Maja Kohek, Ph.D. is ICEERS’ Research Program Lead. Maja is a medical anthropologist specializing in the ethnographic and public-health dimensions of psychoactive plant practices. She is research coordinator at ICEERS and a member of the Medical Anthropology Research Center (MARC) at Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona, Spain). Her work integrates ethnography, critical public-health analysis and drug policy research to examine how ritualized engagements with ancestral medicines such as ayahuasca, cannabis and ibogaine shape health, well-being and community practices across diverse cultural contexts.
She has co-authored several epidemiological studies on long-term ayahuasca users, employing health indicators and psychosocial measures to assess well-being and lifestyle outcomes in Europe. She has also led ethnographic research on the ritualized use of cannabis within a self-managed community in Catalonia, highlighting forms of social regulation, harm reduction and communal spirituality as alternatives to prohibitionist framings. Her anthropological work further addresses the globalization of ayahuasca practices, exploring questions of authenticity, self-care, intercultural exchange, and the role of ancestral medicines in adaptive medical and spiritual systems.
Additionally, she has published on the experiential dimensions of less-studied ancestral medicines such as ibogaine, as well as on epistemological challenges in emergent psychedelic science, reflecting a broader commitment to situating altered states and ancestral medicine practices within their social, cultural and health contexts.
