The Activist Work: Nouvelle Planète

“For thirty-five years, Narby worked as Amazonian projects director for the Swiss NGO Nouvelle Planète, backing indigenous land rights, education, health, and botanical preservation projects in Peru and Brazil.”

Jeremy Narby is sometimes discussed primarily as the author of The Cosmic Serpent, the DNA hypothesis, the ayahuasca visions, the anthropologist who went native in the theoretical sense. The practical work that grounded the book and occupied most of his professional life is less well known.

From 1989 to 2024, thirty-five years, Narby served as Amazonian projects director for Nouvelle Planète, a Swiss NGO. The work was not theoretical. It involved land rights negotiations for indigenous communities whose territories were threatened by oil, timber, and agricultural development. It involved primary education projects. It involved village health programs. It involved fish farms, tree nurseries, and botanical documentation.

This practical work is the foundation that makes The Cosmic Serpent's arguments credible rather than merely interesting. Narby was not a theorist visiting the Amazon, he was a working development professional with sustained relationships in specific communities, who happened to encounter something in those communities that his training had not prepared him for.

The combination, rigorous field presence, institutional accountability, and a willingness to report what he actually observed rather than what his framework could accommodate, distinguishes his work from the more credulous ayahuasca literature that has proliferated since 1998.

His departure from Nouvelle Planète in 2024, after thirty-five years, marked the end of what is probably the most sustained engagement between a Western anthropologist and specific Amazonian communities in the context of plant medicine knowledge. The network he built and the documentation he created represent a resource that the communities themselves, as much as Western researchers, will determine how to use.

Sources

• Wikipedia, Jeremy Narby
• Nouvelle Planète organization records
• Narby, The Cosmic Serpent (1998)