Toward a Cultural Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity: The Extended Relational Field of the Tzotzil Maya of Highland Chiapas, Mexico

In Press: Language & Communication (Special Issue: “Intersubjectivity: Cultural Limits, Extensions and Construals”; E. Danziger and A. Rumsey, eds.)

*Note: This is an uncorrected page proof. When citing, please refer to the final published version.

Among the Tzotzil Maya of San Juan Chamula (Chiapas Highlands, Mexico), dream experience, symptom formation, and certain forms of emotionally heightened self-consciousness are drawn upon to gain knowledge of the social surround. Through an exploration of these ostensibly non-intersubjective domains (and their epistemological and ontological entailments), I begin to trace the contours and dynamics of the “extended relational field” of the highland Maya, emphasizing a distinctly multimodal approach to intersubjectivity which includes interpersonal relations, intersomatic processes, and soul-based “counterpart relations.” By attending to social experience across diverse phenomenal levels, contemporary Tzotzil Maya are able to cultivate a more fully dimensional understanding of the dispositional surround—particularly in terms of those aspects of feeling and intention that are systematically stripped from most face to face interactions. Through this discussion, I hope to broaden the frame through which we view cross-cultural inflections of intersubjectivity, emphasizing the importance of tracing the differential manifestations of relational processes across diverse—and often unexpected—experiential registers, only some of which involve “minds coming to knowing other minds.

Devereux's Paradox: Disciplined Subjectivity as the Royal Road to Objectivity

Paper presented at the 2011 Biennial Meeting of the Society for Psychological Anthropoology

In Devereux’s classic anthropological text “From Anxiety to Method,” the existence and role of unconscious dynamics is postulated as a fundamental variable that must be accounted for in order to understand the observational and interactional field of the human sciences. In other words, the "subjective response" is part and parcel of the observational field, and is thus a piece of “data” to be understood. Despite his commitment to what we might refer to as a proto-intersubjective field theory, Devereux’s tendency to emphasize the “distorting” impact of subjectivity retains elements of a positivist approach in which the subjective element—no matter how valuable—is a “factor” to be corrected for in the pursuit of a more objective and “scientific” accounting. In this paper, I bring Devereux’s epistemological and methodological approach into dialogue with parallel developments in psychoanalytic hermeneutics, namely Heinrich Racker's seminal 1957 work on transference-countertransference dynamics. While Devereux tends to take what we might call the “negative path” in his work, drawing our attention to the myriad countertransference interferences that arise in the course of the ethnographer’s data collection and interpretive work, Racker highlights the positive uses of countertransference, setting out to clarify the processes underpinning the interpretive attitude—the work involved in the “intention to understand.” Through this discussion, I balance Devereux’s tendency to emphasize the “distortions” brought about by countertransference reactions—namely anxiety and its derivatives—with a focus on the ways in which positively inflected “subjective factors” might allow for increased insight and empathically-mediated understanding of the interpersonal field in which self and other emerge and become knowable. I close with an exploration of the implications of a transference-based interpretive model for anthropological hermeneutics.

Willful Souls: Dreaming and the Dialectics of Self-Experience among the Tzotzil Maya of Highland Chiapas, Mexico

Published 2010 in Toward an Anthropology of the Will (Keith M. Murphy and C. Jason Throop, eds.)

In this chapter I discuss the link between dreaming and "disavowed volition" among the Tzotzil Maya of highland Chiapas, Mexico. Through a close examination of the psychological and social dynamics of "dream investiture" (in which individuals are divinely appointed to specialized vocational and religious responsibilities), I illustrate the ways in which basic epistemological and ontological assumptions toward dream experience yield a culturally distinct approach to willfulness and self-assertion; one in which the most experientially "willful" component of the person—the waking self of daily life—is also viewed as only partially agentic, subject to the intentions, desires, and wills of other agents, located both internally and externally. In the case of investiture dreams, the resulting social and psychological transformations are not seen as mediated by individual desire or will; rather, they represent submission to a divine mandate that reveals both the will of the deities as well as the previously unknown potencies of the dreamer's essential self.

The Angel in the Gourd: Ritual, Therapeutic, and Protective Uses of Tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) among the Tzeltal and Tzotzil Maya of Chiapas, Mexico

Published 2010 in Journal of Ethnobiology 30(1):5-30

In this article, I document contemporary highland Maya use of traditional tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) preparations among the highland Maya (Tzeltal-Tzotzil) of Chiapas, Mexico. Among the Ancient Maya, Nicotiana was considered a sacred plant, closely associated with deities of earth and sky, and used for both visionary and therapeutic ends. The contemporary Tzeltal and Tzotzil Maya of Highland Chiapas are bearers of this ethnobotanical inheritance, preserving a rich and varied tradition of Nicotiana use and folklore. The entire tobacco plant is viewed as a primordial medicine and a powerful botanical ‘‘helper’’ or ‘‘protector.’’ Depending on the condition to be treated, whole Nicotiana leaves used are used alone or in combination with other herbs in the preparation of various medicinal plasters and teas. In its most common form, fresh or ‘‘green’’ leaves are ground with slaked lime to produce an intoxicating oral snuff that serves as both a protective and therapeutic agent. Despite its historical and cultural significance, traditional tobacco use is declining in favor of smoked tobaccos. The article closes with a discussion of the social transformations responsible for this decline, reviewing research that suggests tobacco powder snuffs may be less dangerous to health than smoked tobaccos, despite their addictive potential.

Discourses of the Soul: The Negotiation of Personal Agency in Tzotzil Maya Dream Narrative

Published 2009 in American Ethnologist 36(4):705-721.

Winner of 2011 Boyer Prize for Contributions to Psychoanalytic Anthropology, awarded by the Society for Psychological Anthropology (SPA) of the American Anthropological Association.

In this article, I examine the framing of personal agency in Tzotzil Maya dream narrative. Drawing on contemporary linguistic, psychodynamic, and phenomenological approaches, I focus on the lexical and semantic resources typical of highland Maya dream talk, illustrating the way these resources can be used to pragmatically negotiate questions of volition and authorial responsibility in relation to dream experience. By locating experience at a distance from the speaker, this framing provides an expressive resource for managing—mitigating, diffusing, or even disclaiming—agentic responsibility for described events or experiences, particularly those with significant implications for social status or self-definition. I close with reflections on the interpretive potential of an integrative “cultural psychodynamic” approach, one that draws on discourse-analytic, ethnographic, and psychoanalytic methods and theories in the service of understanding complex cultural subjectivities.

Keywords: Chiapas, highland Maya, dreaming, agency, ethnopsychology, evidentiality, narrative, cultural psychodynamics

Social Opacity and the Dynamics of Empathic In-Sight among the Tzotzil Maya of Chiapas, Mexico

Published 2008 in Ethos 36(4):427-448

In this article, I explore local constructions of empathic access and social knowing among the highland Maya of San Juan Chamula. I argue that a pervasive sense of social opacity—a presumed inability to accurately know the motivations, potencies, and identities of social others—gives rise to a moral-interpretive dilemma centering on the degree of concordance between the publicly presented self and the subjective or ‘‘private’’ self. I introduce the phrase ‘‘empathic in-sight’’ to refer to those processes—both real and fantasy based—intended to produce an understanding of the inner states of others (in terms of underlying emotions, feelings, motivations, thoughts, and desires), thereby restoring a degree of transparency to everyday social interactions. The phrase is meant to suggest a dynamic and active process of ‘‘seeing within,’’ through which one attempts to gain access to, and understanding of, otherwise occluded conative and cognitive states—particularly those dimensions of the self that are actively hidden from view.

Keywords: Chiapas, Tzotzil Maya, empathy, intersubjectivity, emotion, ethnopsychology

Vital Warmth and Well-Being: Steambathing as Household Therapy among the Tzeltal and Tzotzil Maya of Highland Chiapas, Mexico

Published 2005 in Social Science & Medicine 61:785-795

Among the Maya, the cultural history of steambathing spans more than two millennia. Although it has largely disappeared from the lowlands, household-level steambathing persists in several highland Maya communities in Chiapas, Mexico. In this article, I present an overview of therapeutic steambathing among the Tzeltal and Tzotzil Maya. Through an extended discussion of the beliefs and practices surrounding steambathing, I develop several features of highland Maya thinking about physical health and ‘‘well-being’’. In particular, I examine a set of ethnophysiological representations relating to the ‘‘thermal’’ nature of functional bodies, and the relationship of these models to the maintenance and restoration of health. The highland Maya have articulated an elaborate understanding of physical health and well-being coded in an idiom of ‘‘vital warmth’’, and directed toward the preservation and augmentation of the endogenous heat necessary for vitality and vigor. These models simultaneously reflect empirical understandings of bodily states in health and illness, as well as metaphorical assumptions about the thermal nature of functional psychosocial identities. Steambathing draws on and reinforces these models, constituting a core cultural technology for radically altering the thermal state of the patient, an experience which the highland Maya regard as deeply beneficial. The paper closes with a discussion of recent biomedical research into the physiological effects of hyperthermal therapies.

Pathogenic Emotions: Sentiment, Sociality, and Sickness among the Tzotzil Maya of San Juan Chamula, Chiapas, Mexico

Ph.D. Dissertation in Anthropology (UCLA, 2005) — 586 pp.

Taxonomic Identity of "Hallucinogenic" Harvester Ant (Pogonomyrmex californicus) Confirmed

Published 2001 in Journal of Ethnobiology 21(2):133-144

The use of California harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex californicus) for visionary and therapeutic ends was an important but poorly-documented tradition in native south-central California.  In this brief report, a confirmation of the taxonomic identity of the red ant species used in Califomia is presented, and the descriptive record of its use is supplemented with additional ethnographic accounts.  This taxonomic identification of this species is of particular importance, as visionary red ant ingestion provides the only well-documented case of the widespread use of an insect as an hallucinogenic agent.

To Warm the Blood, to Warm the Flesh: The Role of the Steambath in Highland Maya (Tzeltal-Tzotzil) Ethnomedicine

Published 1997 in Journal of Latin American Lore 20(1):3-96

Ritual and Therapeutic Use of Hallucinogenic Harvester Ants (Pogonomyrmex) in Native South-Central California

Published 1996 in Journal of Ethnobiology 16(1):1-29.

Red harvester ants of the genus Pogonomyrmex played a central role as vision-inducing agents in the religious and medical systems of many indigenous groups in southern and south-central California. The ants were ingested alive in massive quantities in order to induce prolonged catatonic states, during which hallucinogenic visions were reported to manifest. They also played an important role in both curative and preventative medicine, treating a diverse body of natural and supernatural ailments. In this article I present an ethnographic and toxicological overview of the ritual and therapeutic use of red ants, bringing together both published and unpublished accounts in an attempt to reconstruct this poorly-known facet of indigenous California culture. The data presented in this paper strongly suggest that, through either direct or indirect action on the central nervous system, massive quantities of Pogonomyrmex venom are capable of producing highly altered metabolic states during which hallucinatory visions are apt to manifest. This topic is of considerable interest, as it is the first well-documented ethnographic example of an hallucinogenic agent of insect origin.

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