Rowan Glass is an anthropologist, journalist, editor, and filmmaker from Oregon.

His research and reporting have taken him from Indigenous territories in Colombia and Mexico to primary schools in Senegal, Kurdish restaurants in Greece, music festivals in Morocco, and anarchist gatherings in the Pacific Northwest. In all his work, Rowan endeavors to help tell engaging stories about underreported people and places through incisive research and creative endeavors. Whether at a keyboard, behind a camera, or in the field, Rowan is always looking for the next chance to apply his skills to creative and impactful ends. Rowan holds a BA in cultural anthropology from the University of Oregon and is currently an MA student in folklore at Indiana University Bloomington.

ISFP 2025 ABSTRACT:

Ethnomusicology – „Shamans and Charlatans: The Circulation of ‚Medicine Music‘ in Colombia’s Sibundoy Valley“

n the Sibundoy Valley, a basin situated between the Andes and the Amazon in southwest Colombia, an emergent musical-spiritual genre known as “medicine music” circulates at the intersection between the valley’s two Indigenous populations, the Inga and Kamëntšá, and non-Indigenous visitors. These Indigenous communities are heirs to a unique musical tradition combining Andean and Amazonian sounds, often in connection to the locally prominent tradition of ayahuasca shamanism. Non-Indigenous musicians, on the other hand, have drawn on local Indigenous symbolisms to create a New Age-inflected genre evoking stereotyped neoshamanic and ecospiritual aesthetics. “Medicine music” refers to this syncretic genre, which asserts the healing powers of the music as a product of the shamanic and ceremonial milieus it comes out of, often with an explicit ecological dimension.

In some cases, non-Indigenous musicians active in the Sibundoy Valley have gained commercial success in venues and markets far from the valley itself. For instance, the genre has become increasingly popular among New Age showgoers in tourist hotspots like Ibiza and Tulum. In these cases, it is possible to see a form of cultural appropriation and extractivism implicit in the genre. In the Sibundoy Valley, however, something more interesting has occurred: Indigenous musicians have begun to reclaim the genre for themselves.

This reclamation suggests that the Indigenous communities of the Sibundoy Valley intentionally adopt and deploy the discursive assumptions about Indigeneity embedded in medicine music to assert their legitimacy as ecologically and spiritually privileged stewards of the land. This exemplifies a strategic adaptation to a contemporary instance of cultural appropriation in a musical-spiritual vein. More broadly, it serves as a case study of how musical forms and associated discursive concepts circulate in intercultural environments, shedding light on how music can serve as a vehicle for the sociopolitical ambitions of different actors.