Specters of Social Antagonism: The Cultural Psychodynamics of Dream Aggression among the Tzotzil Maya of San Juan Chamula (Chiapas, Mexico)

Abstract

In this article, I present an analysis of “persecution dreams” among the Tzotzil Maya of San Juan Chamula, discussing the complex connections among sickness, interpersonal aggression, ideologies of social antagonism, and the spectral phantasies that shadow these social phenomena. Building on this ethnographic foundation, I present a “cultural psychodynamic” account framed in terms of projective‐introjective dynamics (functioning at both the individual and social levels), arguing that the aggression dream serves as an experience structure in which inner and outer realities become deeply interwoven—often resulting in an increased sense of insecurity and existential threat. At its broadest level, this article is concerned with the affective dimensions of dream life, the processing of real affects and social relations within the register of phantasy, and the transposition of these phantasy‐laden feelings back into waking life, where they influence not only the individual's sense of well‐being, but the tenor of actual interpersonal relations.

Anthropology and Psychoanalysis: The Looping Effects of Persons and Social Worlds

“…The influence of the social context on dreaming is most obvious with regard to the manifest content of dream images and scenarios, such content being more directly revealing of a dreamer's entanglements with the social world that Freud assumed in The Interpretation of Dreams (Hollan 2003b(Hollan , 2004a(Hollan , 2005(Hollan , 2008(Hollan , 2014(Hollan , 2017. Content may vary impressively from conversations with God or other religious figures or spiritual beings (Hollan & Wellenkamp 1994, 1996Hollan 1995Hollan , 2014Lohmann 2003Lohmann , 2021 Groark 2008Groark , 2009Groark , 2010Groark , 2013Groark , 2017Mittermaier 2011Mittermaier , 2021 to cultural and historical anxieties of various kinds (Stewart 2017, Newsom 2021, Sheriff 2021b) to images of social dislocation and discrimination (Mageo 2011(Mageo , 2021Bulkeley 2021). Yet beyond this variation in manifest content, social context also directly affects how dreams are categorized, used, expressed, and actually experienced by people, depending on whether the dreams are considered nonsense, a prophetic message, social gnosis, or something else.…”

“…Some of these imaginal transformations resemble quite closely those identified by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, including condensation in images and scenes and the telescoping of time, place, emotion, and experience. Although evidence strongly indicates that Freud was correct in proposing that the ambiguity of dream images may be used at times to conceal troubling thoughts and feelings from self-consciousness (Groark 2009(Groark , 2017Denham 2020), there is also reason to believe that such ambiguity may also arise from the processes of dream and imaginal formation themselves (Stevenson 2014, Pandolfo 2018, through mimesis (Mageo 2021), memory consolidation (Lohmann 2021), and play (Bulkeley 2021), among other possibilities.…”

“…To be clear, the close study of individual lives and their social and cultural psychodynamics (Mageo 2015;Groark 2017Groark , 2019 is not the naive study or promotion of individualism or its ideological and sociopolitical correlates. It is the study, in a variety of social contexts, of the degrees to which and the ways in which individual people actually internalize and are moved by the norms and structures of their behavioral environments (Hallowell 1955) or not.…”

Entre sueños y realidades: La cultura onírica entre los tzotziles de San Juan Chamula en Los Altos de Chiapas

“…Algunos sueños dan entrada a las agresiones anímicas de otros, pero al mismo tiempo dotan de valiosa evidencia diagnóstica útil para la curación chamánica (Contreras Cortés, 1998;Groark, 2017). En Los Altos de Chiapas los chamanes -j'iloletik-se especializan en tratamientos de enfermedades anímicas engendradas por los daños o insultos que sufren una o más almas de una persona, sea la esencial o el animal connatal.…”

“…Debo a BernardFaure (1996) los términos "revelaciones ontofánicas" y "manifestaciones hierofánicas". 4 Los mayas tzotziles, como muchos grupos tanto en Mesoamérica como en el Pacífico, tienen una postura interpretativa propia frente a la posibilidad de conocer el pensamiento de otros: el estado interno de otros -en sus dimensiones cognitiva, volitiva y afectiva-es considerado relativamente obnubilado en las formas de apreciación cotidianas (véaseGroark, 2008Groark, , 2013Groark, , 2017. Esta "opacidad social" es una percepción generalizada en el mundo maya y parece ser un axioma básico de la vida social local.…”