This is The Guardian.

Welcome to The Guardian long read, showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking.

For the text version of this and all our long reads, go to the Guardian.com forward slash long read.

The ancient psychedelic myth.

People tell tourists the stories they think are interesting for them.

By Manvier Singh, read by Sebastian Capitan Viveros.

Beginning in 2001, the Austrian-Captitan Viveros. Beginning in 2001, the Austrian anthropologist Vernt Brabeck de Mori spent six years living in

the western Amazon.

He first arrived as a backpacker, returned to do a master's thesis on ayahuasca songs, and eventually did a PhD

on the music of eight indigenous peoples in the region. Along the way, he married a woman of the

local Shipibo tribe and settled down. I did not have a lot of money, he told me, so I had to make my living there. He became a teacher,

he built a house, he and his wife had children. That rare experience of joining the community,

he said, forced him to realize that many of the assumptions he had picked up as an anthropologist were wrong.

Like most outsiders, Brabeck de Mori arrived in Peru, thinking that ayahuasca had been used in the western Amazon for thousands of years.

This is the standard narrative. Look up resources on ayahuasca and you're bound to run into it.

Ayahuasca has been used in the Peruvian Amazon for millennia, long before the Spanish came to Peru,

before the Incan Empire was formed, before history, states the website of the Ayahuasca Foundation,

an organization founded by a U.S. citizen that offers

ayahuasca retreats. Yet with time, Brabeck de Mori came to see just how flimsy this narrative was.

He discovered a double discourse which happens in all societies where there is tourism, he said.

People start to tell the tourists, and I found that

most Shipibo people did not distinguish tourists from researchers. The stories they think are

...