personal choice # 1- Kim Robinson

This semester I am trying to finish up the classes I need for my major. One of those classes I’m taking is called the “Refugee Experience” and is an anthropology class studying the culture of refugees coming into the U.S. One group of people we studied this semester were the Hmong (formerly of China) who have been driven out of their country and even neighboring ones. So what does the Hmong have to do with primal religions? The Hmong are a very spiritual people and many practice shamanism. In class we watched a movie about a Hmong shaman living in the United States and above all else he could worry about, the thing he was afraid of most was losing is shamanic ways and not being able to pass down the tradition and rituals that go along with their religion. The Hmong use shamanism for many aspects of life from being sick, to protecting the house, to burying the dead. We also read a book about the Hmong people and a sick Hmong girl with a severe form of epilepsy. Throughout the book the father took his daughter to many different shamans in hopes of being able to release the demon that he believed possessed her. Although there was no way to know whether western medicine or the rituals preformed by the various shamans was working best. However at the end of the book, the little girl had one last major seizure and became brain dead. To the doctors she was not alive anymore, even though her heart was beating, she would never be a functioning person again and they expected her to die shortly after leaving the hospital. When her parents took her home another shaman came to the house a preformed a ritual of rubbing herbs on the child and as of 2003 she is still living. Do the rituals that are performed by shamans and medicine men work like western medicine does, just in different ways. There needs to be a merging of both kinds of medicines in the US so that families who do believe it the healing powers of shamanism know that everything that could be done, is being done. If nothing else, it becomes a way of preserving shamanistic rituals so that these beliefs don’t fade away.