The following text explores a particular aspect of religious practice and migration. Shamanism presents itself today as a multi-polar landscape, criss-crossed by regular movements of ritual experts and practitioners and by the continuous diffusion and reconfiguration of practices. These intercontinental travels and settlements influence the local communities and lead them to rethink and adapt their own internal and regional practices. The intercontinental version of shamanism presents an organizational continuum that withholds, allows and reproduces a set of itineraries that binds together, on a national and international scale, the territories of the so-called "ethnical" shamanism and its urban adaptations. In fact, this continuum rests upon the encounter of national and international "urban shamanisms" that structure themselves by looking at the "indigenous" as a revalued and ultimate resource-location. By addressing the shamanic expertise classified as "knowledge" in this particular context, we shall question its influence on the national and international symbolic hierarchies that originated in colonization.
International shamanism; shamanic itineraries; colonization of Amazonia; ayahuasca; healing rituals; interethnic circulation