Adam is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology and Communications and an active member of the Medical Anthropology Research Center (MARC-URV). A long-term student and researcher of various magico-medical systems around the world, he has facilitated workshops and retreats in the Amazon rainforest and the Mexican coast for almost a decade. Adam is the co-founder of Hidden Hand Media, a creative agency at the intersection of psychedelia, technology, and society, and the creator of Healing from Healing, a social media platform that casts a critical, skeptical, and humorous gaze at Healing and Transformation Culture.

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Memes, drugs, and the Spectacle of Healing Culture

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While in recent years there's been a great deal of attention given to the importance of "set and setting", one critical contextual aspect remains under-discussed: how cultural memes, common discourses and narratives prime, orient and condition experience, interpretation, meaning-making and integration.   In the West, the ongoing medicalization and psychologization of psychedelics and plant "medicines" have primed many facilitators and plant-medicine providers to align with a psychologised and medicalised orientation, mixed with the medical libertarianism tyical of wellness culture, modern neoliberal spiritualities and sanitized bits and pieces of indigenous ontologies. We liberally use terms such as "medicines", "healing" or "doing the work", not always questioning the assumptions underlying these approaches.  

In this session we will talk about "Healing Culture" and examine the ideologies, narratives and  politics that shape and envelop much of the "work" we do, often unconsciously. From New Age spirituality, Pop-psychology, the marketing of caricature-like versions of indigenous ontologies dressed as "ancestral wisdom", conspiracy culture and all the way to consumerism, loneliness, alienation and the hyper-individualism typical of neoliberalism and late-stage capitalism. Through a humorous exploration of Healing Culture as filtered through the Spectacle of social media, We will see why its critical to question and expand our understanding of what "Healing" is and could be, the limits of individual healing and how to move forward by shedding light on the intrinsic links between individual and social, cultural and environmental health