Toward a cultural phenomenology of intersubjectivity: The extended relational field of the Tzotzil Maya of highland Chiapas, Mexico

Among the Tzotzil Maya of San Juan Chamula (Chiapas, Mexico), dream experience, symptom formation, and certain forms of emotionally heightened self-consciousness are drawn upon to gain knowledge of the social surround. Through an exploration of these domains (and their epistemological and ontological entailments), I trace the contours of the "extended relational field" of the highland Maya, emphasizing a distinctly multimodal approach to intersubjectivity-one that subsumes interpersonal relations, intersomatic processes, and soul-based "counterpart relations." Through this discussion, I seek to broaden the frame through which we view cross-cultural inflections of intersubjectivity, emphasizing the importance of tracing differential manifestations of relational processes across diverse experiential registers, only some of which involve "minds coming to know other minds.".