Revisiting the terminology substance, set and setting: the example of electronic music festivals and the urban rites of consumption of ayahuasca

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore a little discussed aspect in the studies on psychoactive consumption: the methodology. Developed by Leary in the 1950s, retaken by Zinberg in the 1980s and by MacRae and Simões in the 1990s, the methodological tool “substance, set and setting”, which has aided several studies over half a century, is threatened by theoretical patterns  who  consider  it  essentialist,  deterministic  and  that  necessarily leads to the specialization of the sciences in the studies of psychoactives: substance (pharmacology, chemistry, physics, biology), set (psychology) and setting (Social Sciences). From the examples of the festivals of electronic music and transcultural therapies, we perceive how the different spaces of psychoactive consumption found in the cities reorganize, in a much differentiated manner, the notions of substance, set and setting according to the problems and disputes to which they are inserted. The hypothesis of this article is that the pertinence of Zinberg’s terminology in the anthropological analyzes of phenomena linked to the consumption of psychoactive will present itself if we move or extend the notion of social to the other two domains of the trilogy.