Stephanie Parsons and Dr. Jacob Hickman, Anthropology Department

Introduction

During my second week living in a Hmong village outside of Chiang Mai, I sat down with a middle-aged woman while she was working on her embroidery. She is a Protestant Christian who has been married twice, once to an old culture Hmong man, and currently to a Thai Buddhist. I was surprised to hear that she didn’t follow the Hmong traditional expectation of converting to either of her husband’s belief systems. When I asked her why she never relinquished her faith in Christianity, she said that she was afraid to follow her first husband in old culture traditions. Her grandmother, the first Christian in her family, had told her how she had “suffered as a woman in the old culture.” This confident woman testified to me that Christianity is the only way for Hmong women to be truly liberated and freed from the constraints of traditional Hmong beliefs and rituals.

Admittedly, I was surprised to hear this relatively progressive and feminist interpretation of Christianity. However, as the weeks continued to pass, it became obvious that this woman was not alone in her understanding. Based on three months of ethnographic field work in a Hmong community in Thailand where approximately 90% of the members have converted to Christianity, I analyze these changing ideas about gender and gender roles within the community. There is circulating discourse about how gendered expectations are different in this “new” Christian society, as opposed to the “old” ritual system of traditional Hmong culture. Specifically, I will illustrate how these emerging Christian feminist discourses among Hmong people are framing Christian gendered expectations as liberating for women. These discourses are especially interesting given the generally more conservative nature of these sects of Christianity.

Methodology

This project involved a twelve-week ethnography of gender among Hmong in Chiang Mai, Thailand. During the program, I lived among Hmong families and forged personal relationships with village members. This provided opportunities for extensive participant observation, field notes, formal transcribed interviews, and discourse and ritual analysis which helped me to define traditional gender roles and the ways in which Hmong are redefining these norms into a Christian feminist framework.

Results

The data that I collected reveals an ethnographic story, one that is surprising when we think about popular understandings of gender norms in conservative Christian communities. Ultimately, I found that Hmong women are recasting ideologies of gender through a Christian framework, in part as a critique of “traditional” gender relationships. Although Christianity for Hmong people may provide a new framework where women experience more power and feel more equal to men, this feminism is not manifested in the same way as Westerners may expect. Hmong culture remains patriarchal and even Hmong Christians maintain that men are to be the leaders in the home and the pastors in the church while women are to be homemakers or even “housemaids.” However, there are subtle yet evident ways in which Christianity has enabled Hmong women to feel empowered – whether through their increased ability to participate in rituals (i.e. prayer), the teaching of equal partnership as a spousal team, or because their opinions are more respected and valued by the men in their lives.

Discussion

I compare my findings to other anthropologists who document similar trends in seemingly “conservative contexts.” Specifically, Usha Menon has sought to highlight how Western feminism can be problematic when it is transposed to a different environment, particularly one where women from religiously conservative communities may perceive gender and power in very different ways. In regards to her work with devoutly religious Hindu women, she said that “feminist activists fail to appreciate that the large majority of Hindu women indeed do not perceive themselves as victims of systemic gender inequities” (Menon 2002, 290). In fact, far from being victimized, Menon presents convincing evidence that both Hindu men and women “regard the domestic domain – the home and family – as perhaps the most important sphere of human action” and that women are undoubtedly the “custodians of their husbands’ lives and well-being and of their families too” (Menon 2002, 295-296). Although not entirely the same, I argue that Hmong women in Thailand similarly experience an increased sense of worth through the framework of conservative Christianity. Following the footsteps of Menon, I argue that the feminism experienced by Hmong Christians varies significantly from that which Western feminists may be expecting, but this should not discredit the feminist narratives of Hmong Christians that I worked with in Thailand.

Conclusion

My ethnographic conclusions fall in a field with much current scholarly literature and debate. In February of 2018, I will present my findings at the Utah Conference on Undergraduate Research at Southern Utah University. Moreover, by the end of Winter semester, I will have completed my thesis and will continue to work closely with Dr. Jacob Hickman in order to co-author a manuscript for publication by the end of Summer 2018.

References

Menon, Usha. 2002. “Neither Victim Nor Rebel: Feminism and the Morality of Gender and Family Life in a Hindu Temple Town.” In Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies, edited by Richard A. Shweder, Martha Minow and Hazel Rose Markus, 288-308. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.