, have become increasingly popular. Although previous studies have investigated plant diets among indigenous and mestizo ayahuasca practitioners, studies examining Westerners engaged in shamanistic training have overlooked the crucial role of plant diets.

Based on ethnographic research at a shamanic training center where a Shipibo man teaches foreigners how to be healers, this dissertation describes how students learn and experience plant diets. While it is firmly grounded within the ayahuasca world, ayahuasca is not the central focus; diets are - mirroring the importance of diets for Shipibo and foreign practitioners alike. Centered on a two-month shamanic training course, the study examines how foreigners translate and understand Shipibo concepts of healing and spirits, as taught by a Shipibo healer. It also explores the relationships the dieters have with the plants and the kinds of bodies and selves they create through the diet. For my interlocutors, plant diets are a process of merging permanently with a plant spirit. They talk about themselves as plant-human hybrids, describing the diets as saplings growing inside their bodies. The relationships they develop with the plants, the place, and the people are both intimate and durable; many dieters return every year to diet, and some even stay to work full-time as facilitators on the course.

I argue that dieters cultivate an ability to perceive an animate and agentic plant world, through the experience and mastery of embodying Others. They learn how to listen to plants, share bodies with them, and actively manage porous self boundaries. Dieters develop various skills through the diet - attunement, discipline, reciprocity, and discernment - that allow them to interact with plant spirits, following the norms and values promoted by Shipibo and Western practitioners. I also propose that what the dieters learn supports an alternative ontological stance to Otherness compared with dualistic or monistic stances which reify or erase difference. The ayahuasca community in general and my site in particular offer a potent contact zone at the juncture of Otherhood (self/other, whiteness/indigeneity, humans/nature), laden with histories of pain and healing. Fundamentally, this project is about how people understand Others and the work they do to manage difference in the pursuit of healing.

The dissertation is divided into five chapters which loosely reflect stages of the developing relationship between a dieter and the diet plant: 1) Calling, 2) Meeting, 3) Merging, 4) Negotiating, and 5) Integrating. Calling introduces the site and the spiritual context that drives the dieters to the site. Meeting recounts histories of encounters in the Amazon. Merging explains the diet practices and the kinds of hybrid bodies dieters create. Negotiating investigates the conflicts that arise among humans and between humans and non-humans as they attempt to navigate hybridity. Integrating is about the lessons learned and how they move across cultural and geographic boundaries.