Hmong studies journal最新文献

{"title":"Frontier Livelihoods: Hmong in the Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands","authors":"M. N. Lee","doi":"10.5860/choice.193101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.193101","url":null,"abstract":"AbstractThis article consists of a book review of Frontier Livelihoods: Hmong in the Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands, a scholarly work focused on the socioeconomic experiences of the Hmong residing in Northern Vietnam.Keywords: Hmong, Vietnam, BorderlandsFrontier Livelihoods: Hmong in the Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands by Sarah Turner, Christine Bonnin, and Jean Michaud. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015. 223 pages.Sarah Turner, Christine Bonnin, and Jean Michaud acknowledge the difficulties in obtaining access to minority groups in Communist Vietnam and China (xi). When official permission is granted, researchers are shadowed in the field by a state chaperone that hinders the ability to obtain accurate information from highland subjects who endure lowland prejudice and fear official prosecution. One can imagine that researchers also would have to watch the kinds of questions posed to subjects lest they unintentionally cause problems for them. Finally, the types of information from the field that is revealed via publication afterwards may also determine future permission to go back to local areas. Access is perhaps even more of an issue when it involves the Hmong who had played a critical role in the Communist victory during the Vietnamese revolution against the French (1946-54), but who have since been shoved aside by state policies. For these reasons, Frontier Livelihoods is a cautious but welcome addition to the accumulating body of knowledge about the Hmong who straddle the borderlands of Vietnam and China. This work of scholarship applies an \"actor-oriented approach\" to examine Hmong relations with two Communist states and eschews neoliberal, (neo)Marxist metanarratives in the process of investigating the complex ways that this ethnic minority group indigenize modernity and globalization (169). The authors analyze how the Hmong navigate state policies while negotiating for cultural and economic survival.The authors deftly reveal how highland Hmong society copes with socialist conservationist policies by examining the production and distribution of four highly demanded commodities: the buffalo (Chapter 4), alcohol (Chapter 5), cardamom (Chapter 6), and textiles (Chapter 7). They trace the origins of these products from the Hmong highlands to the lowlands, across state borders from Vietnam to China and, to a limited extent (especially, textiles), across the globe into the upscale boutiques of New York. Along with the flow of these goods, the authors unveil how the manufacture and exchange of these items are intricately entangled with Hmong social networks, as well as how they give indications of Hmong relations with lowlanders, the state, and the larger global community. Although constrained by socialist and developmental policies, the Hmong did their best to be agents of change; they selectively accepted state initiatives, hence, retaining some autonomy. Agency was possible because in highland Hmong society, social capital took precedenc","PeriodicalId":91264,"journal":{"name":"Hmong studies journal","volume":"7 1","pages":"580"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75752531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom: The Quest for Legitimation in French Indochina, 1850–1960","authors":"M. N. Lee","doi":"10.5860/choice.193560","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.193560","url":null,"abstract":"Countering notions that Hmong history begins and ends with the oSecret Waro in Laos of the 1960s and 1970s, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom reveals how the Hmong experience of modernity is grounded in their sense of their own ancient past, when this now-stateless people had their own king and kingdom, and illuminates their political choices over the course of a century in a highly contested region of Asia. China, Vietnam, and Laos, the Hmong continuously negotiated with these states and with the French to maintain political autonomy in a world of shifting boundaries, emerging nation-states, and contentious nationalist movements and ideologies. Often divided by clan rivalries, the Hmong placed their hope in finding a leader who could unify them and recover their sovereignty. In a compelling analysis of Hmong society and leadership throughout the French colonial period, Mai Na M. Lee identifies two kinds of leadersupolitical brokers who allied strategically with Southeast Asian governments and with the French, and messianic resistance leaders who claimed the Mandate of Heaven. The continuous rise and fall of such leaders led to cycles of collaboration and rebellion. After World War II, the powerful Hmong Ly clan and their allies sided with the French and the new monarchy in Laos, but the rival Hmong Lo clan and their supporters allied with Communist coalitions. Lee argues that the leadership struggles between Hmong clans destabilized French rule and hastened its demise. Martialing an impressive array of oral interviews conducted in the United States, France, and Southeast Asia, augmented with French archival documents, she demonstrates how, at the margins of empire, minorities such as the Hmong sway the direction of history.","PeriodicalId":91264,"journal":{"name":"Hmong studies journal","volume":"40 1","pages":"1"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75138856","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hmong and American: From Refugees to Citizens","authors":"Kong Pheng Pha","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-1051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-1051","url":null,"abstract":"Her, Vincent K., & Buley-Meissner, Mary Louise. Hmong and American: From Refugees to Citizens. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2012, 278 pp.While much research has been done on the Hmong, few studies have focused specifically on Hmong American identity. Vincent K. Her's and Mary Louise Buley-Meissner's Hmong and American is a contribution to this area of Hmong Studies as contributors to this anthology examine Hmong identity within the American context. The topics covered in this volume are diverse and include history, gender and sexual orientation, age, education, and the arts. Her and Buley-Meissner creatively weave together an assortment of academic, artistic, and community voices to articulate the changing, and often challenging, facets of the Hmong American identity. Taken together, all of the essays in Hmong and American convince us that the Hmong are indeed making America their permanent home and are redefining the Hmong diaspora and Hmong identity altogether.The book is divided into three parts: identity and history, family challenges and community transitions, and cultural integration through education and the arts. The neatly crafted sections of the book display a chronological analysis of the Hmong experience. Various authors and contributors to the volume argue that the Hmong community is indeed a global community. Every generation retains their \"Hmong identity\" and sense of community through their reimagination and participation in homeland narratives, entrepreneurial initiatives, and education. This section also presents some new and pressing questions on the implications of these constantly remade and shifting forms of Hmong identity for the Hmong American community and America more broadly. Vincent Her explores Hmong student involvement at university campuses and the impact of this engagement on academic programming, racerelations, and student activism. Keith Quincy questions how intermarriage will affect the Hmong community, while Gary Yia Lee assesses the effects of the consumption of Hmong costumes, videos, and other cultural products on the Hmong diasporic identity. Although the authors only begin to explore these questions, they nonetheless challenge us to rethink the complexities of Hmong American identity. The authors in this section refer frequently to Hmong life in Laos. There are also recurring allusions to the Hmong refugee narrative in several of the essays. While these issues are vital to Hmong identity formation, they do become repetitive and serve to distract readers from the central theme of the anthology, which is focused upon Hmong identity formation in contemporary America.Perhaps the greatest strength of the anthology may be found in Part II. The authors in this section detail under examined, and sometimes controversial, topics associated with Hmong identity including gender, sexual orientation, and age. Taken together, the essays in this section explicate the heterogeneity of the community and its","PeriodicalId":91264,"journal":{"name":"Hmong studies journal","volume":"6 1","pages":"1"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81475344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"19. MEDICAL, RACIST, AND COLONIAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF POWER IN ANNE FADIMAN’S THE SPIRIT CATCHES YOU AND YOU FALL DOWN","authors":"Monica Chiu","doi":"10.36019/9780813549330-021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.36019/9780813549330-021","url":null,"abstract":"This essay looks at the values attributed or denied to \"culture\" (medical culture, history, Southeast Asian refugees, Asian American cultural citizenship) in the care surrounding a Hmong child diagnosed with spirit loss, according to Hmong interpretation, or epilepsy, as defined by Western medicine. In my reading of Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, medical, colonial, and authorial knowledge often converge in devastating ways, linking the seemingly disparate discourses of war, refugee medicine, and the model minority through colonial representations. I also look at the book's lacuna in its investigation of cultural collisions, finding that its approaches to reporting the medical-cultural conflict from a seemingly neutral position-one balancing the reported views of the epileptic child's parents and the views of her medical practitioners-often reinscribe the Hmong subjects into the very colonial parameters from which the book attempts to extract them. Introduction This essay is about medical, racist, and colonial constructions of power. It incorporates the following seemingly disparate, but what I will prove to be inextricably connected, discourses: those surrounding the Vietnam War and its subsequent stateside refugee management; current medical care for Southeast Asian patients; and so-called authorial (medical, textual, cultural) constructions of Hmong representation. My critique is based on a reading of literary journalist Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, her re-presentation of the actual case of epileptic Hmong American child Lia Lee. Her book raises thorny questions concerning why Lia’s “proper” care remains a contentious debate between medical knowledge and Hmong cultural","PeriodicalId":91264,"journal":{"name":"Hmong studies journal","volume":"55 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91035567","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}