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

Although the effects of so-called psychedelic or hallucinogenic substances are known for their strong conditionality on context and the culturalist approach of hallucinations has won the favor of anthropologists, the vectors by which the features of visual and auditory imagery are structured by social context have been so far little explored. Using ethnographic data collected in a shamanic center of the Peruvian Amazon and an anthropological approach dialoguing with phenomenology and recent models of cognition of Bayesian inspiration, I draw here some leads in order to shed light on the nature of these dynamics that I call socialization of hallucinations. Distinguishing two levels of socialization of hallucinations, I argue that cultural background and social interactions not only organize the relationship to the hallucinogenic experience, but also to its very phenomenological content. I account for the underpinnings of the socialization of hallucinations proposing candidate factors as the education of attention, the categorization of perceptions and the shaping of emotions and expectations. Considering psychedelic experiences in the light of their noetic properties and cognitive penetrability debates, I show that they are powerful vectors of cultural transmission. I question the ethical stakes of these observations, at a time when the use of psychedelic is becoming increasingly popular in the global North. I finally emphasize the importance of better understanding the extrapharmacological factors of the psychedelic experience and its subjective implications, and sketch out the basis for an interdisciplinary methodology in order to do so.