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

In Hmong’s, they have their own traditional beliefs in which they hardly ever alter due to a different atmosphere. Some of the Hmong beliefs are they prefer traditional medicine, are culturally active, host ritual ceremonies, and are spirituality influenced. In the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, refers to the Hmong culture and their beliefs on medicine while their baby Lia Lee, is suffering from epilepsy in which they have a hard decision. Traditional Hmong’s have their own medicinal beliefs which they obey prior to obtaining Western medicine. The gulf between Western medicine and Hmong health beliefs is an impossible abyss. Also, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down describes the life of Hmong refugees assimilating to

I think it would be an understatement to say that there are many differences between the American and Hmong birthing process's. Chapter one describes in explicit detail the common process of how a baby is born into the Hmong culture. Specifically following the life of a woman named Foua. Myself being more familiar with the American way of childbirth, I found this woman's story fascinating. The process's and beliefs that the Hmong have toward childbirth are vastly different than American's. The Hmong seem to be more superstitious about the whole thing, and don't believe in modern medicine. While on the American side, we use every medical precaution, to the point that every minute of the babies development and birth is planned to a tee.

1. What do you think of traditional Hmong birth practices (pp. 3-5)? Compare them to the techniques used when Lia was born (p. 7). How do Hmong and American birth practices differ?

What happens when two very different or even mutually exclusive cultural perspective are forced into contact with one another? In Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, there is a division between the shamanistic insubordinate cultural of Hmong refugees in Merced, California and the cold analytical approach of western medicine. In the early 1980s, the child of a Hmong refugee family in Merced, California is born with epilepsy, her name is Lia Lee. Anne Fadiman traces the interaction between these two cultures and Lia’s disease, she reviews that misunderstanding and miscommunication can have calamitous consequences for all involved. The author introduces many characters throughout the book and they all

From our text, Race, Class, and Gender, we read Unit III E: The Structure of Social Institutions; The State and Violence: Policing the National Body: Sex, Race, and Criminalization; The Color of Justice; Rape, racism, and the Law; and Interpreting and Experiencing Anti-Queer Violence : Race, Class, and Gender Differences among LGBT Hate Crime Victims. We also encountered and excerpt from Social Work Practice With a Difference; The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman. The first four reading from our text explore the association of the manner in which state power organizes race, class, and gender. We also get a view of how the intersectional approach of race, class, and gender may help us to understand some forms

Randall Kenan born in Brooklyn, NY 1963 was raised by his grandparents in a rural community in North Carolina. In 1985, he graduated the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in English and creative writing. One of his instructors recommended him for a job for and editor at Random House where he was an eventual assistant to senior editor’s prestigious subsidiary, Alfred A. Knopf. (Fountain) Kenan’s first novel, A Visitation of Spirits, was published in 1989, and a collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury the Dead, followed in 1992. He has written five other works and has received numerous awards. (RandallKenan.com) Randall Kenan is a talented African-American author of the present era who writes about the human condition. He not only writes about what it is like to be a black man in the south, but he throws in homosexuality into the bible belt. Kenan repeatedly pits homosexual characters against an oppressive, closed minded community that is against new views of acceptance and equality of the times. With these themes of racial and sexual identity, forgiveness and acceptance; “Kenan, perhaps one of the first Southern authors to openly analyze the struggles of homosexuals, he subtly intertwines common concerns and ideals from the Civil Rights Era and parallels the Gay Rights Movement of today.” (Turley)

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman, is the story of two very different cultures lacking understanding for one another leading to a tragedy due to cultural incompetence. Today in America there are very many different cultures. Health care providers need to be aware of cultural diversity and sensitivity when caring for patients. If a health care provider is not sensitive towards a patient’s culture it can cause a relationship of mistrust to form, lead to barriers in the plan of care, and increase health care cost. The current guidelines to promote cultural competence in the clinical setting include completing a cultural diversity self-assessment, identify the need of the population served, evaluate barriers in the community and practice, educate staff to cultural diversities, schedule longer appointments, clarify limitations, and identify alternatives offered (Cash & Glass, 2014).

From the perspective of the social worker Jeanine Hilt, systems perspective could be used to assess Lia Lee, her family or those in the community of the book. System perspective sees human behavior as the outcome of reciprocal interactions of persons operating within linked social systems (Hutchison, 2013). When reading this book at the beginning, one may have thought of it as a story about the collision of two cultures - a story about Lia Lee, Foua Yang and Nao Kao Lee, Neil Ernst and Peggy Philp, and Jeanine Hilt-rather than Lia Lee's story. The lives of Lia Lee, Foua Yang and Nao Kao Lee, Neil Ernst and Peggy Philp, and Jeanine Hilt were interrelated. In addition, the influences of one and another's behavior had impacted the overall well-being of Lia Lee. The mutual roles of caregiver parents and caregiver doctors had to keep adjusting their roles to accommodate changing care needs. For example, the Lees believed in a little medicine and a little neeb for treating Lia's epilepsy, under the circumstance, their beliefs impact Lia's illness when they brought Lia to MCMC for treatment, while, practiced traditional healing to call back her soul. Similarly, concerned for Lia's safety due to her parents’ noncompliance with the medicine,

This applied theory paper will analyze both the macro and micro analysis of the Novel, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman (Fadiman, 1997). In the book “The Spirit Catches You and Falls Down”, the character Lia illness resulted in a cultural divide between the Hmong culture and the American culture. Throughout this paper both the conflict theory and the family systems theory will be used to examine themes of behaviors among the characters in the text. The family and medical team use the applications of a number of different social work theories to navigate through her illness implementing a number of different strategies to nurse her to health. The author Fadiman explores the Lee’s family

What would it be like to come to a country and not understand anything about its health care system? In The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman brings to light the conflicts between a Hmong family’s cultural beliefs, and that of the traditional western medical beliefs of the American doctors they come into contact with. Fadiman shows the consistent tug of war between the Hmong culture and the Western American medical practice. The Lee family comes from a culture that believes in holistic healing. They have an animalistic view in regards to health and medicine. The cultural barriers between the two eventually leads to the detrimental fate of the Lee’s daughter Lia.

At birth, the Hmong view their newborns as a gift and extremely special. At birth, it is called “Mus Thawj thiab, “go become again” or more simple, “reincarnation,” is a traditional Hmong belief (Bankston 2000). When a child is born, they are automatically seen as a gift and reborn as a reincarnated soul. Though, if a child dies after three days of living there are “no funeral ceremonies…since the child did not have a soul yet” (Bankston 2000). The Hmong believe if the child lives past three days, their soul is present though if they die, the infant never had a soul to begin with. If the child lives past day three, then a shaman is brought in and he “evokes a soul to be be reincarnated in the baby’s body” (Bankston 2000). This is considered

“In the Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down”, Anne Fadiman explores the subject of cross cultural misunderstanding. This she effectively portrays using Lia, a Hmong, her medical history, the misunderstandings created by obstacles of communication, the religious background, the battle with modernized medical science and cultural anachronisms. Handling an epileptic child, in a strange land in a manner very unlike the shamanistic animism they were accustomed to, generated many problems for her parents. The author dwells on the radically different cultures to highlight the necessity for medical communities to have an understanding of the immigrants when treating them.

While reading “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” written by Anne Fadiman, I found how interesting it was to learn about the history of the Hmong people. These groups of people have been through a lot in history, and they fought to keep their culture alive when the Chinese people attacked them for not assimilating to their culture. The Hmong people have different birthing tradition then those of Americans. The Hmong people believed in “Dabs,” which is evil spirits that can steal the baby’s soul. When Lia was taken to MCMC for seizures, we see the conflict that both the doctor and parents had towards communication, which included different diagnosis by the doctors from the diagnosis of the parents. The Hmong people also believe that it is taboo to have surgery or blood

The United States of America is a wonderful country; they allow people with different backgrounds to come make a new life here, although it may be very difficult to do. America is not the perfect country some Americans believe it is; it has its faults like everything else. This can be seen in the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. Her book tells the tragic, true story of Lia Lee, a young Hmong girl with epilepsy and her American doctors. The Hmong came to America in the seventies and eighties to escape Laos after the secret war. The Hmong were safe from the war dangers in Laos, but once they arrived in America they would face other kinds of problems. One problem would be the health care system. Anne Fadiman views assimilation for the Hmong as necessary, but difficult to accomplish.

According to “Human Sexuality: Diversity in Contemporary America,” women and couples planning the birth of a child have decisions to make in variety of areas: place of birth, birth attendant(s), medication, preparedness classes, circumcision, breast feeding, etc. The “childbirth market” has responded to consumer concerns, so its’ important for prospective consumers to fully understand their options. With that being said, a woman has the choice to birth her child either at a hospital or at home. There are several differences when it comes to hospital births and non-hospital births.