The book The Spirt Catches You and You Fall downs talks about different cultures who don’t get along. There is the Lee family who doesn’t get along with the United Sates because the doctors are treating the family’s daughter Lia who has epilepsy. The Hmong also doesn’t get along with the United States doctors because they have different beliefs. They don’t trust the antibiotics and they don’t trust the United States doctors either. Lia’s family are trying to help her the best that they can, but they also don’t want to go against what they believe in. Lia was only three months old when she lost her soul. Her sister slammed a door and her parents think that is how she got sick, they thought that it startled an evil spirt. When they took Lia to the hospital sine they are Hmong, they don’t speak English and there wasn’t an interpreter there to help them. This was one of many complications they had to deal with in the United States …show more content…
The Lee’s don’t have much trust in the doctors because of the two different cultures and its becoming very difficult for the Lee’s and the doctors. The Lee’s are questioning how they can trust the United States system because it is not apart of their culture and they don’t have trust in the United States doctors. Because they are not the United States they are not sure how great the antibiotics in the United States are. They is understandable though because they are so used Hmong and how different the cultures are to the United States, I would be a little uneasy too, but the United States also don’t understand the Hmong culture and how the go about with their medical problems. The United States doctors know exactly how to treat Lia and help her recover, but they just don’t know the Lee’s beliefs and how their culture works. It’s hard on both the Lee’s and the United Sates
In The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, author Anne Fadiman explores the complexity of a cultural clash through communication and interaction between the Hmong minority and biomedical culture in the United States. In broad terms, her book classifies as a modern-day case of cultural anthropology that depicts the complications of unprepared cross-cultural communication and lack of assimilation. Fadiman documented the saga of the Lees, a Hmong family who immigrated to Merced, California after nation-wide problems in their homeland of Laos and China (Fadiman 5). Their story exemplifies the struggle with biomedicine in the United States by detailing the story of the Lee’s severely epileptic daughter Lia and reflecting on the factors and outcomes of her life and death.
She heard about the Hmong through a friend, and so she spent 4 years living in Merced, California and another 5 writing this book. She attempts to stay fairly neutral in her writing, though through her time with the Lees, she confesses that her writing may appear biased toward the Hmong culture rather than toward the Americans. However, in the end she could not blame one side or the other for the unfortunate tragedy of Lia, who got hit in the cross-fire between these two cultures. Her theoretical view is a type of cultural relativism. Neither the Hmong nor the Americans could emerge as the better culture. She does not address any questions about direct unethical practices. The Hmong did not practice human sacrifices, and the animals they did sacrifice were theirs. She does seem to believe that every culture has its weak and strong
Fadiman, Anne. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Print.
I learned about the diverse cultures present in today’s society. It is very easy to ignore the beliefs that do not perfectly align with our own. This book addresses that issue very well. I would not blame anyone for Lia’s tragedy. I believe that she was just a victim of her circumstances. Although it could have been handled in a better fashion, it is not anyone’s fault that there were language and cultural barriers. Anne Fadiman seemed unbiased and probably feels the same way about this
In this book Anne Fadiman portrayed the ethnocentricity of the American culture, in which people of other cultures are judged based on the standard of American customs and tradition. This means that people are very skeptical about the things that they do not understand. A lot can be learned from the interactions that took place between the Western United States health care system and the more traditional Hmong culture. This book proved that in the end neither way of thinking was completely wrong or completely right. Compromise and understanding is the key to both cultures getting the outcome that they desire.
Traditional Hmong’s believe in their Shaman rather than western doctors, they choose to detain their treatment by hosting their rituals to save them. A shaman is “a person who acts as intermediary between the natural and supernatural worlds, using magic to cure illness, foretell the future, control spiritual forces, etc” (dictionary.com). Hmong individual’s have a belief that ancestral spirits, including the spirits of shamans, are reincarnated into the same family tree. Hmong consider being a shaman an honor because they carry the duty of helping mankind according to Hmong mythology. Differences between Hmong traditional beliefs and Western biomedical beliefs create a lack of understanding. Negative health care experiences result in Hmong community members’ mistrust and fear of Western medicine. However, when there’s mistrust between a doctor and a patient there could be lack of treatment because of the differences between our ...
The Vietnam War caused great destruction in Laos, and so the Lee family migrated to America, after spending a short time in refugee camps in Thailand. After settling in America, Foua gives birth to Lia, who unbeknownst to them will suffer from epilepsy soon after she is born. For four years, little Lia is admitted to hospital seventeen times, after suffering both grand and petit mal seizures. Through miscommunication and a failure to understand each other’s cultural differences, both the parents of Lia, and her American doctors, are ultimately at fault for Lia’s tragic fate, when she is left in a vegetative state.
I enjoy reading Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone. I find her novel easy to read and understand. Although she included some phrases the Chinese use, I find no difficulty in understanding them, as I’m Chinese myself. The novel Bone is written in a circular narrative form, in which the story doesn’t follow the linear format where the suspense slowly builds up and finally reaches a climax stage. Rather the story’s time sequence is thrown back and forth. I find this format of writing brings greater suspense and mystery to the reader. When I read the book, my mind was always wondering what reasons or causes made Ona commit suicide, and this made me want to continue reading the book to know the outcome. The happenings in the story do portray reality of the lives of Chinese immigrants in America, their hardship and difficulty in adapting American lifestyle and culture. For the younger generations, adapting the American culture and lifestyle is much easier than for the older generations. This is shown in the book and it also happens in reality, which is another reason why I like this book. This is a fiction novel, but the story told is like a non-fiction book; giving readers a sense of realism. As a Chinese reading Bone, I understand the narrator’s feelings and predicaments. Although she is an Asian, her thinking lies more on the American side. Leila wants to move out to stay with Mason but yet she fears leaving her mother alone and also of what her mother might say in r...
It is important to consider that the Hmong had their own way of spiritual beliefs and religious healing practices. However, after the community decided to exclude Lia from the applications and advantages of modern medicine, the condition of the young girl worsened (Parish, 2004, p. 131). It was not at all wrong to humanize medicine, but apparently, as a multi-cultural community, the Hmong people became too ignorant and indignant over the applications and benefits of modern medicine applications. Staying firm over their religious affiliations and conduct, the maximum effect of healing became misaligned and ineffective. This was the misunderstanding that should be cleared in the story. There would have been probable results if the Hmong community chose to collaborate with the modern society without needing to disregard or compromise their own values and religious affiliations and
How would it feel to flee from post-war Communist forces, only to face an ethnocentric population of people in a new country? In Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, a portrait of a disquieting, often times touching, ethnography (i.e. a book that details particular data of an extended period of time an anthropologist spent living closely with a community of individuals during his or her field work) of Fadiman's experience living in Merced, California, which was home to the largest population of Hmong refugees, such as the Lee family, from Laos who suffered mass confusion when trying to navigate the American health care system. Because the Hmong could not speak sufficient English until the children gained language skills native to the United States, residents of California were not accepting of the Hmong community. Fadiman aims to better understand how knowledge of illness among Hmong and Western medical practitioners differ, which pushes the reader to understand how the complicate medical treatment in the past as well as the present from a perspective of an American observing a Hmong family's struggle with the system. In America, it isn’t uncommon to be judged for your clothing, your house, or the amount of money your family makes, so it is easy to believe that the Hmong people were not easily accepted into American society. As a whole, ethnocentrism, or the tendency to believe that one's culture is superior to another, is one of America's weaknesses and this account proves ethnocentric behavior was prominent even in the 1970-80's when Fadiman was in the process of doing her fieldwork in post-Vietnam War Era California.
In “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” by Anne Fadiman, the whole story revolves around Lia, the thirteenth child of Lee family. Lee family was a refugee family in USA and Lia was their first child to be born in US. At the time of time of birth, she was declared as a healthy child but at the age of three it was founded that she is suffering from epilepsy. In the words of western or scientific world the term epilepsy mean mental disorder of a person and in Hmong culture, epilepsy is referred to as qaug dab peg (translated in English, "the spirit catches you and you fall down"), in which epileptic attacks are perceived as evidence of the epileptic's ability to enter and journey momentarily into the spirit realm (Wikipedia, 2014)
Anthropological studies on language and communication would be directly related to Lia’s case for a few reasons: Lia and her family were Hmong, her parents could not read or write, they didn’t give her enough medication. Also, Lia was taken away from her parents because of language and communication barriers that led to her parents not administering her medication at all, as well as interpreters not being clear about what to give her.
Tradition is defined in the dictionary as the handing down from generation to generation of the same customs and beliefs. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, I believe has two main topics addressed: the traditions of the Hmong people, and the dangers of being unable to communicate. The misunderstanding of these two consequential points, I believe caused the majority of conflict that arose.
This book addresses one of the common characteristics, and challenges, of health care today: the need to achieve a working knowledge of as many cultures as possible in health care. The Hmong population of Merced, California addresses the collision between Western medicine and holistic healing traditions of the Hmong immigrants, which plays out a common dilemma in western medical centers: the need to integrate modern western medicinal remedies with aspects of cultural that are good for the well-being of the patient, and the belief of the patient’s ability to recuperate. What we see is a clash, or lack of integration in the example of the story thereof. Lia, a Hmong child with a rare form of epilepsy, must enter the western hospital instead of the Laotian forest. In the forest she would seek out herbs to remedy the problems that beset her, but in the west she is forced to enter the western medical hospital without access to those remedies, which provided not only physical but spiritual comfort to those members of the Hmong culture. The herbs that are supposed to fix her spirit in the forest are not available in the western hospital. The Merced County hospital system clashes with Hmong animist traditions.
Cultural diversity, coalesced with the strain of delivering quality care, often results in conflict. Consequently, an unsettled conflict leads to hurdles for staffs, teams,