Emilia Sanabria

About

Emilia Sanabria is a Franco-Colombian anthropologist and full-time researcher based in Paris. Her research explores how more-than-human collectives weave practices of mutual care and regeneration that extend beyond the skin-bound individual. For over two decades, she has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in South America, particularly in Brazil and Peru. 

Learning alongside Indigenous teachers and collaborators as well as traditional and alternative health practitioners in Latin America she has been reflecting on the challenges and potential of reimagining our common human condition in these times of radical planetary transformation.
In her writing and thinking, Emilia brings together anthropology, transpersonal and transcultural psychology, somatics, embodied social justice, decolonial theory, speculative feminism and critical public health. Her research practice involves collaborative design experiments and community-based participatory research that center otherwise ways of knowing with plants.

Between 2018 and 2024 Emilia was Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) funded project “Healing Encounters: Reinventing an indigenous medicine in the clinic and beyond” that examined the expansion and prolific reinventions of healing practices that make use of the Amazonian herbal brew ayahuasca. You can find out more about this work here: https://encounters.cnrs.fr/en
Before this, she undertook extensive ethnographic research focusing on Brazilian women's experiences of their menstrual cycles amid increasing medicalization and pathologization. This research culminated in the publication of her first book, Plastic Bodies: Sex Hormones and Menstrual Suppression in Brazil, released in 2016.
In 2013 her partner introduced her to Holotropic Breathwork and she embarked on the training in 2017, certifying with Grof Transpersonal Training in Colorado in 2022. She also successfully completed the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Science (MAPS) 100-hour MDMA Therapy Training Program in 2021.
Emilia was born in Paris and grew up between Canada, Ecuador, France and the United Kingdom. She is fluent in French, English, Spanish and Portuguese and currently lives in France with her partner, daughter and two cats. Holotropic Breathwork in 2013 and began her training in 2017. She certified with Grof Transpersonal Training in Loveland Colorado in 2022. She has also completed the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Science (MAPS) training in MDMA for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (2021). She is passionate about plants, permaculture, cross-cultural wisdom in more-than-human relationality, the subtle alchemy of space holding and the wisdom of the body and the breath.

In her everyday life, Emilia is an anthropologist and works as a full-time researcher at the CNRS in Paris. She has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in South America (particularly Brazil and Peru) for over two decades. Emilia is currently Principal Investigator of the European Research Council funded project "Healing Encounters: Reinventing an indigenous medicine in the clinic and beyond" that examines the expansion and prolific reinventions of healing practices that make use of the Amazonian herbal brew ayahuasca: https://encounters.cnrs.fr/en

She lives in France with her partner, daughter and two cats and is fluent in French, English, Spanish and Portuguese.

Qualifications

Holotropic Breathwork Facilitation (Grof Transpersonal Training, 2022)

MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD (MAPS, 2021)

PhD in Anthropology (University of Cambridge, 2008)

Masters Development and Environmental Studies (Institut de recherche pour le développement, 2001)

B.Sc. History and Philosophy of Science (University College London, 2000)

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS 

Sanabria, E. (2024). « La Dieta como metodologia » in Lopez Sanchez, José & Mesturini, S. ; Trabajar con las plantas que tienen madres. Diálogos con un Onanya Shipibo. Fineo Editorial. https://encounters.cnrs.fr/ima...

Sanabria, E. & Tofoli, L. F. (forth.) “Integrating Psychedelic Experiences: An Interdisciplinary Discussion” Journal of Psychedelic Studies

Sanabria, E. & Mesturini, S. 2023 “Introduction: Plotting PhytoFutures.” American Anthropologist. 125(3): 673-678 https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.1...

Dumit, J. & Sanabria, E. 2022. Set, Setting and Clinical Trials: Colonial Technologies and Psychedelics. The Palgrave Handbookfor the Anthropology of Technology. Hoeyer, Klaus and Winthereik, Brit Ross (eds), pp291-308 https://encounters.cnrs.fr/ima...

Sanabria, E. 2021. Vegetative Value promissory horizons of therapeutic innovation in the global circulation of ayahuasca. BioSocieties, 16, 387-410 

Sanabria, E. 2020. (Psychedelics) Beyond the “Neuro”.  Cultural Anthropology. https://culanth.org/fieldsight...

Talin, P. and Sanabria, E. 2017. “Ayahuasca’s entwined efficacy: An ethnographic study of ritual healing from ‘addiction’.” International Journal Drug Policy. Vol. 44 pp23-30