Sweet blood, dry liver: Diabetes and Hmong embodiment in a foreign land
Author(s):
Henry, Rebecca R
Format:
Thesis
Degree granted:
Ph.D.
Publisher:
Ann Arbor : The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1996.
Pages:
269
Language:
English
Abstract:
By examining the daily social practices of St. Paul Hmong elderly such as eating, talking, physical activity, taking medicines, testing blood sugar, and going to the doctor within the context of their daily lives I have suggested some basic differences between Hmong elderly and upper- and middle-class urban-Americans and biomedical practitioners in the construction of experience, person and illness. I discuss these differences in terms of embodied tendencies or "dispositions" (Bourdieu 1977) I characterize as "improvised" and "studied." A studied embodiment figures experience according to an objective and material body and an embodied "self"--revised throughout a lifetime along a developmental time line. It is produced in part with the aid of abstracting tools such as clocks, calendars, mirrors, books, and scales. Figuring experience in this way produces a sense of an essential self and bounded objective body, the role of the professional health provider, and predefined and patterned "chronic" illnesses (such as diabetes). For Hmong elders in St. Paul, the body--derived within a unitary cosmology in which the body itself reflects moral characteristics of socio-environmental circumstances--is generally an inhabited site. I characterize this form of embodiment as "improvisational" because the immediate context is used both concretely and symbolically to speak of the full gamut of experience and, for Hmong these contexts have historically changed due to their landless, minority status. This kind of figuring leads to a more thorough integration of body, mind and spirit felt and expressed through the vicissitudes of siab. A sense of the contingency of the person and the relatedness of context and illness is created through this kind of figuring. These differences in embodiment are discussed in terms of their practical impact on clinic interactions throughout the dissertation. Topics discussed include: oral versus literate dispositions of the patient and practitioner in the clinic, first person verbatim interviewing, qualities and abilities of Hmong bodies, catharsis as a therapeutic principle, differences in eating and categorizing of foods and Hmong food allergies.