We are in the early 1980s in the United States of America. Hippies are out. Ronald Reagan is in power, Wall Street is booming, and capitalism has won. Snorting coke to electronic music is the new trend. No one wants to hear about the revolution anymore. No one except a few grad students strolling across chemically treated lawns with their bowls of granola and their books by European intellectuals. Jeremy Narby is among them. He is a 22-year-old PhD student in anthropology at Stanford University. He listens to The Psychedelic Furs, smokes cannabis in private and debates inequalities of race, class, and gender.
Then comes the time to leave the ivory tower of academia to conduct his fieldwork. Concerned with Indigenous rights and critical of Western-led development, he travels to the heart of the Peruvian Amazon, to live in an Ashaninka community. Two years later, when he returns to the West Coast, his views about justice and equality have been turned upside down. Fancy arguments and peer-review journals, he now believes, can only take you so far when it comes to fighting inequality.
After handing in his PhD dissertation, he turns his back on academia and starts working for Nouvelle Planète, a Swiss non-governmental organisation that backs community-led development projects across Africa, Asia and Latin America. When we met earlier this year, he told me that during his time at Nouvelle Planète, he had raised slightly more than 10 million Swiss francs, which contributed, among other projects, to the demarcation of six million hectares of land for Indigenous communities in the Amazon. “That’s approximately 1% of the entire surface of the Amazonian forest. It may not have changed the world, but that’s more or less what one can achieve on a practical level in 35 years of work.”
Today, in his sixties, Jeremy Narby lives with his partner Corinne and their dog Django in Porrentruy, a small Swiss town located in the Jura. Independent of any institution or university, and recently retired from Nouvelle Planète, he continues to write books aimed at raising awareness of biodiversity. “I’m basically an anthropologist who focuses on plants.”
The ability to travel between different epistemological paradigms, much as one might move between languages or perspectives, is what Narby calls bi-cognitivism. In the West, we tend to consider valid what can be tested and replicated or shaped through words, syntax and figures. Our teachers produce books and articles, run experiments, and hold degrees. In the Amazon, this very direction of analysing and dissecting a phenomenon from an exterior and neutral point of view is reversed. Not only are plants seen as teachers, but they are the ones testing humans and, by doing so, showing them something they previously ignored. In this logic, shamans can be seen as mountain guides who, through practice and experience, are the best equipped to lead others on paths that would otherwise be restricted or dangerous.
In 1995, Jeremy Narby published Le Serpent Cosmique (Ed. Georg), challenging our anthropocentric view of nature. Translated into seventeen languages, the book continues to sell decades later — a long-seller, as the publishing industry calls it. Drawing on his firsthand experiences with ayahuasca among the Ashaninka, Narby explores the possibility that visions dismissed as mere hallucinations might actually be a precious source of knowledge. Back then, ayahuasca had yet to become an attraction for mass tourism, and Narby’s conclusions were far outside mainstream thinking. They still are.
Indeed, since the revival of psychedelics, shamans have gained in popularity and hallucinogenic substances are increasingly being analysed in labs. This is undoubtedly progress, but it is also another way of westernising foreign knowledge by stripping it of part of its richness. I for instance, have been experiencing psychedelics for the last couple of years, and it’s only by becoming familiar with Jeremy Narby’s work that I realised how wrong my approach had been. When taking psilocybin, LSD, or Iboga, I’d pay attention to the setting, but not once did it occur to me to listen to the substance. In other words, I’d take psychedelics the way I take aspirin or antidepressants, that is, with a predetermined purpose such as relieving a headache or silencing dark thoughts. Psychedelics can certainly be consumed in this manner, with a fixed objective, yet, as I came to understand through Jeremy Narby’s work, their power reveals itself through our ability to receive their teachings. One may take psychedelics to stop drinking or sniffing coke, but the fuller way to go about it is to listen to what the plant has to say and show. Perhaps drinking and sniffing coke aren’t the main issues. Perhaps something else needs to be acknowledged before changing this or that habit. To receive this knowledge, one needs to listen, to widen one’s perspective and, moreover, to momentarily let go of one’s objectivity.
While reading his latest book on cannabis, as well as Le Serpent Cosmique and Intelligence dans la nature, it became clear to me that the crisis we are experiencing today, in the form of global warming, mass migration, natural disasters, and so on, is partly rooted in our inability to hear, perceive, and relate to other beings that share the Earth with us and on which we depend. Our crisis is relational. We understand that our behaviour needs to change; we talk about recycling and carbon footprints, yet we fail to find the path to reconnect with non-human life. For those who are seeking to widen their understanding and perception of nature and who have limited patience for considerations that have cut all ties with scientific inquiry, Narby’s books are definitely a good place to start.
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How would you describe yourself?
I’m an ordinary Western white guy. Born in Canada, moved to Switzerland when I was 10. Had a happy suburban childhood and played lots of ball hockey. My mother was a housewife and my father a businessman. Narby is actually an anglicization of Nabi, which means “prophet” in Arabic. My father’s real name was Farouk Abdel Nabi. He was born in Cairo and raised in London. When the Second World War ended, he was 18. Back then in England, no matter how smart you were, if your name was Farouk Abdel Nabi, your chances of success were slim. So he emigrated to Canada. He left with my mother and 200 dollars in his pocket, changed his name to Frank Narby, and started working for a shipping company in Montreal. His goal was to become rich. He swore he would make a million dollars, and by 40, he had made several.
Were you driven by similar ambitions when you were young?
Not at all. I had no idea what I wanted to do, or what I was capable of. The one thing that has driven me to this day is injustice. I want to know why, when there is enough to go around, there are so many inequalities in the world. We claim to hold democratic and humanist values, and yet these inequalities persist. I want to know why. It couldn’t be simpler.
Jeremy Narby with The Young Gods, Geneva, 2004 © Boris Meister
Your sensibility to injustice is what drew you to anthropology?
I first studied history in England, then I stumbled across a Stanford program called “Inequality of Race, Class and Gender” – precisely what I was interested in. I applied, and the rest followed.
You arrived at Stanford in the early 1980s. What was the atmosphere like back then?
I got there less than a month before Ronald Reagan was shot. Remember that? 1981? Back then, the Stanford anthropology department was a ‘hotbed’ of Marxists and feminists. I couldn’t have imagined a better education for an ordinary guy like myself. We spent our days reading Marx and Foucault. My first big success was a paper I wrote on Pierre Bourdieu’s Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique. Because I was fluent in French, I was one of the few who could make sense of it.
You then conducted your ethnographic research among the Asháninka in the Amazonian forest. Why there?
Well, I had to choose a place to do my fieldwork. I remember looking at a map of the world , wondering where I could possibly go. One of my professors suggested a place with vast natural resources inhabited by Indigenous people. He told me, “If you’re interested in Third World development and inequality between rich and poor countries, the Peruvian Amazon is where it’s all happening right now.” In the 1980s, development projects backed by international banks were cutting roads into pristine forest, with little to no regard for the rights of the people who had been living there for generations. The government called it “the conquest of Peru by Peruvians.” Development experts, capitalist and communist alike, didn’t consider the way Indigenous people used their resources to be rational, and that was reason enough to take their land. That said, the Peruvian Amazon was probably the last place on Earth I wanted to go. I don’t like heat or mosquitoes, and I’m scared of snakes. I’m more of a northerner in that way. Anyway, I showed up in Lima with a letter of introduction and a research plan designed to help Indigenous communities keep their land.
After living for six months in the Amazonian Forest, Pichis Valley, 1985 © Jon Christensen
What happened then?
My initial aim was to study how Indigenous people used their natural resources, to make the case for their land rights. When you cut down large areas of rainforest, it doesn’t grow back. You end up with sterile savanna, which leads you to cut down even more. It makes no sense, ecologically or economically. Back then, my concerns were human rights, which is a typically anthropocentric, Western approach. Yet Indigenous leaders saw things differently. In 1983, when they testified before the US Congress in Washington, they maintained that the forest wasn’t just their territory. It was also the territory of plants, animals, and fish. Human and non-human rights, they argued, were intertwined. Imagine people in Washington in 1983 hearing about the rights of insects and plants! When I arrived among the Asháninka, I couldn’t make sense of their knowledge, or explain where it came from. When I asked, they told me it came from teacher plants such as ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic plant brew. I eventually tried ayahuasca myself, and it remains one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. There was a true before and an after. It took me years to understand what it was all about. Looking back, I think one of the things I learned is that life as we know it is not only about human beings. As an anthropologist, you focus on humans. Classically, anthropology has come down to humans studying humans, but there is so much more to the picture. By listening to the Indigenous people, I gradually realised human rights were inseparable from all the rest – just as the Indigenous leaders had argued in Washington. The shift began with The Cosmic Serpent (1995), followed by Intelligence in Nature (2005) and then Plant Teachers (2021): I’ve been increasingly focusing on the relationship between people and plants.
Including The Book of Cannabis (2026), which has little to do with human rights.
Yet injustice remains at its core. Because human madness doesn’t only target other humans. It extends to plants, too. My aim in this book was to understand how cannabis became one of the most controversial plants on Earth. It has been condemned, banned, celebrated, used as medicine, and turned into a commodity. Some see it as a plant; others as a drug. The way we understand, classify, use, or prohibit a plant says a great deal about us. In that sense, The History of Cannabis is another way of telling human history.
When did you become a writer?
While finishing my PhD, I needed a side job. Someone at L’Agrijournal in Fribourg was looking for a part-time journalist. I ended up taking the assignment. I was 27 and convinced I knew nothing. But after writing an article, I realized I could actually read and write. Give me a book, and the next day I could tell you what it was about. I suppose that’s a skill in itself.
Django helping Jeremy Narby, Porrentruy 2026
What do you need in order to write?
To be left alone! No appointments, nothing to distract me. I work best between 8 p.m. and 2 a.m. Once I’ve finished about two-thirds of a chapter, my partner, Corinne, reads it and tells me whether it’s understandable and interesting. If she says it isn’t, I go back to the drawing board. If she says it is, I move on. Sleep is essential, of course, and ideally, a coffee every couple of hours.
If you were a philanthropic billionaire, into which cause would you throw your money?
Allowing space for other species, in other words, biodiversity. I’d like humans to understand why it’s important to leave space for other species.
If you could reincarnate, where, when, and as what would you choose to come back?
I’d come back as a blue whale. In the Pacific. Today.
Today?
I’m a person of today. I like challenges.
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