Hmong Culture

The purpose of this volume is to provide a comprehensive overview of the concepts of health, healing, and illness held by Hmong Americans, and to examine their experience with conventional medicine and medical services delivery systems as those systems exist in the West. The primary motive for conducting the research which comprises a substantial portion of the book was to analyze the extent to which Hmong American's experiences, as they attempt to seek healthcare for their families in the United States, are conditioned by enormous cultural clashes. By and large, the Hmong do not understand the complexity of the American health care system, while at the same time, mainstream healthcare providers know very little about the Hmong and their cultural background. This book will not only brigde that gap, but it will also provide some insight into the complexity of Hmong concepts of health healing, and illness and the Hmong experience with conventional medicine.

Despite the fact that there are many Hmong living in the West (especially in the U.S., France, and Australia), their voices are generally not heard. This is particularly true for Hmong women. Health and welfare professionals complain that there is a lack of knowledge about Hmong women's lives, history, health needs, and reproductive customs. This book is an important resource for those who treat Hmong women.

"In an ethnographic study of recent Hmong immigrant families in Seattle, Donnelly examines changing gender roles in both the economic and social spheres as Hmong women adapt to new social conditions and opportunities in the U.S. The author focuses specifically on changing patterns of courtship, marriage arrangements, and economic decision making in the household, and how women incorporate new values while attempting to retain elements of their Hmong identity . . . . An actor-based approach and inclusion of long passages in Hmong women's own words makes Donnelly's ethnographic presentation compelling and highly readable". -- Choice

This survey for educators of all grade levels provides vivid descriptions of how each of seven major Asian-American ethnic groups is faring in public schools both linguistically and socioculturally, and gives practical suggestions and effective strategies for teachers.

While African American dress has long been noted as having a distinctive edge, many people may not know that debutante balls - a relatively recent phenomenon within African American communities - feature young women and men dressed, respectively, in conventional symbols of female purity and male hegemony, and conforming to gender stereotypes that have tended to characterize such events traditionally. Within the Hmong American community, mothers and aunts of teenagers use bangles, lace and traditional handwork techniques to create dazzling displays reflecting the gender and ethnicity of their sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, as they participate in an annual courtship ritual. This book examines these events to show how dress is used to transform gender construction and create positive images of African American and Hmong American youth.Coming-of-age rituals serve as arenas of cultural revision and change. For each of these communities, the choice of dress represents cultural affirmation. This author shows that within the homogenizing context of American society, dress serves as a site for the continual renegotiation of identity - gendered, ethnic and otherwise.

Minority Rules is an ethnography of a Chinese people known as the Miao, a group long consigned to the remote highlands and considered backward by other Chinese. Now the nation's fifth largest minority, the Miao number nearly eight million people speaking various dialects and spread out over seven provinces. In a theoretically innovative work that combines methods from both anthropology and cultural studies, Louisa Schein examines the ways Miao ethnicity is constructed and reworked by the state, by nonstate elites, and by the Miao themselves, all in the context of China's postsocialist reforms and its increasing exchange and fascination with the West. She offers eloquently argued interventions into debates over nationalism, ethnic subjectivity, and the ethnography of the state.

Posing questions about gender, cultural politics, and identity, Schein examines how non-Miao people help to create Miao ethnicity by depicting them as both feminized keepers of Chinese tradition and as exotic others against which dominant groups can assert their own modernity. In representing and consuming aspects of their own culture, Miao distance themselves from the idea that they are less than modern. Thus, Schein explains, everyday practices, village rituals, journalistic encounters, and tourism events are seen not just as moments of cultural production but also as performances of modernity through which others are made primitive. Schein finds that these moments frequently highlight internal differences among the Miao and demonstrates how not only minorities but, more generally, peasants and women offer a valuable key to understanding China as it renegotiates its place in the global order.

Based onextensive, multisite fieldwork, this book will interest scholars of Asian studies, anthropology, gender studies, postcolonialism, ethnic studies, and cultural studies.