2 Angel Debeer SOC208WASP2024 The Spirit Catches You, and You Fall Down

2

Angel Debeer

SOC208WASP2024

The Spirit Catches You, and You Fall Down

Annie Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You, and You Fall Down narrates the story of Lia Lee and her Hmong family, who migrated from Laos to the U.S. in 1980. The family finds a home in the small community of Merced, California, just next to the Merced Community Medical Center (MCMC). Lia is diagnosed with a series of medical issues, including epilepsy and seizure disorder-related complications (Fadiman 22). The book takes the reader on a journey through Lia and her family’s medical perspectives, guided by culture, history, and the doctors’ opinions. The cultural differences in medical practices, life, and the role of communication in patient care are explored in the book. Language and cultural barriers are central issues with regard to the provision of Lia’s medical treatment. While the MCMC doctors offer prescriptions that shift from time to time, adding to the pile of challenges the family has to undergo for Lia’s well-being, the parents also offer Hmong treatments with the conviction that the interventions will aid Lia in acquiring spiritual and physical recovery. This essay navigates the fundamental contradiction between Lia’s family and her medical doctors from a medical anthropologist’s standpoint. The terms explored in the contradictions include biomedicine, naturalistic disease etiology and personalistic disease etiology.

Being a subfield of anthropology, medical anthropology draws upon various theoretical approaches to better understand the factors that influence well-being and health, treatment and prevention of diseases, cultural applications of pluralistic medical systems and the healing process (Hahn 3). Medical anthropologists hold the belief that all cultures seek to explain the cause of illness and that the beliefs about illness causality largely influence the kind of curers, preventive acts, mode of diagnostic and curing techniques embraced. That said, we must understand the geographic and social context of both the medical doctors and Lee’s family. Traditionally, the Hmong do not embrace Western medicine as they consider it invasive. They prefer their shamanistic rituals and spiritual healing, which are referred to as Neeb. The practice entails using musical tools such as finger bells and gongs, offering sacred animals to appease bad spirits, chants and herbs, blessed water and other healing methods to capture or locate a lost soul. The Hmong focus on keeping their souls from wandering as it causes sicknesses, they believe that souls must return home to Laos after the demise. The Lees believe their loved ones have difficulty retracing their steps from Merced (Fadiman 6).

On the other hand, biomedicine in the U.S. does not embrace the aforementioned activities, nor does it share similar opinions with regard to the souls. This is the source of the fundamental contradiction between Lia’s family and her medical doctors with regard to her medical condition. Therefore, Lia’s condition is treatable by understanding the pattern of the propagation of the epileptic discharge in the brain, a concept that the Lees family deem intrusive.

The book details the medical doctors’ opinions regarding Lia’s illness and their attempts to offer quality healthcare for a good quality of life. They treat Lia’s condition as unwell on the grounds of damaged cells of the body due to pathoanatomical changes. Lia’s epilepsy and seizures are considered an illness or disease by the MCMC staff. As far as the doctors are concerned, epilepsy is caused by abnormal electrical brain activity, hence the naturalistic disease etiology approach. Based on class notes, they argue that illnesses might be caused by natural forces such as temperature and germs or impersonal dynamics. Later, once her family advocates for the removal of the life-assisting devices, the doctors refer to Lia in the past tense. A concept that Fadiman argues is a result of the renunciation of the extravagant medical claims made by medicine on the patient’s behalf (Fadiman 257). Far from the above beliefs of sickness, medical anthropologists believe that sickness is an unwanted condition in one’s body, soul, and mind, and it differs depending on culture (Hahn 5). According to the Lees family, their daughter’s condition is not exactly what the MCMC doctors are treating.

Unlike the medical doctors, the family associates Lia’s condition with a personalistic disease etiology. In this regard, the illness is not caused by pathological dynamics but rather by an active or purposeful agent intervention. The agent might be a human (shaman or witch), non-human (spirit or ghost of a loved one) or supernatural (a god or deity). Lia’s epileptic seizures began when she was a three-month-old baby; her family was convinced that her older sister’s slamming of the front door of the Lees’s apartment was to blame for the happenings. Although her soul had been installed earlier during the hu plig ceremony, the door slamming frightened it out of her body; therefore, it got lost. As a result, she developed the quag dab peg, the condition in which a spirit catches her and she falls down. This, to the medical doctors, is epilepsy, but to the Lees family, it is a potentially dangerous illness in which a healing spirit enters her body (Fadiman 88). To the Hmong culture, the illness is divine as it only occurs to shamans, and a healing spirit only chooses important people with high moral character. Considering the value with which Hmongs treat their children, Lia had been well nurtured, and Western medicine’s interventions interfered with the Lees family’s treasured possession.

The Spirit Catches You, and You Fall Down is a thought-provoking read that highlights the dynamics of the relationship between medical practice in the U.S. and cultural beliefs. The fundamental contradiction between Lia’s family and her medical doctors arises from the fact that they believe in personalistic disease etiology while the doctors hold onto the naturalistic disease etiology.

References

Fadiman, Anne. The spirit catches you and you fall down. Farrar Straus & Giroux Inc, 2007.

Hahn, Robert A. Sickness and healing: An anthropological perspective. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.