A Century of Psychedelic Science: A Conversation with Wade Davis and Glenn Shepard

Wednesday, December 16th from 12-1:30pm PST

Wade Davis is a world-renowned anthropologist, ethnobotanist and bestselling author, and has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.” In this very special Community Forum, Wade will talk with anthropologist Glenn Shepard, and provide a retrospective of the last century of psychedelic science. This wide-reaching conversation will look at the history of of the scientific study of psychoactive plants, beginning with the legacy of ethnobotanist Richard Schultes and moving into the psychedelic revolution of the sixties and the legal backlash resulting in the War on Drugs. Finally, we will discuss the recent wave of the psychedelic renaissance, and offer some speculations on the future of the field.

Wade Davis is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. Named by the NGS as one of the Explorers for the Millennium, he has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.” In recent years his work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia, Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo, New Guinea, Australia, Colombia, Vanuatu, Mongolia and the high Arctic of Nunuvut and Greenland. An ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker, Davis holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among fifteen indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), an international best seller later released by Universal as a motion picture.

Glenn H. Shepard Jr. is an ethnobotanist, medical anthropologist and filmmaker who has worked with diverse indigenous peoples of Latin America, especially in Amazonia. He earned his undergraduate degree at Princeton University and completed his doctorate in Medical Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1999. His research interests include ethnobotany, medical anthropology, shamanism, sustainable resource management, visual anthropology and the territorial rights of isolated peoples. Publications include research articles, commentary and reviews in Nature (1998, 2009), Science (2003), Science Advances (2016), American Anthropologist (2004, 2012), Economic Botany (2008, 2011), Conservation Biology (2007), PLoS One (2015, 2015) and the New York Review of Books (2014, 2015, 2019). His work in the Amazon has been featured in news stories in National Geographic (2016) The New Yorker (2016, 2019) and the Financial Times (2019). He has participated in the production of several films, including the Emmy-Award-winning documentary, Spirits of the Rainforest, as well as Zapatista Memories, which debuted in 2016 at the Margaret Mead Film Festival. He is a tenured staff researcher in the Human Sciences Division at the Goeldi Museum in Belém, Brazil, where he curated the ethnographic collections from 2009-2013 and co-chaired the Division from 2014-2016, and currently sits on the Advisory Board of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. He blogs at Notes from the Ethnoground (http://ethnoground.blogspot.com/).

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