Social Opacity and the Dynamics of Empathic In-Sight among the Tzotzil Maya of Chiapas, Mexico

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].