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. [Chiapas, Tzotzil Maya, empathy, emotion, ethnopsychology]

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.

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.

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