Shipibo-Conibo religion, practiced along the Ucayali River in the Peruvian Amazon, centers on a cosmology of layered worlds and on healing and divinatory knowledge carried by ritual specialists who work with ayahuasca and other plant medicines. This article does not set out how a healing session is conducted or reproduce the icaros, the sung ritual patterns healers use; those remain the working knowledge of trained practitioners. What Shipibo culture has made public, and increasingly celebrated internationally, is kene, an intricate geometric design system applied to textiles, pottery and the body, which practitioners describe as perceived in visionary states and transmitted through apprenticeship, documented in scholarship including Peter Roe's study of Amazonian cosmology.
Kene designs are living, individually attributed work rather than a shared public pattern free for anyone to copy, and Shipibo artists have publicly raised concerns when kene motifs appeared in commercial products without their communities' involvement, a dispute over cultural property that has drawn attention well beyond Peru. The Ucayali basin has also become a destination for international visitors seeking ayahuasca healing, a demand that sits alongside, and sometimes in tension with, the tradition's own terms for who may practice and how. Shipibo-Conibo religion remains actively practiced today alongside Catholic and evangelical Christian belief many Shipibo families also hold.