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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

psychocultural foundations, religious revitalization, southeast Asian Massif

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

Anthropology

Abstract

Hmong are a highland ethnic minority group that span the Southeast Asian Massif, including China, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. The research funded by this MEG grant was designed to address questions of how Hmong have adapted to distinct social and political circumstances as they have migrated to new locations, including displacement as refugees from Laos to Thailand. In order to cultivate a mentored environment where students could receive close training and help design and carry out substantive research projects, the PI organized an ethnographic field school in a Hmong community for three months during the summer of 2013. The primary field site for this research was in northern Thailand in a Hmong community with a relatively large percentage of the community descending from post-1975 refugees from Laos, and the remainder descending from Hmong who had migrated to present-day Thailand several generations ago. The PI and students engaged in this research were seeking to conduct ethnographies of everyday practice that would reveal some of the dual psychological and cultural dimensions to how Hmong are positioning themselves in their contemporary political context, including the new and innovative ways that they are wielding cultural resources to this end. These strategies included new ritual innovations, reimagining Hmong history and asserting new forms of that history, changes in ethical thinking that adapt to new economic circumstances, and large-scale shifts in identity politics in which Hmong are recasting Hmong identity in terms that make more sense of the current sociopolitical climate. To this end, some students in this program collected data on the PI’s primary research questions, while other students tailored their senior thesis projects under close mentorship with the PI to develop additional dimensions of this larger project that explore further dimensions of how Hmong have adapted to new sociopolitical circumstances. The PI’s core project dealt with understanding how Hmong daily life in the diaspora feeds into cultural models that underpin religious revitalization movements. Thesis projects built on this to understand how this history plays into a series of related phenomena, as described below.

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