Openings
Denmark, 2018. Master’s thesis research.
Sensory ethnographic fieldwork research and video project with individuals in Denmark engaged in ritual practices with entheogens (psychedelics), using collaborative, phenomenological, and experimental methods to explore the embodied experience of psychonautic ritual.
Based on a three and a half month fieldwork with psychonauts practising with entheogens in Copenhagen, Denmark, the research project explored how entheogenic ritual practices shape psychonaut meaning of reality, self, and relation to the world. Giving primacy to the bodily and lived experience, a sensory filmic approach and textual analysis were applied as intertwining modes of ethnographic enquiry.
While many scholars refer to Western modernity as rational, secular, and disenchanted, psychonautic ritual practitioners exemplify how the human quest for meaning perpetuates in the modern world beyond both scientific and religious contexts. Interrogating how self-defined non-religious individuals interpret seemingly irrational experiences revealed a form of re-enchantment that embraces wonder as a mode of being- in-the-world. Psychonauts find resonance through the embodied experience of ritual, transforming understandings of self and other through recognition of anthropocosmic relations.
