Hmong Religion

Religion in Cultural Anthropology, as we’ve explored in this class, is defined and understood to have many characteristics that make every religion unique, but also very similar in certain aspects. In the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman we have a first hand experience on how culture shapes a peoples’ Religion and how the Hmong Religion explains many of the struggles faced by Lia and the Lee family. We will analyze and demonstrate Hmong Religious beliefs, and how it pertains to many aspects of their culture using knowledge acquired in our studies of Cultural Anthropology.

Religion is a social institution that uses supernatural forces, spirits, symbols, beings and sacred stories and texts to explain the world and what happens within it. For instance, the Hmong people have an Animistic Religion, meaning they believe everything living and non-living has a spiritual being within it, or many spirits within it. The Hmong people believe the human body hosts several spirits or souls, and any separation or isolating of these can cause diseases. They value the remedies and treatments to the soul or spirits within humans to heal the physical body, as seen by the many Shamans and spiritual healers baby Lia saw as treatment for her epilepsy. Shamanism is also an important part of the Hmong religion, as they are seen to be chosen by the spirits as an intermediate between the spiritual realm and the physical world. The Shamans, or twiv neeb, are men and women who dedicate their lives to the teachings and are blessed with powers, often symptoms of physical illnesses like bipolar personality or schizophrenia, usually inherited from their shamanistic family. There are many ceremonies practiced by the Hmong people, from when a baby is born, to the mother’s pregnancy, marriage ceremonies and many religious ceremonies to help a family with their spirituality. The Shamans articulate that spirits require a sacrifice of an animal for some tasks, the first example of this is given in the book as follows, “A twiv neeb might be able to cure infertility by asking the couple to sacrifice a dog, a cat, a chicken or a sheep.” (Fadiman 4) Many other common themes of most religions applied to that of the Hmong people, from the altars placed within a household, the use of totems given to children, to the belief in reincarnation and the practice of communal worshipping and celebration.

The Hmong religion is unique, as seen from the perspective of someone who is not religious, it is the first animistic religion I had heard of. The world view for the Hmong people in modern day society is different, some may see these traits and characterize it as simply a polytheistic religion, but it is not. Many early anthropologists saw it as all religion starting off as animistic, but that was from a purely bias perspective. The Hmong children enculturate the religious beliefs of the family, transitioning into their gendered roles and their cultural norms and values. Much emphasis is placed on the symbolism of family and the spirits that exist around them. The Lee’s placed great symbolism in the home, the mother’s placenta would be buried under the home for each child born, as for the child’s spirit to return once passed away. A form of plasticity in part of the Lee’s was to take the placenta of the children they had in the United States, where they lived in a small apartment, and burry the placenta elsewhere to retain their spiritual obligations. From an inside perspective of the Hmong immigrants that arrived in the US many believed Western doctors had no experience or knowledge in dealing with the spirit of the ill people they were seeing in many camps and hospitals. They saw the western medicinal practices as barbaric, eating organs and taking blood they saw as limited, they believed the shamans had more reliable medicinal practices. Many of the medical staff of these camps and hospitals saw the Hmong people as strange and very traditional, any westerner viewing the Hmong behaviors of odd smelling chicken soups to requesting the placenta from a doctor would simply see these behaviors as different from their own and not as religious practices.

Religion and Culture can easily be intertwined, as many of our own traditions even to this day continue to be. The Hmong people have traditions that may have stemmed from their Religion but continued as a part of their culture, as a part of who they are regardless of the Religion. This is true for many cultures and religions around the world, I follow traditional catholic norms while not being religious in the least bit. Lia Lee’s story details the many aspects of her religion’s customs and her parents’ culture, her story an example of Hmong religious short falls and western medicines inability to properly adapt to new and changing cultural society. The Animistic Hmong Religion is a belief in spiritual beings which are present in all non-living and living things, and the study of these cultures and practices is all in part the core of Cultural Anthropology as a subfield of Anthropology. The Hmong people are fascinating and immensely rich in culture and tradition, and this summation will hopefully inspire one to investigate these interesting people and their religious practices further.