The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: An Anthropological Interpretation - Essay Example

? The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: An Anthropological Interpretation number Publish Dear Fellow Student, I went through Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down and found it to be far removed from conventional anthropological texts. The work concerns Hmong refugees settled in Merced, California and their cultural struggles with the local community. The reading is worth going through in large part because of the method of development used by the author. Fadiman has relied on a mix of anthropology and storytelling in order to convey the cultural differences and the resulting conflicts between the various branches of the Hmong and the local people. Cultural conflict is a broad theme of the work but the primary focus lies on medical anthropology and highlighting how cultural differences contributed to the death of the protagonist Lia Lee. The appreciable thing about the work is its ease of delivery to the reader. Unlike other anthropological readings, this work develops as a tale of people stuck in an alien culture where they are unable to assimilate effectively. The author’s use of simple language allows the reader to easily accumulate what is being related. This approach on the author’s part also makes the work more approachable to novice anthropological readers and the wider reading audience in general. While the author’s approach of storytelling has its advantages, it cannot be denied that the author’s account tends to bias the overall anthropological account. The story telling method tends to involve the reader emotionally. This is especially true given the storyline involving a four year old girl who spends the next twenty six years in a vegetative state because of uncompromising attitudes on the part of her parents and her physicians. The average reader going through the account tends to point fingers at various characters in an attempt to place the blame for the protagonist’s condition. The contention behind an anthropological account is not to create and place blames but to relate the conditions of a place or situation. This form of author’s anthropological account makes it easier to understand the situation at hand but also tends to complicate an unbiased assessment of the situation since an emotional attachment to the tale is created. On another note, the author’s style of writing tends to make the account rather dry compared to other novels. In addition, the author tends to take onto emotional elements repeatedly, especially from the point of view of the Hmong and their cultural peculiarities. For example, the author projects the Hmong’s stance on surgery by relating (Fadiman, 1997): “If the soul cannot find its jacket, it is condemned to an eternity of wandering – naked and alone.” However, the author fails to relate the stance of the surgeons effectively. The Hmong’s point of view on avoiding surgery fearing damage to the soul is without doubt conveyed more effectively than the competing stance of the surgeons. The failure of surgeons in operating on the Hmong is projected more as a mistake of the surgeons than the Hmong since there are no effective interpreters between the two. I feel that the author has failed to appreciate the work load placed on the surgeons in a community medicine system where it is not possible to pursue each case individually given constraints on time and other resources. In such a situation, it was for the community leaders of the Hmong and other local organisations to look into the conflicting points of view and mediate. The author’s approach of placing the blame entirely on the medical system is not fair enough. The author has taken her time to develop the entire tale from a number of different perspectives but the narrative shows that the author was herself somewhat emotionally attached to the protagonist. Emotional attachment on the part of the author has resulted in a rather skewed analysis of conditions that led to the vegetative state of Lia Lee and her subsequent death some twenty six years later. Going through the reading, I have realised that there was some common ground between the Hmong and the local medical system that could have been utilised in order to offer a suitable solution for Lia Lee’s case and others. The author’s focus on Lia Lee’s case tends to blur out cases of a similar nature that occurred before Lia Lee. For obvious reasons, when the Hmong were settled in Merced, it was apparent that they would require some time to adjust to the local socio cultural peculiarities. Since the Hmong had been settled for quite some time in Merced, and since there had been government involvement in such settlements, issues of the kind faced by Lia Lee must have occurred before too. It is not possible that before Lia Lee’s case, there had been no attempts from either side to bridge the gap between the Hmong and the local medical system. However, it needs to be realised that when any new sub culture is about to adopt, assimilate or otherwise fit into a new cultural mainstream, some losses have to be suffered. Lia Lee was essentially one such case. I have realised over time that human beings require sizable time and effort to resettle into new surroundings. People are ready and willing to make sacrifices in order to preserve their initially assumed system of beliefs. All human beings carry some form of socio cultural inertia with themselves. It takes sizable time and effort to build enough momentum to take over conservative socio cultural inertia. The Hmong were not as rigid as shown by Fadiman which is indicated by their willingness to relocate when faced with an existential conflict. The Hmong were moved out of Laos in response to their ethnic cleansing at the hands of forces opposed to American intervention in Laos. If the Hmong had been highly rigid, they would not have moved out of the region. There have been instances of tribes and ethnic accumulations that did not immigrate when faced with conflict which consequently led to their demise as a people. The Hmong, however, were different and willing to adapt to the circumstances. Again, as related above, it could not be expected of the Hmong that they would adapt instantaneously to the new conditions at Merced. Lia Lee’s case can be seen as one of the necessary collateral damage cases that tend to occur when cultures are adapting to each other. The author’s projection on the issue is however very different. Lia Lee’s case has been presented as a resounding tragedy and somewhat as an end to cultural adaption of the Hmong in itself. Mainstream culture and its dynamic values have been blamed directly and indirectly for the Lia Lee case. Given these projections from the author, it needs to be realised that the Hmong have adapted to a number of different things in their new culture and there are chances that they would adapt more new cultural practices too. It is essentially a question of time when the Hmong take onto modern medical practices to save their patients. Evidence in the author’s account is indicative but not strongly supportive of this position. The author relates a traditional Hmong saying (Fadiman, 1997): “You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.” The Hmong saying makes it clear that the Hmong believe in change and are ready to adapt when confronted. The author relates that the Hmong have not been dealt with properly and cites the dearth of interpreters as being a large communication barrier between the Hmong and the medical practitioners. All positive sentiment put aside, the modern economy only produces solutions when confronted with a problem and not before. The author is slightly suggestive that Hmong interpreters should have already been present to educate the Hmong community to abandon their conservative practices in relation to epilepsy and other medical problems. However, this is not practically possible and Hmong interpreters could only be produced when they are required by medical practitioners who are confronted by conservative Hmong people in Merced. I am surprised that the author would expect the government and the medical community to have ready hand interpreters for a variety of languages and cultures which is not practically possible given the lack of Hmong interpreters, the associated costs of keeping such interpreters in reserve and the time required to train such interpreters. The anthropologist’s task is to look at and explore the world from a practicable stand point. The stories of common people are enough to move people to tears but a professional anthropologist has to keep sentiment separated from professional requirements. Overall, the account provided by Fadiman is moving and easy to understand for the average reader but requires further refinement to be called an anthropological account. The author’s sentiment is appreciable but not practicable. This has entered the author’s account of Lia Lee’s case and has so made it more of a novel than an anthropological work. References Fadiman, A. (1997). The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. New York: Macmillan Publishing. Read More