Placing the Self:  Dreaming, Discourse, and Disavowed Volition among the Tzotzil Maya of Highland Chiapas, Mexico

 Speaker: Kevin Groark, Ph.D., Cultural Anthropologist from University of Southern California
Discussants: Howard Welsh, MD and Helena Hansen, MD, PhD

 Wednesday, January 16, 2008, 6:30 PM
Smilow Room 1301, NYU Medical Center, 550 First Avenue

 Dessert & snacks will be served
Abstract

Among the highland Maya of Chiapas, dreams matter.  In this talk, Dr. Groark explores the basic assumptions of highland Maya dream theory in an attempt to understand precisely how they matter, and from whence they derive their unique social effects and influences.  A set of related questions will be discussed:  How is it that dreams gain the power to transform individual self-organization and social relationships?  How is this "processive" power of dreams related to epistemological assumptions framing dream experience and the relation of dreaming to the self?  And more generally, in what way do culturally-localized dream theories – including the psychoanalytic approach to dreams – potentiate some social and personal uses of dream experience, while foreclosing others?

Kevin P. Groark, PhD, is an anthropologist on the faculty of the University of Southern California.  He graduated from UC Berkeley with an AB in anthropology, earning his PhD from UCLA with a specialization in medical and psychological anthropology.  Since 1991, he has worked with the Tzotzil Maya of highland Chiapas, Mexico.  His 2005 dissertation focuses on highland Maya ethnomedicine and ethnopsychology, exploring individual and social understandings of "pathogenic emotions" and their relation to internalized processes of social control.  He has published on topics ranging from ethnobiology in Southern California to the role of dreams and dream telling in highland Maya communities.  In 2006, he won the prestigious CORST prize for best paper in psychoanalysis and culture, awarded by the American Psychoanalytic Association.  He is currently in his first year of analytic training at the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, California.