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The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down Cross Cultural Metaphors

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Health Metaphor’s Values Throughout our daily lives, we communicate and interact with other people that we do or do not know. While we are communicating, we are saying and using many types of language like examples, quotes, and metaphors. In this world that filled with so many cultures, each culture has its own beliefs, norms, traditions, understandings, and its own metaphors. The cultural metaphors can consider as a cultural system or use of language that shared within people with the same culture and values. Moreover, the use of a certain metaphor in a culture can be not understandable and doesn’t make sense for another culture due to the difference in values and beliefs. The metaphorical meanings in different cultures motivate and state …show more content…

Starting from the beginning when Foua Lee gave birth to her first twelve children without any care providers, but her husband’s help. However, She delivered her children in privet at her home floor that made by her husband and it was quite while the others children are sleeping. Furthermore, Hmong families believe that diseases and problems mostly caused by unpleasant dab who like to eat flesh and drink blood. That is why women of childbirth won’t think to step inside a cave because a dab might be there. This kind of unpleasant dab makes his victim sterile by having sexual contact with her. Hmong women who about to give birth need to reach her home or her husband’s cousins place quickly to give birth because if she did give birth in somewhere else a dab might injure her. In addition, Hmong culture doesn’t acknowledge that they have any psychological issues and they don’t characterize between physical and mental illness. However, the reason why because they believe that all the problems happen to them are spiritual problems only (Fadiman, 1998, chapter 1.8). In fact, cultures use metaphor in almost every life aspect, which include health and there are values expressed with those metaphors. In this paper, first I will introduce the metaphor use in cultures then I will show the difference between the Hmong and the …show more content…

This metaphor has a deep meanings and values of the Hmong culture, after the mother give birth to her baby, the father makes a hole at least two feet under the ground in the dirt floor of their house in order to buried the newborn’ placenta. Moreover, it is different if the newborn was a boy or girl, if it is a girl, her placenta will be buried under her parents’ bed, but if it was a boy, his placenta will be buried in honor place like near the house’ base to sanctification the spirit of male. On the Hmong language the word placenta means, “jacket” and it is considered the place that contains the person’s soul and also the person’s first and best clothing. Whenever a Hmong dies, her or his soul will travel and find its way to reach the place where the placenta “jacket” was buried and then wear it to complete its passage. However, if the soul couldn’t find its “jacket”, it can’t travel anymore and it will remain isolated and undressed (Fadiman, 1998, Chapter 1). This is important to Hmong culture because they think that their souls will be alive after they died, so the “jacket” will be its home where the souls feel safe away from

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