The socialization of hallucinations. Cultural priors, social interactions and contextual factors in the use of psychedelics

Introduction

Dupuis situates the paper within a long-standing observation in anthropology and psychedelic research that the effects of hallucinogenic substances are highly conditional on cultural context, commonly framed as 'set' and 'setting'. Earlier comparative work has shown that some features of psychedelic experiences are cross-cultural (for example entoptic imagery) while others—meaning, affective tone and specific content—vary markedly and often cluster within cultures. Although ethnographers have proposed candidate cultural vectors (mythology, ritual interactions, iconography), Dupuis argues that the specific mechanisms by which social context shapes not only the interpretation but the phenomenological content of visual and auditory imagery remain under-explored. This study sets out to characterise what Dupuis terms the "socialization of hallucinations": the processes through which cultural background, ritual practices and interpersonal interactions organise both how participants relate to hallucinogenic experiences and the very content of those experiences. Drawing on roughly a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in the Upper Peruvian Amazon and detailed observation of a shamanic therapeutic centre (Takiwasi), the author combines interactionist and social constructionist anthropology with phenomenology and Bayesian-inspired models of perception to propose candidate mechanisms—education of attention, categorisation of perceptions, emotional shaping and expectation formation—through which social context influences hallucinations. The paper emphasises why understanding these extrapharmacological factors matters, given the growing global interest in ayahuasca and other psychedelics and the ethical stakes of culturally mediated transmission of beliefs.