Calling in the Soul

Gender and the Cycle of Life in a Hmong Village

Patricia V. Symonds

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780295805658
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

"Calling in the Soul" ( Hu Plig ) is the chant the Hmong use to guide the soul of a newborn baby into its body on the third day after birth. Based on extensive original research conducted in the late 1980s in a village in northern Thailand, this ethnographic study examines Hmong cosmological beliefs about the cycle of life as expressed in practices surrounding birth, marriage, and death and considers the gender relationships evident in these practices. The Hmong (or Miao, as they are called in China, and Meo, in Thailand) have lived on the fringes of powerful Southeast Asian states for centuries. Their social framework is distinctly patrilineal, granting little direct power to women. Yet within the limits of that structure, Hmong women wield considerable influence in the spiritually critical realms of birth and death. Calling in the Soul will be of interest to sociocultural anthropologists, medical anthropologists, Southeast Asianists, and gender specialists. Replaces ISBN 9780295800424

CHAPTER 1

HMONG COSMOLOGY: A BALANCE OF OPPOSITES

Very little has been written on Hmong perceptions of birth, even though the Hmong view of life is cyclical and encompasses both birth and death, and a considerable amount of literature is available on death and reincarnation.¹ In his preface to a translation of a Hmong death ritual chant from northern Laos, Jacques Lemoine states that “the transition from life to death is often expressed by the Hmong as a journey . . . to the sources of life” (1983b:3, emphasis mine). Birth and death are not opposed; they are different stages on a continuous journey, and their difference is what makes the journey possible.

The connection among birth, death, and reincarnation is implicit, and, Lemoine suggests, is a “way of dealing with death in order to ensure the survival of the group as a whole” (1983b:3). Howard M. Radley follows up Lemoine’s theme with a quote from Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry on the meaning of mortuary rites:

Individuality and unrepeatable time are problems [that] must be overcome if the social order is to be represented as eternal. Both are characteristically denied by the mortuary rituals which, by representing death as part of a cyclical process of renewal, become one of the most important occasions for asserting this eternal order. (Bloch and Parry 1982:15, quoted in Radley 1986:387)

The Showing the Way (Qhuab Kev) chant recited during funerals not only refutes the finality of an individual’s death but suggests that life is not merely a fleeting period of meaningless contingency but part of an ongoing eternal process. This conceptualization renders the reality of death and the tearing of the social fabric comprehensible and manageable. Life and the social order are not simply a finite aspect of the known and visible world but extend into an invisible realm of spirits, deities, and ancestors. In pointing out these aspects of the cycle of life in Hmong cosmological thought, Radley shows how Hmong ideas of life, death, and continuity are interwoven with their history, politics, and economics (1986:388).

But Radley also states that “the cycle of life, for the Mong, is completed when a person is instructed to find their afterbirth to wear on their journey to the spirit world” (1986:388). What he seems to have missed about Hmong cosmology, as well as the nature of a cycle, is that its distinguishing feature is not completion but movement from one stage to the next in a continuous flow. Investigations of birth, the journey from the sources of life, and into the connections between the two journeys, can enrich our understanding of how Hmong perceive the cycle of life.

SOUND AND SILENCE

Childbirth is the domain of women, and it is fraught with tension, unpredictability, and danger. Yet in contrast to every other important transition in the Hmong life cycle there is no “sound” to accompany childbirth. A Hmong woman does not groan or cry out as she bears her child; she labors in silence. The wrangling and noisy revelry of weddings are absent, as are the gongs and bells of shamanic rituals, and the drums and reed pipes that accompany death. Men, so visible in all other areas of women’s lives, usually do not attend the birth, although the husband arrives on the scene soon after the child is born, often in time to cut the umbilical cord with a sliver of bamboo.

On the third day after the birth, a man of the household (usually the paternal grandfather) calls in the soul and names the child, formally introducing the newborn as a social being. Significantly, that this event is accompanied by loud noise—chanting and banging the divination horns on the door—the first loud noise since the onset of labor, provides support for Rodney Needham’s proposition that “there is a connection between percussion and transition” (1967:613) and that there is a prevalence of percussive sound in rites of passage. I would like to expand Needham’s concept of ritual percussive sound to include any focused, humanly created sound. Richard Huntington and Peter Metcalf, in their discussion of percussion and other sounds in mortuary rituals, point out that both “great noise or extreme silence, provide, like black and white . . . opportunities for symbolic representation and heightened drama” (1979:49). The contrast in Hmong birth customs between the silence of women and the sounds of men can be viewed in these terms.

Women produce the physical body of the child; men call in its soul. In this sense, women and men hold complementary roles in the biological, social, and cosmological process of birth. Without the female’s physical ability to carry and nourish her offspring with her “fat,” blood, and strength, there would be no receptacle into which the soul of an ancestor could be reborn. Without the male who provides the seed, performs sacrifices to preserve the patriline, and calls in the soul of the child, there would be no continuity in the lineage, the clan, or ultimately, the Hmong people.

“Male filiation,” or the male line, is, of course, a “religious and social” link rather than a natural one (Vernant 1980:136), and, as Nancy Jay says, “All over the world social structures idealizing ‘eternal’ male intergenerational continuity meet a fundamental obstacle in their necessary dependence on women’s reproductive powers. There are various ways to organize over and around this obstacle, to transcend it” (1992:xxv). In the case of the Hmong, the means of organization is the naming ceremony on the third day. A child who dies before the third day is not given a traditional burial, but is simply disposed of, because it is not yet considered fully human. Only after the naming ceremony, conducted by males and involving sacrifice, is the child considered a true human, a member of Hmong society.

In her cross-cultural study of sacrifice, Jay analyzes “the many vivid metaphors in which sacrifice is opposed to childbirth as birth done better, under deliberate purposeful control, and on a more exalted level than ordinary mothers do it” (1992:xxiv), and this is certainly true in the case of the Hmong naming ritual. She also extends Emile Durkheim’s notion that in “ritual action people create and recreate aspects of their own society” by adding her understanding of that concept as being “always political action involving struggles for power, including power over women’s reproductive capacities” (Jay 1992:xxvii).

RESEARCH ON GENDER

Over the past two decades, in response to the omission of women from the ethnographic record, feminist anthropological research has begun to challenge some of the dominant paradigms and assumptions that have shaped the discipline. Two models have emerged: universalist or sexual asymmetry and gender symmetry and sexual equality.² Proponents of sexual asymmetry argue that women’s oppression is universal, whereas proponents of gender symmetry believe that the imposition of Western models on non-Western societies has led to inaccurate depictions of women’s roles, status, and power.

A great deal has been written concerning the connections between asymmetry and female reproduction. Some theorists have suggested that because of reproduction—pregnancy, lactation, women’s role as primary childcare provider, and their lack of physical strength following birth—women become economically dependent upon men. Other theorists believe that an undue emphasis on women’s reproduction has inadvertently reinforced a type of biological determinism; they reject the idea that women’s reproduction causes universal gender asymmetry, suggest that motherhood is but one of many female roles, and see the relations of reproduction determined by relations of production (Leacock 1976:11–35; Sacks 1977:211–34). Although both theoretical viewpoints are important, we need to look specifically at a given society in order to understand the meanings and consequences of reproduction. Why, as Carol Mukhopadhyay and Patricia Higgins suggest, do we not address the reasons why men rather than women control the child-bearers (1988:478)?

The contradictory features of the Hmong sex-gender system are worthy of close consideration. Nancy Donnelly has pointed out that “all of the research on Hmong women has been done by men who had little access to the conversations of Hmong women” and that those that include women do not give “women’s view of their own experiences” (Donnelly 1994:14) but only touch on the lives of women to clarify the ways they fit into the world of men. Robert Cooper’s work on gender in Hmong culture calculates the amount of physical labor performed by women and men and concludes that there is no “obvious pattern of exploitation of the female in the organization and division of labour” (1983:176). However, he believes that the ideology of male supremacy arises out of that division of labor and has become “a major psychological distinction between the sexes” and that it is “on the basis of that distinction that man controls woman” (1983:178). And as Cooper makes clear, the capability of Hmong women to do physically strenuous work is made irrelevant by the psychological and cultural constraints that prevent them from taking certain actions that they are clearly physically capable of, such as cutting down trees with an axe and using guns to protect their families, hunting animals, sacrificing animals, traveling (except, increasingly, to market), and climbing on rooftops, which women are not allowed to do because then they would be “above” men (1983:178). In the same way, women’s physical strength—symbolized in Hmong culture by the right hand—is not valued in the way that male strength is.

That Hmong society is male-dominated has been remarked upon by most who have observed it. As Donnelly describes it, “the most immediate striking aspect of gender roles in Hmong society, described time and again by researchers, is the apparent hierarchical relation between men and women” (1994:29). The literature consistently reports male dominance, and most authors emphasize the asymmetrical nature of Hmong society, in which women occupy a structurally subordinate position. Hmong people themselves (both men and women) stress that “men are more important” and that “Hmong is maleness.” The political, economic, and ritual spheres having to do with the patriline are restricted to men, and women have no public voice in these arenas. Gender roles are reinforced for Hmong children on a daily basis in the discourse of everyday life, which involves the recounting of origin stories and traditional folk tales, many of them contradictory in nature (Donnelly 1994:36).

HMONGNESS AND WOMEN AS OTHER

The Hmong lineage, spiritual rituals, and public life are male. Hmong women as well as men say that “maleness is Hmong” and believe that even if every Hmong woman died or ran away, the patriline would continue because Hmong men would be able to marry women from other groups, and those women would then become Hmong. If, however, all Hmong men were to die, Hmong society, or “Hmongness,” would cease to exist. If daughters marry non-Hmong men, they too will become non-Hmong, as will their children. Only by being part of the lineage of one’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather (which is as far back as most Hmong can remember), can one “honor the ancestors.”³ Thus Hmong society is dependent upon “outside” women for survival, and in some sense all Hmong women are outsiders. They cease to belong to their natal lineage when they marry but are not truly part of their husband’s lineage until death, when they join his ancestors in the land of darkness. Until then, married women use not their husband’s surname but their father’s, even though they have left their natal lineage.

In Flower Village there was an Akha woman who had married a Hmong man. She preferred not to speak Akha or discuss her “Akha-ness.” Although she was still known as “the Akha woman,” her two sons were considered Hmong and members of their father’s lineage. If this woman became unhappy with her marriage and wished to leave her husband, her children would be considered Hmong, not Akha, and would remain in the village with their father and his family. The children would not be allowed to leave the family, not only because the payment of bride-price at the time of the marriage gives the father’s family jural rights over the children, but also because if children leave their father’s custody, the action reflects negatively on all male lineage members. There are, of course, exceptions to these rules—Nicholas Tapp records the instance of a Khmu’ man who married a Hmong woman, and then the Khmu’ man “became Hmong” (1989b:168)—but this was the norm described to me by Hmong men and women.⁴

Conversely, when a woman marries out of Hmong society, her child becomes “other”—an Akha, a Lisu, or a Thai—for a child belongs to the father’s descent group. I learned of an instance in which a Hmong woman married a Lao man and when, after several years, the man was killed, the woman returned to her natal village with her small son. The son spoke only Hmong, but although they lived peacefully in the community, he was still considered Lao. He adopted the clan name of his mother, but he had no lineage or obligations, and although he knew how to perform the rituals, he was not allowed to do so, since that would not have been acceptable to the lineage spirits. His lineage status was thus equivalent to a woman’s. If he had been adopted into the Hmong community, which often happens, or his mother had remarried a Hmong man, he would have been accepted as a Hmong, although no one would have forgotten, even a generation hence, that he had not been born to a Hmong father.

Patrilocality is the rule of residence. Women living in a given household are either wives who have married in or daughters who will marry out. Women are defined and indeed define themselves in relation to the males in whose household they reside. They are not permitted to tend to the ancestral altars of the household, nor do daughters assure the posterity of their natal lineage. The Hmong metaphor of men as roots and women as flowers (Tapp 1989b:158) illustrates how daughters are regarded. A Hmong man, Doua Hang, tells us that “the important part of a Hmong family from one generation to the next is the men. . . . Women are important, but women change. . . . Wives and daughters are like leaves and flowers, but men are the branches and trunk of the tree, always strong and never changing” (1986:34).

Many other aspects of Hmong cosmology contain this metaphor of man as skeleton or tree trunk, contributing to the strong/weak dichotomy and the enduring/changing dichotomy between men and women. What is valued is that which endures.

There is much about the patrilineal structure and ideology of Hmong society to support such statements by Hang, Tapp, and other ethnographers. My own work strongly corroborates these reports, finding that in the Hmong community there is no compensatory power for women. Women contribute to the continuance of the male hegemonic structure through special mechanisms and different roles—as daughters, wives, mothers, daughters-in-law, and mothers-in-law, and, more important, as sisters. Although women subscribe to the system of asymmetrical power by aligning themselves with the patrilineal, patrilocal, extended family in which they live, there are also areas in which women have strong voices and receive irrefutable respect from both males and females.

Hmong women’s own stories demonstrate how they situate themselves, especially in relationship to their ability to give birth, in this male-oriented and male-dominated society. Some of the examples and case studies that follow support a cultural ideal as it was described to me in Flower Village. Other examples show how the ideal negates or denies an individual’s lived experience; and sometimes a specific reality contradicts and may even make inroads upon the ideal.

Although it is generally accurate to say that Hmong women’s roles and status are inferior and subordinate to men’s, there are areas in which this is not the case: childbirth and ritual conceptions of the afterlife. These ...