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Anthropologists are now showing how culture impacts psychedelic experiences.
Not everything that affects a psychedelic experience can be controlled in clinical trials. Psychedelic researchers are paying more and more attention to the idea that the “set and setting” of a trip can impact the experience, like asking what genre of music is most conducive to helping psilocybin therapy participants quit smoking.
But a full accounting of a psychedelic experience’s set and setting extends far beyond immediate stimuli like playlists and a room’s ambiance. Researchers have yet to isolate and explore one of the most impactful ingredients in constructing a psychedelic experience: culture.
If tripping indoors is a different experience than tripping outdoors — and it is — so is having a psychedelic experience as a person who’s grown up in 21st-century America, versus elsewhere in the world. Culture shapes the subterranean worlds of the mind, instilling the deep-seated frameworks we use to make sense of our subjective experiences, especially those as strange and powerful as psychedelic ones. Through the emerging psychedelic scene in China, for example, anthropologists are beginning to study how cultures can shape experiences.
Take the trip experienced by Zhang, a young writer from mainland China who relayed his trip to Alex Gearin, an anthropologist who studies the emerging psychedelic subculture in China today. In the comfort of his living room and company of a few friends, Zhang inhaled vaporized DMT, a naturally occurring substance that’s also the active ingredient in ayahuasca.
He then described passing through a wondrous realm of pink Chinese goddesses, and landing in a courtroom where hundreds of floating eyes were watching him, part of a cosmic livestream “of his moral flaws to a court of judges, spirits, and millions of internet users,” writes Gearin. The specificity of Zhang’s visions also reflects the way that psychedelic experiences are profoundly structured by cultural contexts, such as China’s pervasive surveillance system and widespread livestreaming subculture.
During the recent swell of psychedelic research, all of the clinical trial participants having minds shaped by Western culture is a hidden constant that invisibly biases experimental findings. Psychedelic investigators have long been aware of this conundrum. Back in 1959, the anthropologist Anthony Wallace suggested “culture-controlled trials,” as opposed to placebo controls, that would test the same drug dose in different cultural contexts to try and isolate the cultural influences.
In the absence of a cultural corollary to placebo controls in the advancement of scientific knowledge, studying psychedelic experiences in various places around the world, and especially outside modernity’s cultural constructs, can help make these invisible influences more apparent. It may not help totally demystify the psychedelic experience. But we may gain a better understanding of how our culture is influencing our minds.
The new psychedelic scene in modern China resembles … Silicon Valley?
In a 2021 paper, professor of Chinese Studies Fan Pen Li Chen writes that the history of Chinese psychedelic use “is a conspicuous blank” in contemporary English language accounts. In modern times, too, China has rarely been included in talks of the psychedelic renaissance.
Gearin, in his ethnography of Chinese ayahuasca use, notes that ayahuasca’s introduction into modern China is similarly tough to pin down, though accounts of Indigenous ayahuasca shamans traveling in Beijing begin in the early 21st century. Part of the difficulty, he adds, is that China’s strict drug laws and threats of punishment have created a culture of secrecy among users.
Starting in 2019, Gearin spent years embedded in a network of hundreds of ayahuasca users across mainland China. He chronicled the experiences of people like “Ting Ting,” a Chinese woman in her early 30s who manages a large technology firm and hopes that drinking ayahuasca will help advance her career, and “Wang,” a 34-year-old executive manager at a fast-food franchise who drinks ayahuasca to become more successful at his job. (Note: these stories are anonymized to protect them from legal harm.)
In their experiences, a strange comparison emerged, a cultural reference point that should be quite familiar to people in the West: Silicon Valley.
Among those who use psychedelics as part of a spiritual practice, the culture of psychedelic use associated with Silicon Valley — microdosing for a productivity boost, or blasting off on LSD to search kaleidoscopic mind spaces for the next billion-dollar innovation — usually gets treated with a pretty aggressive sneer (roping psychedelics into utilitarian agendas of productivity and competitive edges can be seen as reductive, especially in contrast to the stereotypical portrayal of more spiritual Indigenous uses).
But Gearin notes that using psychedelic experiences and rituals for secular gains is not actually a modern twist, nor is it unique to the US. Indigenous Amazonian groups in South America have long used psychedelic rituals to boost their hunting performance, decipher the schemes of their enemies, and discover the locations of things they have misplaced.
The Chinese ayahuasca network Gearin studied is led by a young European man named Luke. He had previously spent time learning about ayahuasca practices from Indigenous South American traditions like the Peruvian Shipibo and Brazilian Santo Daime. Yet over Luke’s six years conducting weekly ayahuasca retreats across Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, he’s adapted the language to fit the more secular context and clientele.
“I talk more in terms of anxiety, depression, purpose, mission, conflict,” Luke told Gearin. “When they don’t see you wearing feathers, when you speak in a language they understand, the outcome is better.”
Chinese psychedelia suggests an enchanted capitalism
The primary narrative within biomedical cultures like the US for psychedelics’ surge in popularity generally focuses on the unmet need for therapeutic interventions, but social theorists offer a different explanation.
Following the German sociologist Max Weber, who chronicled the disenchantment of modernity in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Gearin summarizes the thesis that living through industrial capitalism transforms subjects “into cogs in the machinery of rational pursuits,” and posits that psychedelics help return that lost sense of spirituality, meaning, and significance to people’s lives.
Accordingly, after China’s rapid modernization and secularization during the 20th century, the changing cultural context should have deeply charged Chinese people’s psychedelic experiences with an unmet need for spirituality that transcends the iron cage of industrialized efficiency, and speaks to the forms of religion that Maoist “cultural reforms” tried to stamp out. That doesn’t seem to be the case. The “disenchantment thesis” doesn’t quite fit Chinese psychedelia, Gearin has found.
In other words, the Chinese example leaves anthropologists with new questions to answer. Business practices and psychedelia are not set against each other. It’s possible to view this reality as the flourishing of psychedelic capitalism, where the motivating force of capitalist pursuits absorbs and transforms the psychedelic experience into its own image.
It’s also possible to read these early reports from the Chinese psychedelic scene as suggesting an innate cultural understanding that the sacred and profane are not two separate realms of life to be set against each other. Instead, as described by the process of “integration” in psychedelic therapy, the decisive question becomes how to weave these powerful, spiritually charged experiences into the mundane, bureaucratic, and worldly fabric of everyday life.
Psychedelics are a window into culture
In the resurgence of American psychedelia, particularly in the therapeutic context, psychedelic trips are interpreted as opportunities to allow the deeper currents of an individual’s mind to rise to the surface of conscious experience. However, individual experience draws from deeper wells of cultural contexts, which are not easy to isolate or control in clinical research.
Psychedelic experience “raises questions that cannot be answered by laboratory experiments and clinical trials alone,” writes anthropologist Nicolas Langlitz, director of the Psychedelic Humanities Lab at the New School. “Among these are questions pertaining to the conceptual and practical frameworks that render experimental and clinical findings meaningful.”
In Gearin’s account of the Chinese ayahuasca scene, we see how government surveillance and widespread secularization provide the material and context for individual psychedelic experiences. But it’s always easier to see someone else’s bias than our own.
As legal access to psychedelics scales up in the US, both as a regulated service and a therapeutic treatment, we’ll have more opportunities to peer through the lenses of our individual experiences with an anthropological eye, asking how American culture is shaping our own minds. I’m not sure we’ll like what we find, but as most therapists will tell you, the first step toward changing deep patterns of experience is becoming aware of them.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!