ipl-logo

How Does Hmong Culture Affect Social Identity

1686 Words7 Pages

Research Questions: How does the Hmong culture affect Hmong people’s social identity in American society?

Thesis: The Hmong culture affect social identity with its beliefs, values, and traditions due to the older generations continuing to practice the culture in order to pass it down to the next generation. The Hmong culture continues to express the ideals of its ancestors. However, the Hmong people holds traditions as the most valuable aspect of Hmong culture. It defines their identity and culture that holds the people together.

Within a vast society like the American society, many social identity will be question if they do not conform to the norms. In any society, people will easily conform to follow norms that fit the views of the society …show more content…

Just like Americans, culture is defined by Hmong people as “the shared ways of a human social group” (Becker 1982:95). As a social group, Hmong people are connected to their culture and continues to practice it. However before understanding the culture of Hmong people, individuals must understand the struggles of the Hmong people. The history of Hmong people can be roughly traced back to China. The Hmong people derived from a bigger group of ethnic groups that were referred as the Miao. During the ancient times, the Hmong people and their leaders created a kingdom that was later destroyed by the Han Chinese (Cha 2010:9). From historical records, many Hmong were almost killed until extinction; however, some did escape and were able to live quietly and deep within the mountains and forests (Cha 2010:9). Since the Hmong people isolated themselves from the world there were not much records that recorded what happened during their time of isolation. Decades later the Hmong people were able to peacefully coexist with the Chinese; however it was destroyed again due to the greed of the successors of China. After decades of resentment and oppression, the Hmong people eventually migrated into Laos and Vietnam. However they still continued to face harsh conditions and oppressions from political

Show More
Related

Summary Of The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down By Anne Fadiman

1738 Words | 7 Pages

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a biographical work on a Hmong family living in California during the early 80’s. While the book is a true accounting of the Lee’s family attempt to secure quality healthcare for their epileptic daughter while traversing the American medical system and the Department of Children Services. The author, Anne Fadiman, takes the reader on a painstaking but necessary journey of Hmong history and culture and how they came to reside in Merced, California. As you learn more about the history of the Hmong people, you come to admire them as a strong and resilient people that have, as a people, overcome many challenges with respect to being conquered, nomadic and always having to start over.

Read More

Summary Of The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down By Anne Fadiman

807 Words | 4 Pages

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a tragic true story written by Anne Fadiman, who spent over five years in the middle of a fight between Hmong culture and American medicine. The book is about a young Hmong child named Lia Lee. At 3 months old she started showing signs of severe epilepsy. Her American doctors had a strict and rigorous treatment plan, but were baffled when the family refused to follow it because of their culture and beliefs. Anne Fadiman originally went to the Lee’s hometown of Merced California as a columnist writing an article on Hmong culture for Life Magazine, but soon gained a personal connection to the Lee family.

Read More

Clan Leaders In Hmong Culture

141 Words | 1 Pages

When people hear about elderly individuals most will assume that they are wise, filled with endless amounts of wisdom, and have stories to pass down. Well, if an individual is an elderly Hmong male, then this is accurate. It has been said “Within the family, the eldest man would traditionally hold the utmost power and control and would possess final say regarding all family decisions” (Tatman 2004). Also, the elder adults are typically seen as clan leaders. Clan leaders make many decisions and approve of any major decisions (Cobb 2010).

Read More

Comparing The Hmong Culture In The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down

624 Words | 3 Pages

We are able to decide what career field we want to pursue, and are able to work up in the social rankings despite our class upon birth. The Hmong culture, on the other hand; are accustomed to living in the mountains and all have the same occupation: farming. As stated in the book, the Hmong were unfamiliar with toilets. Their toilets were the dirt floor of their home. For me, that was an eye opener.

Read More

Hmong Culture

1594 Words | 7 Pages

The cultural collision and difference is described through the development of the story of Lia Lee who happens to be quite young, sick, and unable to stand for herself and her beliefs. Lee is a Hmong child and the narrative is an account of the blow by blow recount of the struggles and challenges as the two colliding cultures as they fight over the soul and the body of Lia Lee the Hmong sick girl. Lia’s outcome and ultimately her well-being is inevitable bound by the challenges of ensuring her best interest by all individual in her presence from both sides. The narrative indicates the complicated nature of the relationships inbound the two sides and thereby uncovers the power struggles from their intertwined relationships. Fadiman provides a scrupulous, fair, compassionate, and thorough presentation of the events thus providing an unbiased and balanced view of the sequential events.

Read More

The Pros And Cons Of The Civil War

150 Words | 1 Pages

Unfortunately, they were forced to face humiliation and abandonment, left out without any shelter, food, employment, education, money nor

Read More

The Racial/Cultural Identity Development Model By Sue & Sue

1011 Words | 5 Pages

The Racial/Cultural Identity Development Model by Sue & Sue (2012), is an active example to understand clients’ attitudes and behaviors toward themselves and their culture as well as the culture of others. According to West-Olatunji, Frazier, Guy, Smith, Clay & Breaux (2007), “This model poses the following questions (Sue & Sue, 2003): (a) With whom do you identify and why? (b) What culturally diverse attitudes and beliefs do you accept or reject and why? (c) What dominant cultural attitudes and beliefs do you accept or reject and why? and (d) How do your current attitudes and beliefs affect your interaction with other culturally diverse clients and people of the dominant culture?

Read More

Compare And Contrast The Economy And The Gilded Age

968 Words | 4 Pages

Labors had to continues suffering in the unjust and cruel environment and hardly survive. Therefore, they long political

Read More

Personal Narrative: My Growing Up As A Hmong-American Student

1203 Words | 5 Pages

Growing up as Hmong-American youth, I was raised by a father who joined the military when he was twelve years old. He was forced into the Vietnam war fighting for safety, peace, and a relationship with the United States of America. Through this military influence and discipline at such a young age, my father accepted the military lifestyle. He carried it over from the Vietnam war to my family today. Growing up, my father was always strict on me, especially when it came to my appearances and education.

Read More

Essay On Hmong Culture

1934 Words | 8 Pages

Hmong Culture The Hmong primarily originated from the “mountainous areas of China, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos” (Purnell, 2014, pg. 236) and immigrated to the United States in 1975 after the Vietnam War. Primarily refugees from Laos, the Hmong people began immigrating to the United States in large numbers “after communist forces came to power in their native country.” (Bankston, 2014, pg. 332) Mainly settling in California, the Hmong began to be dispersed by American refugee settlement agencies across the country in the 1980s, also settling in Wisconsin and Michigan.

Read More

Evey Quotes

649 Words | 3 Pages

They lived through hate, death, injustice etc. Just like countless people must do on a regular basis

Read More

Into The Wild Identity Analysis

845 Words | 4 Pages

In the culture we live in today, we are bombarded with ideas and images of “what we should be”. We are expected and obligated to modify ourselves in order to live up to social expectations and to feel accepted by others. It is the fear of being an outcast that pressures us to mask our true identity. Therefore, in an American culture, one can form an identity and still remain true and authentic to oneself through nonconformity and self-reliance. Jon Krakauer’s novel Into the Wild portrays Chris McCandless’s journey of discovering his true identity through the idea of nonconformity.

Read More

My Social Identity

1298 Words | 6 Pages

I am an international student from Vietnam who came to the United States to pursue higher education. I was brought up in a very unique culture and family traditions, and this has had a strong influence on my beliefs and mindsets. Together with all the experiences that I have been through so far in my life, I have formed some social and personal identities that I might or might be aware of. Such identifies are an important tool that can stay with me and remind me every day of who I am and my origin.

Read More

Vietnamese Cultural Values

1448 Words | 6 Pages

Case Study on Vietnamese Cultural Values I. Vietnamese People and Languages: There are more than 60 groups having different ethnicities; however majority of them are Vietnamese. 85% of total populations are Vietnamese while 15% of the population belongs from other groups. One of the majority ethnicity living in Vietnam is Chinese. The other two groups are Cham and the Khmer. The objective of the current paper is to an analysis of Vietnamese cultural values.

Read More

Cultural Identity Reflection Paper

1883 Words | 8 Pages

Throughout my experiences in this course so far, I have had many opportunities to reflect on my own past and have begun to better understand my own cultural identity. It has been much more difficult to wrap my head around than I would have predicted it to be because so many things play into the construction of an identity that it can be hard to look at all of those separate pieces together. My cultural identity, like all others, is more complicated than it first appears. I identify as a white person, a woman, an American, a gay person, and a feminist, just to name a few. While all of these labels carry with them stereotypes and expectations, they also interplay with the cultural influences I was subject to throughout my childhood.

Read More

More about How Does Hmong Culture Affect Social Identity

Related Topics

Open Document