Rethinking Healing, Rethinking Power

Museums today are faced with the difficult task of reimagining their genesis as imperial institutions, and the past few years of museum boards in Amsterdam have been particularly cognizant of steering in the direction of decolonization practices. In the case of the Tropenmusuem, of course, this is an especially turbulent topic, as it houses a very large collection of colonially-acquired goods.

The museum’s top-floor exhibition Healing Power (on display until August 28th) did the best it could in digesting a bigger bite than it could chew. The premise stretched broadly across several contested layers of spirituality and materiality— the exhibit displayed objects running from Santiago Rodriguez Olazabal’s thrilling Yoruba-descendent El aliento del Leopardo and a jar of tripang (Sea Cucumber) from Indonesia’s Riau Islands to a recording of Marina Abramovic’s The Artist Is Present and contemporary psy-trance beat visualizers. Walking through, it seemed as though the exhibition could not quite decide what it was about.

Weaving any narrative about shamaic healing is already an incredibly complex endeavor, but to house it in a museum of ‘world cultures’ descendant from the peak of the Netherlands’ imperial era reinforces the need for careful consideration of the exhibit’s curation. While it noticeably avoided the pitfalls of lacking object provenance, thus establishing direct links to the specific cultures from which objects were displayed, the same colonial premise of ‘world culture’-al hodgepodge remained prevalent by its attempt to convey such a broad topic in such a minimal amount of time and space.

The set-up is rather overwhelming, with no real lines drawn between artistic and spiritual practices

Healing Power attempted to cover far too much ground. The exhibition begins with introductions to six ritual practitioners from different backgrounds– Santo Daime, Winti, Vodun, Witchcraft, and Mestizo and Samí shamanism. Off the bat, the set-up is rather overwhelming, with no real lines drawn between artistic and spiritual practices. (No, the two do not have to be explicitly separate, but when faced with an interpretation of a Lapland shaman’s robe with plastic bird figurines tied all around the front and a European Witch’s reimagining of a ‘Voodoo doll’, it seems a useful detail).

On the other hand, it was a particularly wise choice to begin not by attempting a generic overview of the exhibit, but by presenting individual narratives of ritual and healing practices. It is imperative to understand that in the contemporary world of constant cultural exchange, there is only a very fine line between cosmopolitanism and sticking your nose where it simply doesn’t belong. Certain practices, such as within Voudun and most Indigenous American circles, are closed to outsiders, the mention of which is largely absent from Healing Power. Especially when touching upon topics like the healing experiences of electronic music culture as reincarnations of shamanic ritual practices, it seems like an oversight not to mention what should and should not be accessible to avoid the continuous abuse of neocolonial powers. The initial specificity and relations to individuated practices faded as the exhibition progressed, but would have been an excellent narrative form to upkeep and update as the visitor progresses through the exhibition rooms.

Especially as an institution within a city known for both its drug tourism and its significant advances in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, it’s rather disappointing to see a prosaic approach to healing rituals. In the past years that psychedelic treatments have spent circulating on the periphery of the mainstream, at least a dozen retreat programs have emerged to proselytize the advent of psychedelic therapy. While these programs usually have highly advanced clinical research teams, from the staff rosters it’s very clear that while the ceremonies might be advertised as “100% safe, legal, and sacred,” the latter is a buzzword largely unsupported by any cultural foundation or interrelations with healers equipped to comment on sacrality. In an era where psychedelic therapies are becoming abundantly accessible, it is even more critical to present their origins in an attentive, holistic way.

This is particularly relevant when the discussion approaches the topic of plant medicine, which is featured at several stages throughout the exhibit. Something I found to be particularly noticeable in its absence was any note on how the medicines are being used in therapies today, the issues of biopiracy, and any critical mention of the capitalist exploitation of these ritual ceremonies, as is particularly notable in the case of ayahuasca. Ayahuasca ceremonies in its native Peru are a hot topic in terms of the tourism they draw, bad press from a lack of regulations, and even environmental impacts. A kindred soul to the drug tourist plague well known and debated in Amsterdam, should we not have more compassion for the ways that appropriative and heedless drug tourism can affect local communities?

We have a long way to go before we can synthesize shamanic knowledge with contemporary clinical practices

What’s so difficult about staging an exhibit like Healing Power is the incompatibility of the museum structure with a topic that is fundamentally reliant on the indigenous views of non-Western peoples. To generalize, in a sense, is a fundamentally colonial act that homogenizes and flattens groups that can be categorized and set off to the side. While the Tropenmuseum’s Healing Power initiated a necessary conversation around the complexities of revisiting ritual healing practices through a Western lens, we have a long way to go before we can synthesize shamanic knowledge with contemporary clinical practices; the road is ripe with a need for acknowledging the prevalence of biopiracy, individuating different ritual systems, and encouraging culturally significant voices to partake in institutional decisions within both museums and therapeutic programs.