Cult Med Psychiatry (2010) 34:169185

DOI 10.1007/s11013-009-9164-0
ORIGINAL PAPER

Moral Agency, Identity Crisis and Mental Health: An

Anthropologists Plight and His Hmong Ritual Healing
Christian Postert

Published online: 11 December 2009

! Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009

Abstract During anthropological fieldwork, the author had a serious accident on

the outskirts of a Hmong village in the highland of Laos. However, this dramatic
incident turned out to be the occasion of his ritual initiation into the local village
community. An analysis of narratives of the incident reveals Hmong conceptions of
the anthropologists physical, mental and moral affliction, its causative concomitants and his ritual healing. Hmong mental health and identity are situated in a moral
space of exchange relationships to significant others, challenging basic assumptions
of concepts of the person widely held in psychiatry and beyond. The healing ritual
transformed the authors being from indeterminate other, in a life-threatening
state of identity crisis, to a wholesome Hmong self, in a state of health and moral
agency. This exemplary rite de passage highlights the affinity of ritual healing and
constitution of self in a moral space. The underlying relational concept of the person
is in sharp contrast to psychiatrys concepts of the person, which are deeply shaped
by values of individualism. Psychiatric services must accommodate substantial
differences in the concepts of the person when treating Hmong migrants from Laos.
Keywords

Hmong ! Self ! Mental health ! Identity ! Ritual ! Moral agency

Introduction
Constructing the other in anthropology is a creative process. In the analysis of
cultural data, the anthropologist has recourse to and chooses from established
scientific models from the discipline. These models have been developed in ones
own society to make the other intelligible. Insofar, an anthropological analysis is
C. Postert (&)
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy, University
Hospital Munster, Schmeddingstrasse 50, 48149 Munster, Germany
e-mail: postertc@ukmuenster.de

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inevitably an appropriation of the other in terms of ones own scholarly models

(Postert 2004a).
There has been a long and heated debate in postcolonial theory about the practice
of appropriating the other (Gandhi 1998). Interestingly, scant attention has been
paid to the fact that anthropological others are subjects, who on their part do not
hesitate to appropriate fieldworking anthropologists. Indeed, analyzing the process
of cultural appropriation of the anthropologist by his or her research subjects can
teach us a lot about the respective cultural models and paradigms of what a person is
basically supposed to be from a native perspective. During my anthropological
fieldwork in Laos from 2000 to 2002, a critical incident turned out to pave the way
for my ritual incorporation into a Hmong descent group. An interpretation of the
course of events from a Hmong perspective provides an exemplary case study of
mental health, identity construction and ritual healing. As the analysis will recount,
strangers may be healed by ritual incorporation into Hmong village community
owing to a relational concept of the person.
The Hmong appropriation of my person performed in ritual healing challenged
basic assumptions of my Western socialization as an anthropologist and child
psychiatrist. The underlying relational concept of the person stands in sharp contrast
to the cultural concept of the self prevailing in large parts of academic psychiatry
and psychotherapy, which is deeply shaped by the values of individualism
(Christopher 1999; Kirmayer 2007). For instance, psychiatric classification systems
like the U.S.-American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) are explicit in
stating that mental disorders occur in a bounded self irrespective of social
relationships and affect a central value of individualism, the ideal of self-mastery
(Gaines 1992; Sadler 2004). The very notion that this self might constitute a
universal is itself integral to the foundations of this cultural model (Comaroff and
Comaroff 2001). In sharp contrast, the present case study of ritual healing among
the Hmong in Laos stresses the moral, social and cosmological embeddedness of the
Hmong concept of the person. Hmong identity is relationally situated in a moral
space of exchange relationships connecting the social and the cosmological realm.

The Hmong
The Hmong are an ethnic group that lives primarily in mountainous regions of
southeastern Asia. Their area of settlement is scattered from southern China to
northern Viet Nam, northern Laos and northern Thailand. In Asia, they number
about 4 million people (Lemoine 2005). The Hmong are more widely known in the
West than other Laotian ethnic minorities because of their efforts on behalf of the
United States of America during the war in Viet Nam, particularly after it spread to
Laos and Cambodia. Thousands of Hmong were funded directly and secretly by the
Central Intelligence Agency to combat the Communist Pathet Lao (Quincy 2000).
Communists gained control of Laos in 1975 and began persecuting the Hmong for
their U.S. alliance, and many Hmong fled to refugee camps in Thailand. Since the
late 1970s, thousands of these refugees have resettled in Western countries,
principally in the United States and France, but also in Australia, French Guiana,

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Canada and Argentina, adding a number of about 320,000 diasporic Hmong to the
total Hmong population (Lemoine 2005). According to the 2000 U.S. Census,
186,310 Hmong were living in the United States. This diasporic community is still
growing rapidly, due to an extraordinary birth rate and further waves of
immigration. Finally, in December 2003, the U.S. State Department officially
announced the acceptance of roughly 15,000 Hmong refugees from Wat Tham
Krabok, Thailand, into the United States (Grigoleit 2006).
The history of war between Laotian communists and Western powers has made it
difficult to conduct research among the Hmong in Laos, especially for
U.S.-American researchers. Thus, whereas there are a good number of research
data on the Hmong in the West, knowledge of the postwar situation of the Hmong in
Laos is scanty (Postert 2004b). The Hmong in Laos are divided into big patrilineal
clans whose exogamy connects them in affinal relationships. Poppy cultivation has
been partly replaced by shifting cultivation or the growing of vegetables for sale on
Laotian markets. Most of the Hmong villagers practice ancestor rituals connecting
the living and the dead in manifold ritual exchanges. In cases of affliction and
misfortune, it is the shaman who restores equilibrium to unbalanced ritual
relationships. However, specifics are not known about the actual circumstances in
which Hmong villagers lead their lives in Laos. One of the main topics during my
long-term anthropological fieldwork in a Laotian Hmong village community was
research on the construction of the person in life-cycle rituals. The analysis of
Hmong birth, marriage, death and healing rituals suggests a continuous flow of
material and immaterial resources connecting social and cosmological domains in
exchange relationships (Postert 2003, 2004c). These exchange relationships are
deemed indispensable for reproducing the social order of the Hmong village
community and the integrity of every single person. Afflicted individuals are
considered to benefit particularly from ritual action. Rituals restore health by
establishing exchange relationships to significant others like ancestors or spirits and
thereby render persons whole again. The self constituted thereby is a dialogical self
that is, time and again, but invariably as a result of a crisis intervention,
reconstituted in ritual exchanges between social and cosmological order (Postert
2004c; cf. Carrithers et al. 1985). A relational and ritual constitution of the person
taking place in exchanges between the social and the cosmological order has been
asserted for different societies across the globe. In the Lao P.D.R., Platenkamp
(2009) and Sprenger (2006) basically confirmed this pattern for the ethnic groups of
the Lao and the Rmeet. A variety of societies in Indonesia (Barraud 1979;
Platenkamp 1988), in the Pacific (de Coppet and Zemp 1978; Iteanu 1983) and in
northern Africa (Jamous 1981; for a valuable comparison see Barraud et al. 1994)
were likewise found to follow a similar pattern of ritual constitution of self.

Construction of Selves
Cultural conceptions of the person may vary radically across cultures (Alvi 2001;
Gaines 1982; Hallowell 1955; Ikels 2002; Kirmayer 2007; Ohnuki-Tierney 1993;

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Sokefeld 1999). In an oversimplified dichotomy, Western conceptions of the self as

an autonomous, bounded, and individuated locus of personal will and agency are
sometimes contrasted with non-Western sociocentric views of the person in which
persons are inextricably woven into a fabric of social roles and corporate identities
(Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). It is important to keep in mind that models of the
self are part of value systems and should not be conflated with the experiential self
(Hollan 1992). They do not exist as an unmediated sociological reality, or as the
autonomous person in Western countries or as the relational person in a nonWestern context. As ethnographically inspired research reveals, social reality is
always infinitely more complex than any theoretical antinomies allow (Sokefeld
1999). Therefore, individualism as a systematized ideology certainly was absent in
precolonial African contexts, but notions of individuality were not (Comaroff and
Comaroff 2001). Western academic psychiatry promotes values of individualism,
but Christian psychiatrists may pursue a sociocentric conception of the person
(Gaines 1985). Broad contrasts of Western and non-Western selves are therefore
ideal types that may be useful to start cross-cultural thinking with which to acquire a
comparative critical perspective. However, they turn out to be too simplified and
idealized to be applicable in cross-cultural research devoted to analysis of concrete
subjective experience. Cultural and experiential selves are dynamically related,
coconstructing or contradicting each other in a complex biographic process that has
to be assessed in empirical research (Hollan 1992).
One of the most important aspects of models of self is the normative orientation
they afford (Hallowell 1955). The Canadian social philosopher Charles Taylor
provides us with some basic concepts useful in the analysis of moral identity
formation. According to him, every self invariably exists in webs of interlocution
with significant others (Taylor 1989). Significant others are dialogical counterparts
who are essential for the individuals full self-realization in a collectivity of people
according to shared basic values. Thus, the significance of others is profoundly
shaped by cultural values. Significant others may include relatives, friends and
colleaguesbut, similarly, ancestors, spirits or deities (Gaines 1985; Taylor 1989).
Taylor describes the establishment of relationships to these significant others as a
basic dialogical structure of identity which he understands to be a transcendental
condition of human subjectivity. Thus, contrary to ontological individualism, Taylor
assumes that one cannot be a self on ones own. I am a self only in relation to
certain interlocutors. A self only exists within what I call webs of interlocution
(36). At the very core of the self is the ongoing imagined or real dialogical exchange
with others (Taylor 1995). These exchanges are not only a constitutive dynamic of
maturation from infancy to adulthood but also an inherent factor of any identity
emergence. While humans are physically individuated, ongoing identity formation
ties their selves into complex webs of exchanges. Who I am invariably refers
beyond me as an individual to my relationships with meaningful others in a medley
of significant dialogues (Taylor 1989).
Of course, every individual might choose to change his or her social and cultural
setting, to put an end to a web of interlocution in which he or she was settled
down imaginatively, or in reality. One of the most dramatic examples is leaving
ones cultural framework to live in a completely alien setting. However, one never

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escapes the anthropological necessities of the self. For Taylor (1989, 1991), relating
to significant others in processes of normative identity formation is an inevitable and
ontological property of human constitution.

Entering the Fieldwork Site

What does the dialogical nature of identity mean for an anthropologist arriving in a
Hmong village in the Laotian highland as a newcomer, without consanguinal or
affinal kinship ties? A stranger who is incapable of identifying with any Hmong
significant other in the social or cosmological realm? A newcomer who, even more
basically, has no sense of the distinction of what the Hmong perceive as worthwhile
versus worthless?
During my first few days in the village the dominant topic of most dialogues
between myself and my Hmong hosts revolved around the need to determine who
and what I was, precisely. How should I be addressed? What code of conduct should
apply? What was to be expected from me in exchange relations? and so forth. Why
do you want to stay in our village? was consequently one of the questions most
often put. At a lost to fathom my presence, they were quick to avail of established
categorieshe must be a development worker, supralocal government representative or, as I was to learn later, a notorious spy, either governmental or
foreignto explain my being with them. However, I was presuming that there are
dialogical ways of incorporating strangers into the Hmong village that tend to be
closed to representatives of the above-mentioned provenances. Therefore, I tried as
best I could to distance myself from these established categories for outsiders in
order to let other, indigenous classifications I did not yet know kick into play. Thus,
by emphasizing my being an anthropologist, not a development worker, and
German, not the notorious U.S.-American, I was an other who resisted an easy
dialogical tagging, someone who was not an easy fit because he did not correspond
to any established outside category: thus, a stranger who, in terms of categorization,
was clearly a nuisance.
In Hmong village communities in Laos, the category of the individual is of
lesser importance. In its place, the sense of sharing an ancestral lineage with others
plays a crucial self-defining role. Ones position in a specific lineage defines terms
of reference, conduct codes, exchange obligations and significant relations to the
cosmological realm. An individual residing in the village for a longer period of time
who had not been categorized either as a Hmong or as a well-known other, like the
Khmou migratory worker, the Lao village teacher, the missionary or even the
notorious U.S.-American or Laotian government spy, presented a challenge.
Without exchange relationships to even the most basic Hmong significant others in
the social or cosmological realm, without consanguinal or affinal affiliation with any
of the local descent groups, my self lacked culturally significant relations. I had no
discernible contours and, in the long run, ran the risk of being tantamount to a
pathological hazard to my hosts. To use a term coined by Erik H. Erikson (1975), I
personified a latent Hmong identity crisis.

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Somewhat perplexed by my presence, and with the implicit intention of keeping

an eye on this strange stranger, one of the Hmong households accepted me in as a
guest. What for me, in the beginning, appeared to be nothing more than a matter of
food and lodgings was retrospectively the beginning of a process initiating my
participation in the gift exchange of the descent group. In her historical
anthropology of Japan, Ohnuki-Tierney (1993) describes the symbolic power of
rice to act as a symbol of self identity. In Japan rice was perceived as an animated
entity establishing relationships to the gods. Its communal consumption led to the
embodiment of a strong metaphor of the collective identity and operated
metonymically to represent the presence of the descent group including ancestors
in each of its consumers. Accordingly, it turned out that my food and lodgings were
not as innocent as expected. In the household, I was eating the rice that had been
harvested and ritually appropriated by the hosting descent group. I was inhabiting a
ritual space assigned to a specific constellation of exchanges between particular
living persons and their dead. Sleeping in this house as a ritual space, eating their
rice as an important exchange object, I was already unsuspectingly taking part in the
households relationships with the cosmos, without yet having formally established
relations with it. Thus, without realizing it, I was already inhabiting some Hmong
twilight zone. Unfortunately, this very state of in-betweeness made me especially
vulnerable to other others who proved to be less benevolent than my Hmong
hosts: hungered wild spirits (dab qus) waiting for prey.

Constructing the Person in Hmong Village Cosmology

To describe the dramatic circumstances of my transformation from anthropologist to
Hmong, I wish to give a brief account of the relations that are deemed essential for
existing as a person according to my hosts. Especially important in this respect is a
constituent called vapor or breath (pa), which pervades the whole cosmos and
is essential to sustain a persons vitality, fertility and ability to grow and move. It
originates in the earth; it can be seen evaporating from the land as the breath/vapor
of the earth (pa av) when the sun is shining very intensely. Growing crops is
essentially an effort to secure the presence of this vital constituent in food. This is
usually done by the combined agricultural efforts of an extended family. To be able
to do so, they have to enter into a reciprocal relationship with a local spirit (dab
thwv tim) specific to the village area they are living in. By making the appropriate
sacrifices in the fields he will be prevailed onto safely oversee the transformation of
nonsocial, nonconsumable pa of the land into social, consumable pa of the food.
Harvested rice usually serves two different purposes: the more obvious being that
of nourishing the living members of a household. The breath/vapor of the cooked
rice (pa mov) is freed in the cooking process and visible as steam. This vapor is
considered to be such a nourishing constituent of rice that some Hmong consider
rice that has cooled down to be nutritionally almost worthless. If someone eats
warm rice, the rices pa will pass into the individuals blood as breath/vapor of the
blood (pa ntshav) and render the person vital, healthy and fertile. When persons

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accidentally cut themselves on a cold day, pa will be seen visibly evaporating from
the blood dripping onto the ground.
The second purpose of rice is that of sacrifice: each household will regularly offer
cooked, steaming rice to the spirits of the house and the ancestors of the lineage
(laig dab). They are supposed to come and take the gift by inhaling the breath/
vapor (hnia pa) of the rice. Reciprocally, the ancestors offer their names as
protection for the household members. The ancestors names are presumed to have
good hmoov, a concept that covers a complex semantic field from luck and success
to competitive spirit. It is common for a Hmong father to giveparticularly male
descendants in a birth ritual the name of an especially fortunate ancestor. This
creates a relationship between the two, in which the ancestors hmoov protects the
descendant, who in turn regularly reciprocates with steaming rice and the sacrifice
of specific animals (for a detailed analysis, see Postert 2003).
A person residing in a well-functioning descent group will usually be able to
keep his or her pa intact owing to careful attendance to exchange relationships
between the living and the dead. Health is therefore not self-evident to human
existence, but a social property that has to be actively nourished again and again in a
network of social relationships connecting the living and the dead.
According to Hmong discourse, the existence of pa in a human body manifests
itself in the presumed presence of diverse souls (plig) each person has to have, for
instance, the chicken, pig or cattle soul. For want of a better term, I translate plig
as soul throughout, although it must be kept in mind that the term is liberally
tinged with Christian connotations not applicable to the Hmong context. Souls
and life force pa seem to be interrelated: if the pa of a person is affected, the
souls of a person tend to desert, and vice versa, if the souls of a person desert,
this tends to adversely affect the pa and thus the vitality of the respective person.
Another important Hmong category of the cosmological other is that of the wild
spirits (dab qus) who do not take part in ordered sociocosmological exchange
relationships as human beings or ancestors do. To be vital, they depend on
ambushing other beings and robbing them of their vital pa. One specific kind of wild
spirits is the spirits of the accidents (dab vij sub vij sw), who close their victims
eyes and ears and thus expose them to life-threatening risks. Once an accident
occurs and the victim is bleeding, the spirits of the accidents approach him or her to
snatch by inhalation the vitality of his pa. Usually, if one is in favorable exchange
relationships with ones ancestors, one bears a good name whose hmoov should
manage to stave off the wild spirits. Apparently, the names protective properties
wane the farther one moves away from the social domain of the village. Beyond the
village, ones protection very much depends on the relations that one0 s descent
group established with the local spirit.
If ritual exchanges with important significant others, either living or dead, have
been neglected, the weakening of protective bonds between a descent group and its
ancestors will, in all likelihood, result in affliction for members of the descent
group. Thus, Taylors dialogical self, responsible for maintaining exchanges,
should in this context not be considered to be an individual but, rather, a group. The
cosmological, social, psychological and physical realms alike may be affected by
the consequences of ritual neglect and are not categorically differentiated in this

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respect. The affliction might be cosmological, as in withdrawal of a protective

ancestor spirit; social, like constant failure in economic transactions; psychological,
such as enduring bad mood and fatigue; or physical, like a sudden accident. In most
cases, misfortune will affect all realms at the same time. In many cases, the integrity
of the person will be considered to be jeopardized, usually expressed in the idiom of
soul loss, necessitating a therapeutic ritual to re-establish relationships with
significant others and to secure the integrity of the dialogical self. Therefore, ritual
healing, from a Hmong perspective, serves much more than just psychotherapeutic
purposes. It must be conceived of as an integral unity of concurring somatic therapy,
psychotherapy, sociotherapy and cosmological therapy.

The Anthropologists Accident from a Hmong Perspective

The subsequent account is a reconstruction of circumstances of the accident that
happened to me in 2000, after having been in the village for just a few weeks. In the
framework of this article, I confine myself to summing up the interpretations of the
incidents given by the Hmong retrospectively. This focus on the Hmong perspective
not only turned out to be a fascinating gateway to underlying concepts of health,
ritual and the person, but also a personal opportunity to work through what had
happened in those turbulent days.
My German name, which was probably capable of protecting me in the vicinity
of my German ancestors, was deemed a strange and worthless appendage in Laos:
Your name did not fit to the village, did not taste good. The spirits of the accidents
did not know, did not like your name. Without this protection, the innocent
anthropologist was an easy prey for wild spirits loitering around the village. After
being in the village for a few weeks, I thought that it would be a good idea to draw a
map of the whole area from the peaks of the surrounding mountains. However, as a
matter of fact, spirits of accidents influenced your liver/will (siab) that you
wanted to climb up a hill. Transferring their victim to the nonsocial sphere beyond
the village, the spirits would be undisturbed while taking hold of it. Apparently
some children in the village tried to dissuade me from doing so: The children told
you not to go, but there were spirits of accidents closing your eyes, covering your
ears. Thus, I did not understand what they wanted to tell me. In an attempt to ward
off even greater calamity, the children joined the unswerving anthropologist on his
demanding expedition up into the mountains. After climbing up for a while, I felt
quite exhausted. My vision became a bit blurred, but I kept moving on. Most
Hmong would have read this as a warning sign indicating the presence of wild
spirits who were closing ones eyes to induce one to lose one0 s footing. The
appropriate countermeasure would have been to sacrifice a small amount of rice or
meat on the spot and to say: You [spirits of accidents] want to eatI give you to
eat; you stay here, do not go with me. Unfortunately, I didn0 t do any of this.
Climbing onward, I slipped on a rock, lost my footing and slid down a steep slope
for about 10 meters. The local spirit with whom I was at least informally in an
exchange relationship prevented the worst. He protected that your body did not fall
with full force, your head did not hit off the ground. However, I suffered several

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serious fractures and could hardly see or breathe, further proof that there were spirits
of accidents present inhaling the pa of my blood. Most of my souls, especially the
chicken, pig and cattle souls, thought the body is dead. They saw the spirits of
accidents eat your blood. They were afraid and ran away. The children who
accompanied me informed the villagers, and measures were taken to bring me to the
provincial hospital. The German Red Cross finally flew me back to Germany,
terminating a 10-day odyssey through various Laotian and Thai hospitals.

Return to the Fieldwork Site

After hospitalization and subsequent reconvalescence in Germany, I was still
determined to continue my fieldwork. Four months after the accident, I returned to
the fieldwork site, this time accompanied by my wife, who joined me for the first
weeks of my stay there. However, smooth integration into the Hmong community
was still out of range. On the contrary, as I got to know later, I posed an even larger
problem to my Hmong hosts upon my return. Not only had I still not established
formal relationships with the descent groups ancestors and still not have a name
capable of protecting me, but even worse now: I had lost several souls, who were
wandering around in the jungle. In the short run, this would not have harmed
anybody. Without a body, the souls have no place to sleep, have no rice to eat.
They miss the body and come back to the place of the accident to look for the
body. Their interest in the body is being fed: When the man eats hot rice, pa
evaporates. The souls inhale this pa. In my case, I was absent from the village for
four months. If ones souls cannot find the body over longer periods of time, they
might leave and reincarnate in another body, for instance, that of a fetus in the
womb of a pregnant woman. Being deprived of these important constituents of the
person, I would constantly feel very weak, lack drive and want to sleep all daya
state that is not that different from the symptoms of a depression. However, I would
finally die when the respective woman gave birth to her child. Hosting such a
vulnerable person in ones house is akin to taking the risk of attracting wild spirits
again. These would perhaps attack not only the exposed person, but also other
vulnerable members of the household such as children or sick persons. However,
initiating me was an attractive option for my hosts, as I was, for Laotian
circumstances, a wealthy exchange partner who was not yet bound up in the
networks of reciprocal village exchange relations. After consulting each other, my
Hmong hosts decided to take the appropriate ritual measures to banish the lurking
danger. They decided that my ritual initiation into the descent group offered a
solution to my plight as well as their dilemma, creating new opportunities of
interaction.

Initiation into a Hmong Self

The ritual solution to the crisis was a healing ritual initiating exchange relationships
with significant cosmological others endowing me with a Hmong self. My hosts told

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me what I had to buy as sacrificial gifts: one pig, two chickens, two eggs and pieces
of paper, which are considered to be money for the spirits and transferred to them by
burning. The first thing to do was to call my souls back into my body, a ritual
called hu plig. Second, a relationship between me and the local spirit had to be
established, to be formally acknowledged in the village. Third, and most important,
I ritually had to be put in touch with my descent groups ancestors in exchange
relationships to be endowed with a patrilineal ancestors name renowned for its
protective hmoov. But what was to be done with my wife? She obviously could not
have been born into the same clan as me due to the obligations of clan exogamy.
Thus, her origin had to be set elsewhere. My wifes Hmong name was chosen by a
woman of another clan who was in affinal relations with my hosts.
Therefore, early on a misty morning, my Hmong hosts, my wife and I went up
into the mountains until we had reached the scene of the accident. One of the
renowned shamans of the village who acted as a ritual elder of the descent group
started summoning my souls while sacrificing the meat of two cooked chickens
and burning spirit money for the local spirit.
With this part of the ritual completed, we returned to the village, where the
second part of the ritual followed. With us wearing traditional Hmong clothing, the
sacrifice of a pig, the binding of the souls to our bodies by using white threads of
cotton (khi tes) and, most importantly, the initiation of formal exchange between
ourselves and the descent groups ancestors took place. Our duty was to make
cooked rice and pig meat available for sacrifice to the ancestors. The countergifts
were the new names the shaman called from the realm of the ancestors, which were
transferred to us and thus made us members of the descent group. It was especially
important to choose an ancestor name with a lot of hmoov to prevent a repetition of
the previous incident. The name is considered to be the owner (tswv) of the
souls. Without it, the souls could not be convoked and would remain in the
extrasocial realm of impermanence. With it, the souls could be temporarily
socialized again and incorporated into a new person as a member of the descent
group.
A ritual elder presented a bowl with the gifts at the door of the house, a pair of
cooked chickens, rice and an egg. He summoned our souls again while attracting
them by knocking a divinatory device, a split buffalo horn, against the right and left
doorpost. The souls were not considered to come and inhale (hnia) the vital
constituent pa of the gifts as in the case of sacrificing rice or meat for the ancestors.
Rather, they were assumed to take up temporary residence in the gifts, which were
then carried into the midst of the descent group to be later handed over to us.
In the next ritual step, the ritual relations established were consolidated by a
ritual sweeping and binding of the hands (cheb khi tes) (see also Tapp 1989;
Symonds 2004). The ritual elder took white threads, made a sweeping movement
from our body to the wrists with them, took them to the doorway of the house and
burned them. This ritual cleansing kept wild spirits at bay, who may threaten the
health of family members. With other threads he again directed the lost souls
from the doorway to the new members of the lineage, performed a reverse sweeping
movement from our wrists to the body and tied the threads around our wrists. As the

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different members of the descent group are not sharply distinguished in terms of
their vital constituents of the person, the most vulnerable of them also got pieces of
thread bound around their wrists. This was considered to be most relevant for the
children who had been eye witnesses to my accident. As unexpected and shocking
events like the sight of a sudden accident might lead to a soul loss, especially in
children, their participation in the ritual renewal of the constitution as a person was
considered to be of utmost importance.
The male representatives of the descent group then approached us, blessed us,
bound our wrists with white threads and pressed banknotes in our hands. The wealth
symbolically presented testified to the descent groups good fortune and competitive
spirit hmoov, further securing the presence of the fleet-footed souls. Now, the
sacrificed animals were consumed in a communal meal. The threads were supposed
to remain tied around our wrists for the most vulnerable phase of our new
personhood, at least three days.

Moral Selves and Health

A person living for any length of time in the midst of a Hmong village community
who resists any easy assignment to established categories of the other poses a
serious challenge to his hosts. Not organizing ones life by some sense of moral
orientation or strong value as personified by ancestors or local spirits cannot remain
without consequences for the conception of ones personhood (Hallowell 1955).
Taylors (1989) claim is that living within such strongly qualified horizons
is constitutive of human agency, that stepping outside these limits would be
tantamount to stepping outside what we would recognize as integral, that is,
undamaged personhood (27). For Taylor, moral orientation in life is therefore not
just a virtue for a person, but an anthropological necessity of its sociality. If it is
missing, basic personhood is at risk, predisposing the individual to calamity from a
Hmong perspective. When calamity strikes, it underscores the necessity of restoring
basic relations that are required to constitute whole persons in a Hmong village
community. The cultural model for this restoration is the ritual construction of the
Hmong self. As Gaines (1982) put it: Other persons are conceivable only in terms
of the self, for the self is the key and central point of reference which makes it
possible for other selves, called persons, to be characterized, described, and
perceptually apprehended (169). On account of the fact that Hmong identity is
invariably in a state of flux, affliction necessitates ongoing resynthesis of the past
and future from the perspective of present incidents. According to Taylor (1989),
narratives provide the means of identity formation vis-a`-vis omnipresent contingency. Healing rituals construct narratives connecting the afflicted to essential
moral sources of their self in exchange relations with significant others. My
affliction was much more than a few fractures; it was a threatening lasting
disintegration of the basic constituents of my person, probably leading to death, if
not ritually treated in time. The healing of this affliction was not just a restoration of
balance between the social and the cosmological realm that could have been

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assumed to have existed before the accident. Rather, ritual healing was a chance to
bring my latent identity crisis to an end, to fill my empty self with significant social
and cosmological relations. The instrument of healing in Hmong rituals is an
exchange object that contains some quality of the giver (cf. Mauss 1954). The
inalienable gift of a Hmong name not only continued to embody the hmoov of the
ancestral giver, but also imposed this identity on me as a receiver, and bound me to
social and moral obligations of reciprocation in the expanded kin network. By
exchanging my indeterminate identity for a more wholesome Hmong self, I was
placed in a relationship terminology and positioned in an ancestral lineage, which
prescribed obligations in reciprocal exchanges with affines, consanguines, ancestors
and other significant others.
The quest for a moral compass is an inevitable undertaking of human agency.
Without it, how is one to orient oneself in complex and meaningful webs of
dialogical exchanges in an alien social and cosmological order? Taylor (1989)
exposes the close connection between self and agency as the essential link between
identity and a kind of orientation. To know who you are is to be oriented in a moral
space, a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth
doing and what is not, what has meaning and importance for you and what is trivial
and secondary (28). Thus, the dialogical narrative of the healing ritual provided an
initiation into basic Hmong relationships connecting social and cosmological order
in a creative piece of identity work that restored not only health, but also moral
agency, in a very basic sense. From the perspective of the Hmong, it is even
questionable whether one could ever be achieved without the other.
Thus, the healing ritual created a shared space of interlocution in the social and
cosmological realm. Restoring health meant reconstituting a Hmong persona
(Mauss 1985) in terms of significant exchange relationships connecting the social
and the cosmological order in a ritual narrative. An orientation to a culturally
defined good is an essential feature of human health and agency from a Hmong
perspective. Healing and providing identity by establishing a moral orientation
through exchange were part and parcel of the same process. Ritual action helped to
render a fragile life meaningful, manageable and comprehensible, restoring a sense
of coherence as described by the founder of the theory on salutogenesis, Aaron
Antonovsky (1987).
However useful Taylors account of identity constitution in a moral space is for
the present analysis of ritual healing and incorporation of the other, one of its main
shortcomings for an analysis of identity formation ought not to go unnoticed.
Taylors concept of identity formation focuses almost only on the ideal sources of
the self, on moral goods and narratives. However, his approach tends to neglect the
somatic dimension to identity. One would expect a full-blown theory of the self to
be informative about aspects of embodiment as exemplified in emotional
dispositions and their cultural transformation in a bidirectional coconstructive
process. Taylor has little to say about the interrelations of somatic and ideal
dimensions of the self, and this casts doubt on whether his approach suffices as a
general account of the self.

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181

Implications for Further Fieldwork

Of course every Hmong prima facie saw that my wife and I were not native Hmong.
Later during my fieldwork it often happened that I met Hmong whom I had not
previously been introduced to. If it came up in conversation, I did not make a secret
of the fact that I was Hmong and was curious to see how my vis-a`-vis would react to
the information. My vis-a`-vis never seemed to be puzzled but, rather, was concerned
to find out whether a consanguinal or affinal relationship could be established
between their and my descent group. I suppose that the above-described procedure
of incorporating the other is not that alien to most Hmong people. Whereas Western
representations of descent are based on the cultural idiom of blood relationships
that tend to be equated with biological relationships, a descent system in
anthropology is a patterned set of symbolic categories structuring relations that
are not necessarily biologically grounded (Barnard and Good 1984). In this respect,
my Hmong hosts helped me to free myself from the conceptual straightjacket of my
own cultural models of kinship. With the healing ritual, I became one of the
connecting elements in the dialogical web of relations shaping and connecting
descent group, affines and their respective cosmological counterparts. Why would
one be so surprised about that? As Sahlins (1993:1516) coined it: Western
peoples have no monopoly on practices of cultural encompassment, nor are they
playing with amateurs in the game of constructing the other.
My newly acquired agency in the web of relations did not remain unnoticed. As a
rather wealthy operator in the web of relations, I got to know the expectations and
obligations associated with my emerging moral agency on various occasions of
affliction, transition or need. However, backed by my consanguinal, affinal and
cosmological affiliation, I was now able to refer to a multiplicity of relations to
negotiate and initiate contact with a variety of significant others in a long and
intensive process of dialogue. From this perspective, appropriating the anthropologist conceptually should be seen not as a failure to appreciate the others identity,
but as unavoidable and, as in my case, potentially integrative and healing, if it
happens with attentive empathy.

Conclusion
Contrary to assumptions of an ontological individualism, ones identity, from a
Hmong perspective, is not fixed in itself or self-evident. It is the dialogical exchange
relationships between social and cosmological order that make up ones identity.
Thus, an anthropologist in a latent and severe identity crisis who turned out to be
prone to physical and mental illness could be treated by engaging him in ritual
relations with diverse social and cosmological beings. The respective healing ritual
was curative, appropriating and incorporating into the descent group at the same
time. The ritual construction of an identity in Hmong terms was a precondition to
being credited with the robust physical and mental health that only a whole person
can be blessed with, according to the Hmong perspective.

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As I see it, my accident was nothing more than an opportunity to realize this
option. If it had not happened, I am convinced that a later incident would have
offered the opportunity to ritually appropriate what represented a categorical
nuisance. The drama of my own incorporation into a Hmong community is therefore
a microstudy highlighting the flexibility one discovers in ritual systems, capable of
healing and appropriating strangers in a state of deep identity crisis. The initiation
into significant exchange relationships between the social and the cosmological
order transformed my being from indeterminate other in a life-threatening state of
identity crisis to a wholesome Hmong self in a state of physical and mental health
and moral agency. This exemplary rite of passage highlights the unique affinity of
ritual healing and appropriation of the other in a relational conception of the
person. Such a concept makes it easy to incorporate into a kinship unit persons who,
from a Western perspective, cannot be incorporated oron the flip side of the
cointo excorporate the same person or others who are born into that descent group
in cases of dissent.
Ritual exchange was the driving force for obtaining Hmongness and health in a
healing process that saw me shifting from other to self. From then onward, it
served to perpetuate Hmongness and health in periodic communal ritual exchanges
between my descent group and its social and cosmological significant others. In a
world of constant transience, the exchange of identities was not the end in itself, but
the beginning of a dynamic process of physical and mental salutogenesis in
recurrent cycles of ritual exchange.
However, the perpetuation of these ritual exchange cycles is critically vulnerable
to sudden disruptions in the constellation of the social networks. Most rituals require
the presence of certain ritual specialists and relatives, who are usually not difficult to
locate in the extended kinship groups, if these are intact (Postert 2004b). However,
death and scattering during the civil war and elopement fragmented most Hmong
patrilineages. In a typically individualist bias, U.S.-American agencies resettled
Hmong refugees as individuals or nuclear families across the United States of
America, with a view to more rapid assimilation into American culture (Miyares
1998). Therefore, in the first years of migration, most Hmong kinship groups were
settled across states and continents unable to perpetuate their ritual cycles of
exchange. If the expression of basic sociomoral agency is severely and suddenly
interrupted in a completely alien sociocultural setting, the consequences for mental
health may be devastating, especially in the presence of additional severe stressors.
The Hmong migration experience bears evidence of this process. Cultural
uprooting, role discontinuity, identity crisis, unemployment, social marginalization,
racism, dysfunctional coping strategies and prior traumatic experiences severely
curtailed previous salutogenetic agency and led to an exacerbation of self-rated
depressive symptoms of the Hmong refugees in the first years after migration to the
United States (Westermeyer et al. 1984). Initially, symptoms tended to be more
pronounced among men and employed women. Several years later, this finding was
reversed, so that women who had remained at home reported the highest level of
symptoms, apparently due to delayed onset of acculturation pressure (Westermeyer
2000). In comparison to ethnic Laotian, Khmer and Vietnamese refugees, of whom
a greater percentage originally came from urban backgrounds, the Hmong were

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183

significantly more likely to report depression (Chung and Bemak 1996). However,
even nondepressed Hmong controls reported significantly higher symptom levels on
items like hopelessness, loneliness and uselessness (Westermeyer 1986). It may be
surmised that the massive cultural-ecological changes especially prominent in the
first years of migration account for this stress (Westermeyer et al. 1984).
The diasporic Hmong communities of the United States have undergone and still
undergo rapid sociocultural change since the 1970s. Any generalizing statement
about their present situation is difficult and prone to oversimplification, as they are
very heterogeneous groupings. Regional differentiation, different waves of migration and varying coping strategies have to be taken into account (Yang 2003). There
has been no research on diasporic Hmong concepts of the person to date, but it is to
be expected that these have been severely challenged and transformed due to basic
changes in the patterns of social and cosmological life in the West. However,
enduring differences in conceptions of moral agency, mental health and identity
between Americans of Hmong and Americans of European descent can be assumed
(Gensheimer 2006; Mouanoutoua 2003). More and more diasporic Hmong are
getting in touch with psychiatric services, voluntarily or involuntarily (Tatman
2004; Westermeyer et al. 1989). Many of them challenge and are challenged by
values of individualism as inherent in psychiatric concepts of the person (Gaines
1992; Kirmayer 2007; Sadler 2004). Psychiatric services must be prepared to
accommodate substantial differences in the concepts of the person when treating
Hmong migrants from Laos.
Acknowledgments The authors data collection and analysis were supported by a grant from the
German Research Council (DFG) in the framework of the interdisciplinary Research Group Cultural
Diversity and the Construction of Polity in Southeast Asia: Continuity, Discontinuity, and Transformation (FOR 362) at Munster University.

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