#13 — Fishing for Harmonies: Kindling Research Cultures of Conviviality with Dr Andy Letcher

In the 13th episode of the Iboga Leadership Summit podcast, Ros Stone speaks with Dr Andy Letcher; author of Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom, scholar of religion, folk musician, druid, and Programme Director of the MSc Psychedelics at EPIC (the Exeter Psychedelic Interdisciplinary Centre); for a conversation about the limits of translation, the politics of psychedelic knowledge, and how the Global North can get better at listening.

Andy traces a path that began in ecology before crossing into the humanities: a third-year undergraduate confronted by the history and philosophy of science, a PhD candidate who set out to vindicate Druidry and emerged a reluctant atheist, and eventually a scholar who found himself having to reassemble his beliefs from the ground up.

He speaks with precision about the intellectual habits that separate disciplines, and makes the case that psychedelic research needs both science and the humanities; but in the spirit of genuine, convivial conversation, with assumptions made visible and reality tunnels widened.

Andy shares the story of his encounter with Iboga and relates the intrinsicality of the music to the resolution of his journey: field recordings of Bwiti music allowed him to experience a sense of the all-pervasive “wonder of song.”

The conversation also approaches some of the thornier questions that he has has spent his career circling: what happens when a tradition is transplanted or extracted, and why the hunger for an ancient Indigenous tradition of one's own, however understandable, may be pointing in the wrong direction.

"Authenticity doesn't reside in the distant past. It doesn't necessarily reside in other parts of the world. The authenticity resides between us and the mushroom, or us and the plants that we use, and our relationship to the non-human."

Andy reflects on the morphic resonance kindled by gathering, and on how this can be built when we come together in embodied practice rather than solely attempting to access spiritual ideas that are mediated through text (including our calendars).

He also notes the particular urgency of hearing Gabonese and African voices more widely within the global psychedelic academic conversation, noting that this has long oriented its reality tunnel almost exclusively towards the Amazon and Mexico.

On the question of Ibogaine's commercialisation and the sometimes wilful perception of the alkaloid in isolation, to the exclusion of its origin in the Bwiti tradition, Andy is candid about the limits of his own thinking, while naming his sense of the core questions plainly: Who does Ibogaine belong to, and what do we owe the people who have tended the knowledge of it for generations?

"We need to give a lot more thought about how we acknowledge the Indigenous knowledge systems from which these drugs have ultimately been extracted."

Taking part in the conversations stemming from the Iboga Leadership Summit, Andy looks forward to engaging with an eye to how the most holistic future possibilities may be discerned through more attuned, animist engagement with the natural world. 

The Iboga Leadership Summit is hosted by Moughenda and the Bwiti community in Gabon, bringing together physicians, pharmacists and providers, neuroscience researchers, farmers and agricultural technicians, students and community leaders, lawyers, policymakers, environmentalists, and all those called to Bwiti, Ibogaine and Iboga.

22–28 June, Libreville, Gabon. Details and tickets: https://ibogaleadershipsummit.com/

Sacred harp: Papa Boussengue.
Podcast producer: Ros Stone