The Ancient Modern Institute
– RESEARCH –
Ancient Modern conducts and supports inquiry across the spaces where scientific, cultural, ecological, medicinal, and experiential knowledge intersect. Our research may move through laboratories and universities. It may also move through villages, forests, farms, clinics, ceremonial spaces, and the homes of people who have spent their lives carrying knowledge that has never entered an academic journal.
Areas of Inquiry
01 — PSYCHEDELIC SCIENCE
Psychedelic compounds, altered states of consciousness, neurobiology, therapeutic applications, and the systems surrounding their use.
02 — TRADITIONAL MEDICINE
Medicinal traditions understood as sophisticated systems containing pharmacological, ecological, psychological, cultural, and experiential knowledge.
03 — CONSCIOUSNESS
Altered states, perception, cognition, subjective experience, and questions that remain difficult to examine within conventional scientific frameworks.
04 — ETHNOBOTANY
Relationships between humans, plants, medicines, landscapes, and the knowledge systems that have developed around them.
05 — INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS
Research models in which Indigenous knowledge holders participate as collaborators, intellectual contributors, and decision-makers rather than simply sources of data.
06 — SYSTEMS RESEARCH
The economic, political, cultural, and institutional structures through which knowledge and medicine are researched, commercialized, represented, and distributed.
The method should be rigorous enough for the question — not the question made smaller to fit the method.
How we research
01
Field
We go where the knowledge lives.
The environment surrounding knowledge is often part of the knowledge itself. Understanding a medicine, practice, or tradition may require understanding the ecology, history, language, community, and relationships in which it exists.
02
Relationship
Information gathered without understanding relationship is incomplete.
We invest in understanding the people, histories, and communities surrounding the subjects we study.
03
Rigor
Cultural humility and scientific precision strengthen one another.
Respecting traditional knowledge does not require abandoning scientific rigor. It requires expanding the questions we are willing to investigate while maintaining extraordinary standards for how we investigate them.
04
Reciprocity
Research creates value.
The people and communities who make research possible should participate meaningfully in the value that research creates.