Speaker Bio
Dr Yogi Hale Hendlin is core faculty of the Dynamics of Inclusive Prosperity Initiative, and assistant professor in the Erasmus School of Philosophy, at Erasmus University Rotterdam, as well as as Research Associate in the Environmental Health Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco. As Editor-in-Chief of the interdisciplinary philosophy of biology journal Biosemiotics, which focuses on meaning-making in more-than-human organisms based on the work of C.S. Peirce, Jakob von Uexküll, and Gregory Bateson, Yogi thrives learning about the insane complexity of life, agency, consciousness, and interspeciality.
Yogi’s futurist visions have been profiled in Happinez magazine (NL) and at Het Nieuwe Instituut. Yogi’s extensive and diverse research of industrial epidemics – how the industrial model’s goods now come with disproportionate bads, undermining our environment and threatening our democracies and health – has been reported on by the BBC, The Guardian, National Geographic, TIME, and hundreds of other news outlets.
ICPR 2024 Abstract
The (de)colonization of psychedelics
Theoretical Background and Rationale: Traditional contexts of psychedelic use have often been attenuated simultaneous to the wider social uptake of these substances in the west. Many scholars, practitioners, and indigenous medicine holders have stressed the necessity to preserve traditional insights and contexts even as their medicines have taken on new forms. As the psychedelic industry develops, many are wary that new legal, economic, and social paradigms could eclipse or undermine traditional uses.
Research Question and Hypothesis: This panel will ask what constitutes colonizing practices of psychedelics and what are their effects? We hypothesize that certain constraints and conditions exist that have evolved out of generations of psychedelic use that cannot be separated from certain formal and unquantifiable elements of community and ecology without remainder.
Methods and Analysis: Through investigating various forms of use, we look at charges of appropriation and epistemicide, and the monetization of traditional ecological knowledge to the latter’s detriment, through ethnographic, case-based methods, and reviews of contemporary and historical literature.
Main Findings: Integrated ways forward include a moratorium on patents, declaring these substances and their derivatives global patrimony; allocating profits to preserve indigenous land (e.g., preserving the home of peyote in Mexico from silver mining), and retaining certain ritualistic elements that emerged historically with psychedelics.
Conclusion: Indiscriminate decontextualization of psychedelic substances from their contexts – biological, ecological, psychological, and social – runs the risk of undermining the wellspring which makes them efficacious, rendering them as one more tool in the pharmaceutical lineup.