Jacob R. Hickman

Overview

Hmong are a highland ethnic minority group that span the Southeast Asian Massif, including
China, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. Many Hmong see China as an ancestral homeland, the
origin of a two-centuries-long diaspora spurred on by conflict. 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, and changes in their subsistence
methods, cultural practice, and attitudes toward state governance. This project holds special
academic value for its reach to China, a perceived origin of Hmong culture, and comparison to
Vietnam, a region of early migration for Hmong escaping persecution. 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 two Hmong
communities for 6 weeks each during the summer of 2015. The primary field sites for this
research were chains of Hmong villages approximately 60 miles apart, one in Northern Vietnam,
the other in Southern China. 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, 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. Thesis projects built on this to understand how this history
plays into a series of related phenomena, as described below.

List of Students and Products

PI and Additional Mentors
Dr. Jacob Hickman, Principal Investigator (BYU Faculty)
Mai See Thao, ABD, University of Minnesota (Additional Mentor)
Dr. Eric Hyer (BYU Faculty, Additional Mentor)

Students in the Field School
Mary Cook (BYU undergraduate)
Ricky Gettys (BYU undergraduate)
Jamie Gettys (BYU undergraduate)
Seth Meyers (BYU undergraduate)
Danny Cardoza (BYU undergraduate)
Brittany Paxton (BYU undergraduate)
Austin Gillett (BYU undergraduate)
Jordan Baker (BYU undergraduate)
Scott Burdick (BYU undergraduate)
Matt Doane (BYU undergraduate)
Davey Cox (BYU undergraduate)
John Trey Kidwell (University of Arkansas undergraduate)
Vinicius Owen (Purdue University undergraduate)
Cody Abernathy (Eastern Illinois University undergraduate)
Chinou Vang (University of Wisconsin-Madison- graduate student)
Maie Khalil (University of Florida undergraduate)
You Lee (University of Wisconsin- Stevens Point undergraduate)
Chee Lor (University of Wisconsin-Madison-graduate student)

Research Assistant

Joseph Vang (BYU undergraduate)
Paul Xiong (BYU Undergraduate)

Products—International Conference Presentations

Paxton, Brittany. (2016). “Threads to Break; Threads to Bind: Embodiment, Ritual Among the
Hmong.” American Anthropological Association Annual Conference. Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Daniel Cardoza. (2015). “Compounding Moral Personhood: How Conversion Changes
Everything, or Not.” American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings. Denver,
Colorado.
Mary Cook. (2015). “Learning English in the Hills of Vietnam: Informal Education Models and
Evolving Gender Dynamics in Highland Hmong Society.” American Anthropological
Association Annual Meetings. Denver, Colorado.

Eric Austin Gillett. (2015). “Finding the Deontological within the Ontological.” American
Anthropological Association Annual Meetings. Denver, Colorado.

Seth Meyers. (2015). “The Political Economics of Captured Brides: Towards a New Perspective
on the Socioeconomic Implications of Kev Zij Pojniam in Two Hmong Villages.” American
Anthropological Association Annual Meetings. Denver, Colorado.

Brittany Ann Paxton. (2015). “Person Centered Ethnography in Gender and Tourism Studies.”
American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings. Denver, Colorado.

Corbett, Cheryl; Jamie Gettys. (2015). Women and Birth: A comparison of Experiences Across
Cultures. Women of the Mountains International Conference. Provo, UT.

Gettys, Jamie; Corbett, Cheryl. (2015). Challenges in Conducting International Research:
Observations in Rural Villages of India, Vietnam and China. BYU College of Nursing Scholarly
Works Conference. Provo, UT.

Ricky Gettys. (2015). “Modeling Minorityhood: ‘Official’ Policies and ‘Unofficial’ Politics.”
Hmong Studies Consortium Biennial Conference, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Austin Gillett and Jacob R. Hickman. (2015). “Tradition, Agency and Emotion in Hmong Moral
Discourse.” Society for the Anthropology of Religion Biennial Meeting. San Diego, CA.

Brittany Paxton. (2015). “Hmong Culture and Gender as Objects of the Tourist Gaze.” Hmong
Studies Consortium Biennial Conference, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Jolysa Sedgwick. (2015). “Pandora’s Hope for Hmong Identity in a Relocation Community in
Thailand.” Hmong Studies Consortium Biennial Conference, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Gillett, Austin. (2015). Moral Anthropology Among the Hmong. Society for the Anthropology of
Religion biennial meetings, April.

Owen, Vinicius. (2015). “Ethnic Tourism in the Hills of Northern Thailand”. Society for Applied
Anthropology, March.

Products—Works Submitted for Publication or in Preparation for Publication

Corbett, Cheryl, Jamie Gettys, Lynn Callister, and Jacob R. Hickman. (Under Review). Giving
Birth: The Voices of Hmong Women Living in Northern Vietnam. The Journal of
Perinatal & Neonatal Nursing.

Hickman, Jacob R., Danny Cardoza and Lindsey B. Fields. (In Preparation). The Ancestors
Don’t Live in Hell: On Belief and Ontology as Distinct Modes of Understanding. (To be
submitted to American Ethnologist).

Cook, Mary, and Jacob R. Hickman. (In Preparation) Psychocultural Landscapes of Hmong
Polygyny: Individualism and Collectivism Reconsidered. (To be submitted to Ethos).

Gettys, Richard; Hickman, Jacob. (In Preparation). Vestiges of the Mandate of Heaven: Hmong
Morality and Resistance in Vietnam. (To be submitted to the Journal of Peasant Studies).

Cook, Mary; Hickman, Jacob. (In Preparation) Transforming Marginality: Redefining Hmong
Ethnic and Female Identity through Development in Sapa, Vietnam. (To be submitted to
the Journal for Vietnamese Studies special issue).

Meyers, Seth; Hickman, Jacob. (In Preparation) “Nobody Gave Me Power:” the Phenomenology
of the Experience of Captured Hmong Brides in Northern Vietnam. (To be submitted to
the Journal for Vietnamese Studies).

Paxton, Brittany; Hickman, Jacob. (In Preparation) Threads to bind Threads to break: Gender,
Paj Ntaub, and Agency. (To be submitted to the Journal for Vietnamese Studies).

Evaluation of Academic Objectives

The 2015 China/Vietnam Ethnographic Field School was a success on several fronts. As outlined
above, this program that was funded by this MEG grant led directly to 14 presentations at
international conferences at the largest professional academic associations in the country. These
included presentations at the 2015 and 2016 annual meetings of the American Anthropological
Association, and the Hmong Studies Consortium Biennial Meeting at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison in 2015. Students presented the findings from their fieldwork and received
quality feedback to help them develop that work for publication. These presentations made an
impression on faculty from several top research universities, who were impressed with the
quality of work that came from undergraduates in the program.

Further, this work that students presented is currently being further developed by the students
and the PI for possible publication in either a special issue of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies
(published by the University of California Press) or an edited volume with an academic press. In
the case of the journal articles outlined above, the students who conducted the bulk of interviews
will be listed as the first author, and the PI as the second author. Many of the students developed
the first drafts of these manuscripts as their senior thesis, and afterwards the PI has been working
with each one to get the project up to par to be submitted to other high-tier journals in relevant
sub-disciplines to the work, i.e., Ethos, The Journal of Peasant Studies, and the Hmong Studies
Journal.

In addition to these tangible products—international conference presentations and manuscripts
being developed for publication, this program also resulted in a broad dataset of information that
can be used in future research that builds on these research questions concerning how Hmong
adapt to new social and political contexts. The PI debuted a database of all of the interviews,
fieldnotes, recordings of rituals, photos, and other ethnographic materials from past Field schools
in a Filemaker Server platform that allowed new materials to be catalogued, summarized,
searched, and analyzed in future work. This database will grow in future projects as the PI carries
out future research in other locations of the Hmong diaspora (such as his planned field school in
2016 among Hmong villages in France). Just from students data collection in the 2016 field
school, the data amassed and catalogued in this database include roughly 1,800 pages of field
notes, 500 digital audio recordings of interviews or naturally-occurring discourse or rituals,
roughly 50 digital video files, and a large database of digital photographs and scanned
documents, all collected during the three months of fieldwork on these projects. Total, the
database features almost 3000 pages of field notes, 700 audio recordings, and over 300 video
files. This database includes descriptions of projects and contextual summaries for these items,
keywords, such that future researchers or the PI could go back to this database and find relevant
material to analyze in future projects. Students in the program not only learned principles of
social science research design, but also crucial skills of data management and analysis, as they
helped amass this systematic database of primary ethnographic data. Critically, this database is
thoroughly indexed with metadata that will help researchers find and analyze relevant data in
future projects.

The students also worked with the PI in developing a survey grounded in the local norms to
expand their data collection methodology and get data that is generalizable to the larger
population. The students drafted questions for the survey based on types of data relevant to their
project while the PI helped hone the questions to make sense in the cultural setting. Students
were then responsible for collecting data on iPads, and received training on survey interview
techniques and survey data analysis. Students were trained by the PI to code and analyze all
ethnographic and demographic data with computer assisted qualitative data analysis software
(CAQDAS) while in the field, and get a head start on data analysis while still in the field. Early
data analysis allowed the projects to be dynamic, adjusting projects to emerging trends while still
in the field, and allowing students to work more efficiently toward publication of these projects.

Evaluation of the Mentoring Environment

The PI and the students in the program found the field school and all of the mentored research
conducted after the field school to be incredibly productive for all involved. For the PI, this was
an opportunity to get motivated and ambitious students involved in his research and to expand
his ethnographic reach in the community as students conducted interviews and observations to
supplement his own during the summer on topics closely related to his own research. In many
instances, student interests and ambitions even pushed the research questions productively in
new (but still related) directions, such as Jamie’s interest in birthing practices, or Ricky, Scott,
and Matt’s interest in the intersections of political science and anthropology. In all of these cases,
we developed a productive synergy that led to projects that expand the PI’s horizon of topics that
fall under his umbrella research questions, and also helped students channel their interests into
particular phenomena and building off of the PI’s former work to carry out productive projects
that also addressed their own research interests. Overall, three main groups of research were
addressed; Medical Anthropology, Economic/Political Anthropology, and Moral Anthropology.
In some cases, students carried out interviews and observations based on the PIs current or past
projects. For example, Danny and Davey conducted in-depth interviews on ritual practices with
several elders in the community that provide crucial insights into the baseline of cultural models
that inform contemporary religious practice and ontological frameworks that underpin daily
ritual practice. Some students even replicated vignettes used by the PI in past projects to compare
responses in Vietnam and China to other places in the Hmong diaspora.

From the student side, participants in this program found their training to be an invaluable
research experience. Students were not mere research assistants to the PI, but rather played a
driving intellectual role in developing research questions and designing methods to adequately
address those questions. While the PI provided close mentoring throughout the process, the
projects were subject to the directions that the students wanted to take them. The PI trained
students to understand and employ the logic of social science research design, and consistently
worked with students to hone methods that adequately address the research questions they were
pursuing. As such, both the student and the PI shared intellectual input into the nature of the
project and the ultimate products. In sum, students learned to perform a research project from the
point of conceptualization to design and through to analysis, utilizing a wide spread of methods,
rather than simply carrying out research tasks designated by the PI. This synergy proved
productive for all involved. In addition to the PI, who worked extensively with students prior to,
during, and after the field school, several faculty, some from other institutions were also brought
in to help mentor the group of field school students. Mai See Thao (ABD, University of
Minnesota) conducted research in the field school and mentored students in the field. We also
organized two research conferences two-thirds of the way into the summer of fieldwork where
students had to present their initial findings. The PI (Dr. Jacob Hickman), Mai see Thao
(University of Minnesota-Twin Cities), Dr. Eric Hyer (Brigham Young University- Provo), and
other faculty, ethnic leaders, ritual experts, and graduate students at Yunnan Nationalities
University attended these conferences along with the field school students, and gave students
critical feedback on their projects. This allowed an additional several weeks of fieldwork after
the conference for students to fill the empirical gaps in their projects. Students in the program all
agreed that this collective mentoring in the field and the conference itself forced them to improve
their projects significantly while still in the field with the ability to still engage in additional data collection.

Findings of the Field School

The findings of the research conducted on this field school all fall under the general research
question of ‘what are some root factors of how Hmong adapt culturally and psychologically to
new social circumstances’, but they are also focused on the outcomes of distinct thesis projects
conducted under this umbrella question. While the core findings of the PI’s research conducted
on this field school are being written up in a series of journal articles and possibly an eventual
book manuscript, what is outlined here emphasizes the findings of these mentored student
projects at present.

Austin Gillett’s research focuses on the ethical reasoning of Hmong handicraft merchants.
Drawing from classical philosophy debates between utilitarianism, deontological ethics, and
virtue ethics is living itself out in the current debate in anthropology in what many have been
calling the ‘ethical turn’ in anthropology. Michael Lambek’s edited volume Ordinary Ethics
argues that a look at ethics in the everyday gives us a “more accurate description of the way that
we live.” Lambek and others use tools from Aristotle’s virtue ethics to argue that ethics are
inherent to speech and action. He lays out a framework for thinking through the ethnography of
moral experience in Hmong communities, and argues that Hmong experience their moral worlds
as having a strong deontological component to them. By focusing on instances of language of
Hmong handicraft sellers—specifically the notion of “good-heartedness”— virtue ethics
overlooks the ethical work being done when our interlocutors look towards Hmong standards of
morality as they make moral decisions. While value still lies in the virtue ethics approaches that
provide good conceptual tools to understand ethical practice, these virtue ethics stances do not
fully account for the moral discourse of Hmong merchants or the ways that they engage in moral
judgment.

Danny Cardoza writes on his research on Hmong conversion. Theories of cultural change
frequently focus in on the discontinuation of local ways of finding truth, and how people turn
and demonize old ways. This is especially true of the literature on religious conversion from
local spiritual traditions to Christianity. These theories rely on a complete separation from the
indigenous ontology and the only role the pre-conversion ontology plays is to reinforce the
reality assumed through conversion. This allows for some level of shallow syncretism, but
consistently undercuts the meaning lent by the traditional ontology. He explores the ways in
which converts to Christianity experience the indigenous ontology as carrying more meaning
than a simple reinforcement of the new ontology, while not practicing the pre-conversion
religion in some sort of secretive fashion. He does so by exploring the implications of the
relationship of a Hmong Christian convert of twenty years with his two shaman pupils, as well as
interviews with interlocutors from his and surrounding villages near Sapa, Vietnam. From these
data we conclude that while there are instances that support the current popular theory of cultural
change, the compounding of the traditional ontology with that of the reality assumed through
conversion produces other nuanced instances that are neither simple reifications of the new
ontology nor are they secretive, but are representative of the reshaping of certain cultural
values that give precedence to neither ontology. Rather, he proposes a rethinking of syncretism
that allows for certain values to carry substantive weight in the newly combined ontology, while
not downplaying the importance of the values inherent to the postconversion ontology.

Seth Meyers work focuses on the experience of captured Hmong Brides in Vietnam. The
tradition of marriage by capture among Hmong of the Greater Mekong Sub-region has existed
for many generations. Among much of the documentation of Hmong communities over the last
century little has given specific focus to this topic. Much of the literature concerning traditional
forms of bride capture dwells mostly on the technicalities of the practice but little to no serious
efforts have been made to reveal the experience of individuals who participate in this activity. He
seeks to use ethnographic evidence through personal narratives of several women who were
married through capture to attempt an understanding of how women experience this practice.
Globalization has caused many cultural changes in Hmong communities around Sapa, Vietnam
and Wenshan, China. Women who are married by capture have to come to terms with an abrupt
redirection of their life course. Often goals of education and career must be put aside as family
and child-rearing take precedence. Understanding how women experience this type of marriage
can give crucial insight into the way in which certain members of Hmong society identify and fill
their roles in their respective communities. He finds that understanding how these women see
themselves as individuals as well as parts of their family and community helps shed light on the
many facets of the Hmong society makeup.

Ricky Gettys examines resistance to government policy implementation. In portrayals of
Hmong-American social activity, Hmong are characterized in some form as resistors of
hegemonic power. Undertones of Hmong resistance to incorporation into a state have
subsequently filled Western academia surrounding Hmong political activity throughout the
world, especially for scholars visiting Vietnam. He critiques this characterization of Hmong
action, because he feels it extrapolates ideas of Hmong social action stemming from involvement
in the Secret war and may be harmful as government leaders define Hmong as resistors of policy,
rather than taking into account Hmong agency, and the things that Hmong are advocating for. He
examines Hmong responses to questions about their political involvement during a governmentlead
relocation of a market from a central tourist area to the outskirts of the village. He then
analyzes the current resistance frameworks in respect to discourse of Hmong merchants, and
proposes that rather than resisting control of the state, these merchants are making a bid to be
better incorporated into the state decision making process.

Jordan Baker also investigated merchant resistance, but explores potential new avenues of
resistance. Some scholars argue that the Hmong and other ethnic minorities in South East Asia
are engaging in small and almost insignificant acts that passively resist modernity and the State.
With a rapidly modernizing and urbanizing landscape encroaching on their lands, Hmong in Sa
Pa are doing what they can to preserve their livelihoods and culture while still remaining
adaptable. Turner and Michaud argue that highland minorities in Lào Cai Province, particularly
the Hmong, are “playing their identities, traditions, and situation of political subordination and
geographical fragmentation to their advantage” (159). While these scholars have touched on
several ways that Hmong are achieving this particular kind of resistance—such as failing to
register as tour guides or refusing to plant government-issued seeds, she explores a new form of
resistance—place-making. In her research, she aims to add to Turner and Michaud’s claim by
particularizing the ways that Hmong in Sa Pa are place-making as a form of everyday politics
and resistance. She explores various ways in which Hmong street sellers are reimagining spaces
within Sa Pa to include themselves and preserve their culture. By inserting themselves into such
a hostile environment, she argues that the Hmong are engaging in a particular kind of placemaking
that has so far been ignored in Western-centric planning theory. Rather than a cocreation
of livable spaces by government bodies and local citizens, to her, place-making in Sa Pa
seems an act of cultural and economic survival and resistance.

Mary Cook’s findings provide a unique insight into identity transformation and education. Ethnic
relations in any given nation have traditionally been understood in overly simplistic terms of
minority resistance toward the majority ethnic group. In this fashion, Hanh (2008) follows the
identity transformation of Hmong girls in Sapa and ultimately argues that these young girls have
‘contested marginality’ by acculturating to the cosmopolitan scene. This acculturation is
facilitated through the development of symbiotic relationships with foreigners and the adoption
of modern practices which allow them to defy stereotypes imposed upon them by the Kinh
majority. In contrast to this model of resistance, Mary has found that Hmong women in the Sapa
tourist industry generate and integrate methods of development as ways to further transform their
ethnic and female identities in relation to the Kinh majority, and that in no way have they
successfully completed the ‘contesting of marginality,’ as Hanh claims. Rather, she demonstrates
through one case study of a local educational development initiative, the nuanced performing of
ethnic identity (Schein) functions as a means to re-construct ethnic and female identity not
merely to ‘contest marginality’ but to redefine the very boundaries by which marginality has
been traditionally set forth in the community. Hmong women involved in and affected by this
educational development initiative transform traditionally marginalizing factors within the
community through processes of commodification in order to redefine these boundaries.

Trey Kidwell and Scott Burdick explore resistance in the marketplace. Many of the tourists that
come through the small mountain city are quick to purchase Hmong handicrafts and visit nearby
Hmong villages in tour groups led by Hmong tour guides, yet the tourists find lodging and
purchase food at hotels and restaurants owned by the local Vietnamese. With the ownership of
more stable and profitable business attributed disproportionately to the Vietnamese ethnic
majority, the researchers observe that Hmong have begun to feel as if they are being unfairly
profited from, although tourism industry in Sapa is somewhat dependent on their presence in the
area. Scott and Trey claim that while many Hmong agree that the increased traffic of
international tourists has resulted in increased quality of life, they do not feel that they have
benefited to the same extent as others, especially while contributing to the same profitable
industry that has resulted in their own discrimination.

Brittany Paxton took a slightly different approach, and worked with objects that symbolize
aspects of Hmong culture. She dives into the practice of cross-stitching handicrafts and how the
symbolism of sewing has changed from clothing making to profiting from tourists. Like Trey
and Scott, she notes underrepresentation of Hmong women in the market, but more deeply
explores the two-way relationship between tourism and embroidery. She sees that not only do
tourists demand what Hmong women create, but Hmong women sew what they think tourists
will like, highlighting an intriguing perspective of acculturation.

You Lee, Maie Khalil, and Chee Lor all explore Hmong medical practice. Especially acute for
studies on Hmong health, they have largely been conducted in western countries with significant
populations of resettled Hmong refugees. The overarching themes pervasive within the nursing,
public health, medical, and medical anthropology literature depict the Hmong as a traditional,
static, and homogenous group of people whose cultural beliefs and practices are in conflict with
modern western society, particularly with biomedicine as an explanatory model and institution;
consistently, researchers cite cultural beliefs as the reason Hmong suffer from poorer health
outcomes. Their reasoning assumes that cultural beliefs prevent minority groups from utilizing biomedicine. Structural inequality, racial discrimination, lack of transportation or monetary
funds, and language barriers are typically mentioned secondarily as problems in accessing health
care, if at all. This rhetoric is inherently problematic in that it neglects not only the structural
factors present in everyday life but also by disregarding that the culture of biomedicine does not
allow room for Hmong culture, essentially placing the entirety of blame on the Hmong by the
very framing of the issue. The authors examine new ways to characterize Hmong health care
decisions and portray the rationale behind decisions rather than differences from procedures in
Western medicine.

Description of Expenditures

The current MEG grant provided a substantial source of funding to carry out this three months of
mentored fieldwork in Vietnam and China, as well as critical resources for data analysis after the
fieldwork. In total, $9,084 of the MEG Grant went to student wages, including two main
categories. About $6,000 of this total amount went to interpreters in the field. These were
students in the program who received all of the standard training and conducted research like the
rest of the group, but because of their language skills also provided interpretation services for
students who did not speak Hmong or Chinese fluently. An additional $3,084 was used to pay
students on campus to help transcribe, translate, code, and analyze interview and video materials
as they were collected. Student researchers were trained to code and index critical materials for
analysis, and Hmong-speaking RAs on campus were trained to process and analyze these
materials, as well as transcribe/translate them for the field school students to analyze. These RAs
also received valuable research training in this process, and worked with the field school students
throughout the data analysis period. Research supplies purchased on this MEG Grant totaled
$2,716, which included 1) purchasing two iPads for conducting field surveys (total $1,716) on
the Filemaker platform, 2) purchasing two Ultra-High definition portable field cameras (Go Pro
and Contour) and accessories for field recording (total $700), 3) satellite imagery of the sites
where we would be conducting fieldwork ($300). A total of $8,000 of the MEG Grant offset
group travel expenses in the program. This amount covered faculty and student travel and living
expenses during the fieldwork portion of this research. While travel and living expenses
extended way beyond this $8,000, this subsidy made the program expenses much cheaper and
therefore financially more manageable for students enrolled in the program. The difference in
expenses was made up by a Kennedy Center budget and program fees paid by participating
students in the program. The MEG grant was critical in providing critical additional resources
and making this entire field school much more accessible to the students and PI involved, all of
whom benefited immensely from this mentored research program.