Qaug Dab Peg: High School Anthropologists Need Case Study
My students need a class set of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, an anthropological case study of the Hmong and cultural misunderstanding in California.
Anthropology is a field typically available only to students in college, but my students engage with fieldwork, undergraduate-level readings and documentary filmmaking while still in high school.
My students attend a public high school in New York City, and our student body is culturally, geographically and economically diverse.
The documentaries they have produced in my class address topics ranging from the experience of Muslim teenage girls to Beliebers, the community of fans dedicated to Justin Bieber.
Our class examines the coming-of-age experience in New York City and around the world and is the first introduction many students have to studying human cultures from an academic perspective.
My Project
"The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" ("qaug dab peg") is the account of a Hmong family's experience with western medicine as immigrants in California. This true story poses difficult questions about cultural miscommunication and assimilation, and presents a thorough overview of how Hmong culture was (and is) lived in the United States.
With a class set of this book, my students will be able to ground their thinking as anthropologists in a solid case study of Hmong culture. We currently read various articles and excerpts, but do not have a unifying text to refer to throughout the course.
A colleague and I received a grant to travel to Vietnam and Laos this summer to visit Hmong villages, and I hope to connect my students to that experience through this book in the fall.
I have seen anthropology change my students' thinking about their place in the world and their understanding of other cultures.
"The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" will stay with them for as long as they continue to ask these questions.
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