Broadly framed, my research interests are situated at the intersection of medical, psychological and linguistic anthropology, with an emphasis on the medical culture of the indigenous societies of the Americas.  Primary field research has focused on the ethnomedicine and ethnopsychology of the Tzotzil-speaking Maya of Highland Chiapas, Mexico, among whom I have carried out a total of 28 months of research (12 months of dissertation research, with approximately 16 months of field work in both Tzeltal and Tzotzil communities from 1991 to the present). Principal research concerns have centered on household diagnostic and therapeutic strategies, medical ethnobotany, ethnophysiological understandings of the body in health and illness, and the role of dysphoric emotion in the folk medical system.
[ comprehensive list of publications available here ]

Emotion and Illness among the Tzotzil Maya

My NSF-funded dissertation—Pathogenic Emotions: Sentiment, Sociality, and Sickness among the Tzotzil Maya of San Juan Chamula, Chiapas, Mexico—represents a transition toward a more psychologically-inflected approach to medical anthropology. This project provides a detailed investigation into the experience, expression, and management of emotion-based illnesses among the highland Maya. Building on a fine-grained ethnosemantic analysis of the language of dysphoric emotion in Tzotzil, I develop a somatically-based model of “emotional ethnophysiology,” examining the social and interactional processes (many of which take place during shamanic diagnosis and curing) that simultaneously articulate and sustain the connection between negative emotional experience and physical illness. My dissertation contributes to contemporary anthropological interests in idioms of suffering, the cultural configuration of health and illness, processes of somatization, and the role of emotion ideologies in canalizing and shaping individual responses to somatically mediated dysphoric emotional experience.
[ Abstract and Table of Contents | PDF Copy of Dissertation ]

Cultural Psychodynamics: Tzotzil Maya Dream Experience

Since completing the dissertation, I have been analyzing a corpus of data centering on the role of dream experience in traditional Highland Maya diagnostic and curing practices. I am in the process of writing a series of interlinked articles on highland Maya dream epistemology, which I hope to fashion into a book. Current articles (both published and in preparation) include: an anlysis of narrative devices used to negotiate questions of personal agency and responsibility in the investiture dreams of aspiring curers; the experience of pathogenic dreams in symptom formation and illness etiology; the relationship between dreaming and “empathic in-sight”; and symbols of personal and social power in the dreams of a Chamula curer. Drawing on fine-grained ethnomedical and ethnopsychological data, these in-process articles represent a preliminary effort to develop a “cultural psychodynamic” approach to illness and healing, taking the Tzotzil Maya as a sustained ethnographic case study. The first of these articles, “Placing the Self: Dreaming, Discourse, and Disavowed Volition among the Highland Maya of Chiapas, Mexico,” was awarded the American Psychoanalytic Association’s prestigious 2006 CORST Prize in Psychoanalysis in Culture.

Future Project:
Religious Conversion, Urbanization, and Ethnomedical Change
in Highland Chiapas

Future research interests in Chiapas reflect an increasingly applied and urban focus. Shifting from the “traditional” indigenous community setting of my previous research, I will be pursuing the question of intergenerational change in highland Maya medical ideology and practice among the vigorous and rapidly-growing population of urban Tzotzil Maya living on the outskirts of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. This population consists largely of Evangelical Protestant converts (as well as a small but growing number of Mayan converts to fundamentalist Islam) who have been expelled from their natal communities over the past forty years. I am interested in exploring persistence and/or change in traditional ethnomedical models, examining the socialization processes through which local ethnotheories of health, illness, and well-being are internalized and elaborated in the course of development in this changed setting.

This project will contribute to an understanding of the complex formation of medical subjectivities, as well as the ways in which alternate religiously-derived ethnotheories of health, illness, society, and personhood are deployed by individuals in the service of negotiating various aspects of their medical lives in an increasingly pluralistic society. The intergenerational urban context offers a controlled “natural laboratory” for examining the effects of rapid social and economic change on health status within an indigenous Mesoamerican community (as reflected in such empirical measures as household nutrition, ethnoepidemiological profiles, and the utilization of medical resources), as well as the elaboration of new subjective orientations toward the medical (including changing meanings of well-being and illness; novel explanatory models for health conditions; and the articulation of medical experience with new cultural forms and institutions).