Kalli Abbott and Dr. Jacob Hickman, Anthropology Department

Introduction

The Hmong people are a diasporic, highland ethnic minority group spread throughout Southeast Asia and other parts of the world. Contenders of Christianity have penetrated their communities with religious change to a significant extent. Hmong traditional religious practices include a repertoire of ancestral and spiritual rituals influenced by Taoist and Confucian ritual systems. Challenging these traditional systems today is the influx of conversions to Protestant Christianity in Thailand (about 10% from community surveys). Beginning in the 1960s, the war in Laos began to cause major disruption in the life of Hmong people. Escaping as refugees to Thailand and eventually to the west “further reinforced this cultural borrowing through the assimilation of new ideas…changing from Hmong animism to Christianity.” In the chaos of political and moral change, foreign missionaries challenged ritual structure and religious practice in these villages in Thai highlands.

Ban Phanokkok lies about an hour outside of Chiangmai. Perched on a hill drowning in webs of dense overgrowth, it is home to around 100 Hmong households. Steps of terraced farmland carve out the sides of the taller mountains surrounding Phanokkok, and the Hmong farmers speckle the crops with color. What makes this particular village interesting, though, is that while Hmong people traditionally practice rituals often described as a combination of animism and ancestral worship, but Phanokkok is about 95% Christian. This influx of conversions might be perceived as replacing the traditional shamanic ways. However, I argue that religious conversion represents only a shift in ritual practice, and that Hmong people retain belief in their original traditions despite this ritual shift. Church participation in Phanokkok is less intertwined with personal convictions and more involved simply with the normative practices of kinship changes. These kinship changes, most readily seen in marriage, involve the changing nature of culture within the home, kin relations, and daily practices of new wives. Moving into the physical house of her husband’s family demands behavioral and religious change from her. Instead, the practices learned when a person converts to a different religion do not replace previous beliefs, but exist separately from them, building on currently held inner convictions.

Methodology

My data analysis process in the field began as I lived among the villagers, interviewing at least two people a day, and observing their habits through participation in those activities. I was accompanied by two translators who translated during these interviews, and here at BYU who are now transcribing these recorded interviews into English. All of my field notes and interview data have been uploaded to a database where I and my fellow researchers can access it easily, and I have analyzed this data by using MAXQDA, a software program designed for computer-assisted quantitative research and analysis, helping me to build my argument.

Results

The data which I gathered first, demonstrates that conversion for Hmong women is similar to the cultural conversion which takes place through marriage, and second, displays a propensity for a duality of belief among the Hmong people of Ban Phanokkok. As one exshaman in the village told us, each person in a marriage, the woman as the finger and the man as the thumb, must act together in order to power the necessary functions of life. This action represents the importance of identical ritual belief between a husband and a wife, a necessary quality which makes the smooth success of marriage possible. This is why both men and, more commonly, women change ritual structures to that of their spouse at marriage or to fit their familial needs and circumstances later in life. Just as women in the village adjust their physical location and household habits at marriage, their religion experiences a similar shift to align with their husband’s framework of belief. This conversion, however, does not represent a conversion of belief. Rather, belief remains concrete even while ritual structure might change.

Discussion

One of the main facets of my research is the importance of linguistics in my analysis. The difference in the language of belief is essential to understand in the analysis. It is important to distinguish the difference between kev cai, religion, and ntseeg, or what we could call “belief.” Ntseeg is the Hmong translation for belief, commonly meaning “to have trust in”. When I ask, for example, if someone ntseeg in Christianity or something else, the reply is skewed by an English-speaker’s definition of belief, as both Deborah Tooker and Julia Cassaniti have described3. Changing ntseeg, according to interviewees, does not always mean changing their internal “belief,” but rather, their kev cai, or their ritual structure and way of life.

Villagers also often say that it does not matter what you believe, and that you can believe what you want. Only a few religions, such as Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam teach that participation in other faiths is a problem, and perhaps there is some kind of relationship for monotheism and exclusivity, where loyalty issues with conversion. Christianity demonstrates this strong belief in exclusivity and value in “truth”, and this emphasized the duality of belief in the village. However, these Hmong women still converted and retained their beliefs in their former religion, and while people in the Seventh Day Adventist church place stronger emphasis on one truth and belief, members still do not discount the reality of those in the Protestant church or who practice shamanism.

Conclusion

The frameworks which guide the course of a Hmong person’s life do not have to exist exclusively; instead, they merge together to create a larger, more unique framework of belief which allows the individual to internalize their surroundings in a unique way. Truth becomes more fluid, and does not change the rituals and traditions which play important roles in the Hmong village. Religion is not always representative of belief. Instead, religion can be seen as fluid and belief as ever-growing, a concept which is illustrated in my analysis among Hmong Christians in Northern Thailand. Conversion, rather than changing belief, merely adds belief to pre-existing beliefs. My research in Thailand allowed me to conclude that traditions lay the foundational framework for Hmong people and therefore, Hmong people, whether old way or Christian, retain their traditional beliefs even when adopting new beliefs.