Kevin Groark
EDUCATION:
• Ph.D. in Anthropology (2005, UCLA)
• Ph.D. in Psychoanalytic Science (2015, New Center for Psychoanalysis)
PROFESSIONAL LICENSURE:
• Research Psychoanalyst (Student)—Lic. No. RP230, Medical Board of California, Division of Allied Health Professionals.
GEOGRAPHICAL SPECIALIZATION:
• Latin America / Mesoamerica (Highland Maya)
RESEARCH INTERESTS:
Culture & Emotion • Ethnomedicine • Ethnobiology • Psychoanalytic Theory • Cultural Psychodynamics • Dreaming • Ethnoepistemology • Ontology • Ritual Curing • Illness and Healing • Medical Change • Social Theory • Religious Conversion • Urbanization
OVERVIEW OF RESEARCH:
Broadly framed, my research interests are situated at the intersection of medical, psychological, and linguistic anthropology, with an area specialization in indigenous Latin America (Mesoamerica).
I earned my Ph.D. in Anthropology from UCLA’s interdisciplinary Program in Medical and Psychological Anthropology. As a complement to my anthropological training, I have completed a postgraduate Ph.D. in Psychoanalytic Science at the New Center for Psychoanalysis.
I have an established and ongoing program of ethnomedical and ethnopsychological research among the Tzotzil & Tzeltal Maya of highland Chiapas in southeastern Mexico, where I have worked since 1991. Principal research concerns have centered on household diagnostic and therapeutic strategies, religious dimensions of sickness and healing, medical ethnobotany, ethnophysiological understandings of the body in health and illness, the role of emotion and dreams in the folk medical system, and local configurations of empathy and intersubjective awareness. Future research focuses on the impact of urbanization and religious conversion on Highland Maya medical ideology and practice.
In addition to my ongoing research in southern Mexico, I have extensive research experience in indigenous communities in both highland and lowland settings throughout Latin America (Northern Mexico, Peru, and Chile), as well as urban medical anthropological research experience in South Central Los Angeles.
Please feel free to contact me or refer to my CV (see link at left side of page) for additional information.
• Ph.D. in Anthropology (2005, UCLA)
• Ph.D. in Psychoanalytic Science (2015, New Center for Psychoanalysis)
PROFESSIONAL LICENSURE:
• Research Psychoanalyst (Student)—Lic. No. RP230, Medical Board of California, Division of Allied Health Professionals.
GEOGRAPHICAL SPECIALIZATION:
• Latin America / Mesoamerica (Highland Maya)
RESEARCH INTERESTS:
Culture & Emotion • Ethnomedicine • Ethnobiology • Psychoanalytic Theory • Cultural Psychodynamics • Dreaming • Ethnoepistemology • Ontology • Ritual Curing • Illness and Healing • Medical Change • Social Theory • Religious Conversion • Urbanization
OVERVIEW OF RESEARCH:
Broadly framed, my research interests are situated at the intersection of medical, psychological, and linguistic anthropology, with an area specialization in indigenous Latin America (Mesoamerica).
I earned my Ph.D. in Anthropology from UCLA’s interdisciplinary Program in Medical and Psychological Anthropology. As a complement to my anthropological training, I have completed a postgraduate Ph.D. in Psychoanalytic Science at the New Center for Psychoanalysis.
I have an established and ongoing program of ethnomedical and ethnopsychological research among the Tzotzil & Tzeltal Maya of highland Chiapas in southeastern Mexico, where I have worked since 1991. Principal research concerns have centered on household diagnostic and therapeutic strategies, religious dimensions of sickness and healing, medical ethnobotany, ethnophysiological understandings of the body in health and illness, the role of emotion and dreams in the folk medical system, and local configurations of empathy and intersubjective awareness. Future research focuses on the impact of urbanization and religious conversion on Highland Maya medical ideology and practice.
In addition to my ongoing research in southern Mexico, I have extensive research experience in indigenous communities in both highland and lowland settings throughout Latin America (Northern Mexico, Peru, and Chile), as well as urban medical anthropological research experience in South Central Los Angeles.
Please feel free to contact me or refer to my CV (see link at left side of page) for additional information.
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Publications by Kevin Groark
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.
This dissertation represents a first step in the elaboration of a “cultural psychodynamic approach” that merges the methods and theoretical sensibilities of cultural anthropology, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. A sustained interpretive triangulation between these fields lends greater dimensionality to scholarly analyses: Psychoanalytic ideas help illuminate dynamic intrapsychic and interpersonal processes of meaning making; ethnographic data emphasize the powerfully constitutive role of ethnotheories and social practices in conditioning the form, function, and expression of psychodynamic processes; and close attention to narrative and the “language of experience” allows for a focus on expressive– symbolic instantiation of these ethotheories in both social interaction and the constitution of self-experience.
"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"
Keywords: Chiapas, Tzotzil Maya, empathy, intersubjectivity, emotion, ethnopsychology"
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.
This dissertation represents a first step in the elaboration of a “cultural psychodynamic approach” that merges the methods and theoretical sensibilities of cultural anthropology, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. A sustained interpretive triangulation between these fields lends greater dimensionality to scholarly analyses: Psychoanalytic ideas help illuminate dynamic intrapsychic and interpersonal processes of meaning making; ethnographic data emphasize the powerfully constitutive role of ethnotheories and social practices in conditioning the form, function, and expression of psychodynamic processes; and close attention to narrative and the “language of experience” allows for a focus on expressive– symbolic instantiation of these ethotheories in both social interaction and the constitution of self-experience.
"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"
Keywords: Chiapas, Tzotzil Maya, empathy, intersubjectivity, emotion, ethnopsychology"
Drawing on dream narratives collected in San Juan Chamula (Chiapas, Mexico), I focus on shamanic investiture dreams, explore the ways in which dreaming allows one to gain increased knowledge of the potential and potencies of the self, mediated crucially through contact with powerful dream alters, objects, and landscapes. In particular, I emphasize the role of manifest dream content as a proto-symbolic lexicon for the expression and articulation of personally compelling idioms of shamanic power. Within this genre of investiture dreams, the visiting saint motif plays a central role in the transmission of divine power and access to into the social realm.
The experiential split between the dreamer and powerful dream objects liberates a potent transformational process, in which various aspects of self can be recursively elaborated through repeated and titrated exposure to power-bearing being. Crucially, this process of self-reorganization is facilitated through a reordering of inner and outer, self and other. Indeed, the transformative potential of such dreams appears to derive from the displacement of desire and agency away from the self onto something outside and fundamentally other—the saint or deity that “invests” the dreamer with power. An objectifying and distancing stance toward dream experience, paradoxically, facilitates and encourages deep personal identification.