About

I am a Research Fellow at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) conducting research at the intersection of Psychedelic Studies, Anthropology of Mental Health & Cultural Psychiatry. My research interests lie mainly within the contemporary reconfigurations of the status of so-called “psychedelic” substances and “hallucinatory” experiences. I explore the cultural, political, clinical and ethical implications of these dynamics within Euro-American societies. My work is based on ethnographic fieldworks conducted since 2008 in Latin America (Peruvian Amazon, Mexico) and Europe (United Kingdom, France).

I completed my PhD at the EHESS/Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale (Paris) under the supervision of Pr. Philippe Descola in 2016. I have been then a postdoctoral research fellow at Durham University (UK) and the Quai Branly Museum (Paris). My doctoral research was based on an 18-months fieldwork in the Upper Peruvian Amazon, and has been the first extensive French-language ethnographic survey on a “shamanic center” in the Amazon. These institutions, which have recently multiplied in the region, offer an international clientele ritual practices inspired by indigenous shamanism, including the use of psychedelics such as ayahuasca. My work focused on understanding the dynamics through which cultural knowledge, symbolic frameworks, as well as interactional and discursive contexts shape the psychedelic experience. Studying the stakes of this “socialisation of hallucinations” dynamics in the recomposition of identity and the constitution of social groups dynamics, I explored its implications in cultural transmission and therapeutic efficacy.

Since then, the investigations that I carry out are twofold : 1) The globalization of the use of psychedelics through the rise of shamanic tourism in Latin America & clinical studies on these substances in Euro-American societies 2) The contemporary recharacterization of the social status of so-called “hallucinatory” experiences through the impulse of movements of psychiatric users such as the Hearing Voices Movement.

Through my participation to ALIUS (an interdisciplinary research group dedicated to the study of the diversity of consciousness that I have co-founded) & the Hearing the Voice program (Durham University), I have placed this work in an interdisciplinary dialogue involving History, Religious Studies, Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience. I also provide scientific consulting for clinical and experimental studies involving the use of psychedelics. In these collaborations, I exercise a critical practice of interdisciplinarity leading me to question, from an anthropological perspective, the growing place of neurocentrism in the approach of the human phenomenon.