ode to smaux

1/11/12

Dear Colleague,

The problem was (the Hmong's words) "That the Sprit caught her and Lia fell down… Soul loss… It started when Lia's sister Yer slammed the door and Lia's soul was frightened… We are now angered at Yer for slamming the door… We need to sacrifice pigs and chickens to cure her, as well as a few Hmong treatments… All we want from the doctor is a small pill to take, without removing any blood, so that she will be fixed by next week and get her sould back."

These ideas that the author presumes that the Lees would have had are very interesting to me. Their understanding of what was going on was so far from that in my head. I have read almost the whole book and until it was put in this simplistic form I did not truly understand how they felt about the situation at present. Fadiman felt inclined to call Kleinman and discuss her results with him. What Kleinman is a lesson of a lifetime that you and I can benefit greatly from.

"Get rid of the term 'compliance.' It's a lousy term. It implies moral hegemony. Also, instead of looking at coercion, look at a model of mediation. Go find a member of the Hmong community who can help you negociate. Decide what is critical and be willing to compromise on everything else. If you cannot see that your own culture has its own set of interests, emotions, and biases, how can you expect to deal successfully with someone else's culture?" (p. 261)

What Kleinman is saying above is that we need to 1- watch our language so that there is not a hint of coercion or authoritarianism in our tone or words. 2- In dealing with different peoples and cultures we must never have coercion as out medium, rather we should have mediation. And finally, we should realize that our culture has it's sets of motives in and of itself. Its own biases, interests, emotions. If you can't realize that then you can't deal with other cultures!

I hope that we can learn from this my friend! What a great read!

Signed,

Alexander Hatch Spencer