The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

The book’s title, “the spirit catches you and you fall down,” is a literal translation of the Hmong term quag dab ped, a condition we call epilepsy. Hmong believe in spirits - both good and bad - and that your health depends on evading the bad spirits while capturing the good to stay within your body. After her birth, her family found they were unable to bury the placenta beneath her birthplace, considered an inauspicious sign. The subject of this book, Lia Lee, was born in 1982, the 14th child of Four and Nao Kao Lee, and the first to be born in the U.S. in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, often settling in California.Īs this book clearly documents, many faced a collision course with American culture. withdrawal in 1975, these Hmong-Lao fled Laos for Thailand, ending up in overcrowded refugee camps. The book, which won the National Book Critics Award, was a wake-up call on the need for cultural sensitivity in medicine.ĭuring the Vietnam conflict, many Hmong people in Laos fought on the side of the United States.

If professional anthropologists wish our own best work to speak to 'apparitions of culture' within medicine and other 'cultures of no culture,' I suggest that we must find compelling new narrative forms in which to convey more complex understandings of 'culture.Back in 1997, Anne Fadiman wrote The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, documenting the experience of a Hmong family in Merced, Calif., 10 years earlier. I argue that The Spirit Catches You is so influential as ethnography because it is so moving as a story it is so moving as a story because it works so well as tragedy and it works so well as tragedy precisely because of the static, reified, essentialist understanding of 'culture' from which it proceeds.

This article addresses the relationship between theory, narrative form, and teaching through a close critical reading of that book that is informed by theories of tragedy and ethnographies of medicine. Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (Noonday Press, 1997) is widely used in 'cultural competence' efforts within U.S.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman