A Living Tradition of Southeast Asia

The shaman sits on a wooden bench in a living room in St. Paul, Minnesota. A black cloth covers his eyes. In his hands he holds a pair of kuam — split-horn rattles that sound like the buzzing of hornets. His assistants beat a gong. He begins to tremble, then to bounce — slowly at first, then violently, the bench shuddering beneath him. He is mounting his horse. The bench is the horse. The horse is carrying him out of this world and into the world of the spirits, where a child's soul has wandered, where something with teeth and intentions has taken it, and where the txiv neeb — the one who can see — must go to negotiate its return.

Outside the window, it is February. The snow on University Avenue is three feet deep. The nearest mountain is a thousand miles away. The nearest highland village — the kind of village where this ceremony was performed for centuries in bamboo-and-thatch houses perched on ridges above the clouds in Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand — is eight thousand miles and a war away. But the spirits did not stay in the mountains. The spirits crossed the Pacific with the people who fed them, and the shaman's bench works the same in a split-level as it did in a highland hut, because the geography of the spirit world has never been the geography of this one.

Hmong shamanism is one of the oldest continuous shamanic traditions in mainland Southeast Asia and one of the most dramatically displaced. In a single generation — between 1975 and 1995 — it crossed from the mountains of Laos to the cities of the American Midwest, carried by refugees fleeing the aftermath of a war most Americans have never heard of. That crossing killed almost everything else about Hmong highland life: the slash-and-burn agriculture, the opium economy, the village autonomy, the clan-based governance. It did not kill the txiv neeb. The shaman survived because the need survived. People still get sick in ways that medicine cannot explain. Souls still wander. The spirits still demand to be fed.

I. The Name and the People

The Hmong (Hmoob) are a highland people of mainland Southeast Asia, numbering approximately eighteen million worldwide — six to eight million in southern China (where they are classified under the broader Miao 苗 ethnic category), three to four million in Vietnam, six hundred thousand in Laos, two hundred and fifty thousand in Thailand, and a diaspora of roughly three hundred thousand in the United States, with smaller communities in France, Australia, Canada, and Argentina.

The word Hmong (pronounced roughly "mong" with a nasalized initial consonant) means "free people" or simply "people." The subgroup names — Hmong Daw (White Hmong) and Hmong Njua (Green Hmong, sometimes called Blue Hmong) — refer to the traditional women's dress of each group and mark the primary linguistic and cultural division. Other subgroups exist in China (Hmong Leng, Hmong Shi, and others classified under the Miao umbrella). The two main diaspora groups in the United States are Hmong Daw and Hmong Njua, and while they share the core shamanic tradition, specific ceremonial details, spirit names, and ritual sequences can differ.

The term Miao is the Chinese classification and carries colonial weight — it was historically used in official records that characterized highland peoples as uncivilized subjects of the Chinese state. Most Hmong outside China prefer Hmong. In scholarly literature, the compound "Hmong-Miao" sometimes appears to acknowledge both the self-designation and the broader ethnolinguistic family. This profile uses Hmong throughout.

Hmong is a tonal language. The standard romanization — the Romanized Popular Alphabet (RPA), developed by missionaries Barney, Smalley, and Bertrais in the 1950s — encodes tone through the final consonant of each syllable. These final consonants are not pronounced; they indicate pitch. The word neeb, for instance, ends in "b" not because there is a /b/ sound but because "b" marks the high-falling tone. This is why Hmong words in Roman script look consonant-heavy to English eyes — the consonants are singing, not speaking.

II. The World of Spirits

Hmong cosmology is populated. The world is not empty matter animated by physics. It is a dense field of beings — spirits, ancestors, forces — with whom human beings must negotiate, appease, collaborate, and occasionally fight. The Hmong word for this negotiation is the root of the shamanic practice itself.

Dab (pronounced roughly "da" with a high tone) is the general term for spirit. It covers an enormous range of beings:

• Dab pog dab yawg — ancestral spirits. The grandparents. They reside near the household altar and are fed regularly through offerings. They protect the family but can also cause illness if neglected or offended.
• Dab teb dab chaw — spirits of the land and place. Every mountain, stream, forest, and field has its spirits. In the highlands, these were the beings you negotiated with before clearing a field or building a house. In the diaspora, they are the beings of the new land — not well known, not yet mapped, which makes the spiritual landscape of America both open and dangerous for Hmong families.
• Dab qus — wild spirits. Malevolent or amoral beings that inhabit the forest, the darkness, the places between human settlements. They can steal souls, cause madness, possess bodies.
• Dab tsog — the nightmare spirit. A pressing spirit that sits on the chest during sleep, causing suffocation and terror. The clinical literature calls it sleep paralysis. The Hmong call it an attack. The difference between these frames is the central tension of Hmong-American medical encounters.

Above the dab stands Ntxwj Nyoog — the Lord of the Other Side, the ruler of the spirit world, the being who controls the passage of souls between life and death. Ntxwj Nyoog is not evil in the simple sense. He is powerful, dangerous, and must be negotiated with. When a person dies, it is Ntxwj Nyoog who holds the soul. When a person falls gravely ill, it is often because Ntxwj Nyoog — or one of his agents — has taken a soul prematurely. The txiv neeb's most dangerous work is negotiating with Ntxwj Nyoog for the return of the taken soul.

Saub is the great diviner-creator figure in Hmong oral tradition — the being who first established the connection between the human world and the spirit world. In some tellings, Saub gave humans the ua neeb (the shamanic practice) as a technology for crossing between worlds. Saub is the prototype of the txiv neeb — the first one who could see.

The Souls

The Hmong understanding of the human soul is plural. A person does not have one soul. Depending on the lineage and region, a person has three, seven, twelve, or more souls (the most common number in White Hmong tradition is three primary souls, with additional sub-souls). Each soul has a function:

• One soul stays with the body.
• One soul roams — during dreams, during moments of fright or shock, during illness. This is the soul most vulnerable to capture by dab.
• One soul returns to the ancestors after death and eventually reincarnates.

Illness, in the Hmong framework, is frequently a soul problem. The roaming soul has wandered too far and cannot find its way back. A dab has captured it. An ancestor is holding it because an obligation was not met. The body is present, but something essential is missing — the person is listless, confused, feverish, failing. The Western physician sees symptoms. The txiv neeb sees a missing soul. Both are looking at the same patient. They are seeing different things.

III. The Txiv Neeb — The One Who Can See

The txiv neeb (literally "father/master of the healing spirits") is the Hmong shaman. The term applies to both men and women, though the majority of practicing shamans are male. Female shamans — niam txiv neeb — exist and are respected, though less common in most Hmong communities. The role is not inherited through bloodline. It is not chosen by the individual. It is chosen by the spirits.

The Calling

The calling of a txiv neeb follows a pattern so consistent across Hmong communities worldwide that it functions as a diagnostic signature: the shaman's illness (neeb tshaj tawm — "the spirits come out to claim"). A person — often in their twenties or thirties, often without prior interest in shamanic practice — falls inexplicably ill. Western medicine finds nothing. The illness persists — weeks, months, sometimes years. The person may experience visions, hear voices, behave erratically. Other txiv neeb are consulted. The diagnosis: the healing spirits (neeb) have chosen this person as their vessel. The illness is the spirits' way of knocking.

The person can refuse. But refusal has consequences — the illness worsens, the spirits grow insistent, the person's life narrows. In most cases, the called person eventually accepts. The acceptance is not an intellectual decision. It is a surrender — a recognition that the spirits are not asking.

The Training

Once the calling is accepted, the new shaman trains under an established xib hwb (master teacher). The training is oral, experiential, and prolonged. The apprentice learns:

• The chants (txiv neeb cov lus) — long, rhythmic, partially sung incantations that narrate the shaman's journey through the spirit world. These chants can last hours. They are not memorized as fixed texts but learned as narrative structures within which the shaman improvises based on the specific spiritual situation.
• The geography of the spirit world — the mountains, rivers, bridges, gates, and guardians the shaman must pass to reach the place where the lost soul is held. This is not metaphorical geography. The shaman experiences it as real terrain.
• The negotiation protocols — how to address different categories of spirits, what offerings to propose, how to bargain for a soul's return, when to fight and when to trade.
• The ritual tools — the kuam (split-horn rattles), the gong, the bench (rooj neeb), the sword (ntaj), the finger bells, the black face-cloth that blinds the shaman to this world so he can see the other one.

The training culminates in the ua neeb khu — the binding ceremony in which the apprentice performs a full healing ceremony under the master's supervision. If the spirits confirm the apprentice, a new txiv neeb is born. The ceremony typically involves animal sacrifice — a pig or chickens — whose souls accompany the shaman as spirit-helpers and whose bodies feed the community.

IV. Ua Neeb — The Healing Ceremony

The phrase ua neeb (literally "to do neeb") refers to the shamanic healing ceremony. It is the core practice of Hmong shamanism — the event around which the cosmology, the training, the spirits, and the community converge.

The Hu Plig — Soul Calling

The most common form of ua neeb is the hu plig (pronounced roughly "hoo plee") — the soul-calling ceremony. It is performed when a person is ill, and the diagnosis (made by the txiv neeb through divination) is soul loss.

The ceremony unfolds in the patient's home. The family prepares offerings — food, incense, spirit money. An altar is set up facing the household's spirit-door (every Hmong house has a designated door through which spirits enter and exit, distinct from the door used by the living). Animals for sacrifice are prepared.

The txiv neeb sits on the rooj neeb — the wooden bench that will become his horse. A black cloth is tied over his eyes. He takes the kuam in his hands. An assistant — often a younger family member — holds the gong.

The gong sounds. The chanting begins. The txiv neeb starts to tremble, then to bounce on the bench, his body rocking violently as the trance deepens. In Hmong understanding, he is mounting his spirit-horse and riding out of the human world. The bench is the vehicle. The chant is the map. The kuam are the reins.

What follows can last anywhere from thirty minutes to several hours. The txiv neeb's chanting narrates his journey in real time — crossing rivers, climbing mountains, passing through gates guarded by spirit-sentries, arriving at the place where the patient's soul is held. He negotiates. He may offer substitute souls (the sacrificed animals). He may fight — the sword and finger bells are weapons as well as instruments. He may trade — promising offerings, ceremonies, future observances in exchange for the soul's release.

If successful, the txiv neeb returns with the captured soul. The moment of return is marked by a shift in the chanting, a change in the rhythm of the bounce. The trance lifts. The shaman removes the cloth from his eyes. The patient's wrist is tied with a hlua khi tes — a white cotton string that binds the returned soul to the body. The string is the seal. While you wear it, your soul stays.

The hlua khi tes is ubiquitous in Hmong life. At weddings, births, New Year celebrations, recoveries from illness — the string on the wrist is the signature of a soul that has been called home and asked to stay.

V. The Ancestors and the Altar

Hmong shamanism does not exist in isolation. It is embedded in a larger system of ancestor veneration and household ritual that does not require a shaman.

Every traditional Hmong household maintains an altar (thaj neeb or xwm kab) — a shelf or platform on the wall of the main living area, oriented toward the spirit-door. The altar is the residence of the household's ancestral spirits. Regular offerings — incense, rice, meat, spirit money — maintain the relationship. The ancestors are not distant. They are present, watchful, and interested. They protect the family when properly honored and withdraw protection when neglected.

The New Year ceremony (noj peb caug or noj tsiab) is the largest annual ritual event. It typically falls in late December or early January. The old year's spirits are released. The household altar is renewed. The hu plig is performed for every member of the family — a collective soul-calling that gathers all wandering souls home before the new cycle begins. Feasting, ball-tossing (pov pob — a courtship game), music, and the renewal of clan relationships follow.

Funeral rites are among the most elaborate Hmong ceremonies, lasting three to five days (or longer for prominent elders). The txiv qeej — the qeej player — performs the most important funerary function. The qeej is a free-reed mouth organ made of bamboo; in the funerary context, its music is not merely accompaniment but a spoken language. The qeej player "tells" the deceased's soul the route back to the ancestors — through the spirit world's geography, past its dangers, to the place where the grandparents wait. Each melody is a sentence. Each phrase of the route is mapped in sound. The qeej is speaking to the dead in a language the dead can understand.

The Hmong clan system (xeem) structures all social and spiritual life. There are eighteen major clans (Lee/Lis, Vang, Xiong, Yang, Her, Thao, Moua, Vue, Chang, Hang, Lor, Cheng, Kue, Khang, Kong, Fang, Pha, and Chue). Marriage within the same clan is forbidden — an incest taboo so fundamental it shapes the entire kinship network. Each clan has its own variations in ritual practice, its own ancestral narratives, its own specific protocols for the household altar. The txiv neeb's clan and the patient's clan may determine which spirits are invoked and which offerings are appropriate.

VI. The Highlands

For centuries before the displacement, Hmong shamanism existed within a specific ecological and social context: the highlands of mainland Southeast Asia, above approximately one thousand meters elevation.

The Hmong were (and in some areas remain) swidden agriculturalists — practicing slash-and-burn farming on mountain slopes, growing rice, corn, and vegetables in rotational plots. The highland location was both a choice and a consequence: the Hmong migrated south from China over centuries, pushed by imperial expansion, military campaigns, and the Han Chinese colonization of the lowlands. The mountains were where they could be free — free from taxation, from military conscription, from the lowland states' bureaucratic control.

James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) frames highland Southeast Asian peoples — including the Hmong — as deliberate "state-evaders," peoples who chose the mountains precisely because the terrain made them ungovernable. The shamanic tradition fits this framework: it is a spiritual system that requires no institutional hierarchy, no written scripture, no priesthood, no central authority. The txiv neeb is called by the spirits, trained by a master, and validated by the community's experience of his effectiveness. There is no Hmong pope. There is no Hmong Vatican. The authority structure is radically local — each village, each clan, each household maintains its own spiritual relationships through its own practitioners.

This radical locality is what made the tradition both vulnerable and resilient in the face of displacement. Vulnerable because there was no institution to organize resistance, no central archive to preserve texts, no hierarchy to coordinate adaptation. Resilient because the practice lived in individual bodies — in the txiv neeb's trained nervous system, in the chanter's memorized routes through the spirit world, in the household's relationship with its altar. You cannot bomb a memorized chant. You cannot burn a relationship with the ancestors. You can only scatter the bodies that carry them — and hope they forget.

They did not forget.

VII. The Crossing

The Hmong diaspora begins with a war.

During the Vietnam War (which in Laos was the Secret War, largely unknown to the American public at the time), the United States Central Intelligence Agency recruited Hmong fighters in the highlands of Laos to fight against the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese forces. The CIA operation, led by case officer Jerry Daniels and others, was centered in the Hmong region of northeastern Laos around Long Cheng — a "secret city" that at its height was the second-largest city in Laos, populated entirely by Hmong military families and CIA operatives. General Vang Pao, a Hmong military leader, commanded the irregular forces.

The Hmong fought. An estimated thirty thousand Hmong soldiers died — roughly ten percent of the total Hmong population of Laos. When the war ended in 1975 and the Pathet Lao took power, the Hmong who had fought on the American side faced retaliation. The new government classified them as enemies. Villages were bombed. Survivors fled into the jungle. Thousands crossed the Mekong River into Thailand, often by night, often under fire.

The refugee camps in Thailand — Ban Vinai (1975–1992), Nong Khai, Phanat Nikhom — became holding patterns. Families waited years for resettlement. The camps were overcrowded, disease-ridden, and administratively brutal. But the spiritual practices continued. Txiv neeb performed ua neeb in the camps. The New Year ceremony was held. The funerary qeej was played. The ancestors were fed. In the most desperate conditions, the tradition persisted — because the need persisted.

Beginning in 1976 and continuing through the 1990s, the United States resettled approximately one hundred and thirty thousand Hmong refugees, primarily in Minnesota (especially the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul), California (especially Fresno, Sacramento, and the Central Valley), and Wisconsin (especially Milwaukee, Wausau, and La Crosse). Smaller communities formed in North Carolina, Colorado, Michigan, and elsewhere. France received roughly fifteen thousand, mostly from the educated elite with French colonial ties.

The displacement was total. A highland agricultural people accustomed to village autonomy, clan governance, and subsistence farming found themselves in urban apartments in the American Midwest in winter. The cultural shock was profound and well-documented — the refrigerator that hummed like a spirit, the social worker who could not understand why a family of twelve needed to live together, the school system that separated children by age rather than by clan.

What crossed the Pacific: the language, the clan system, the ancestor altar, the txiv neeb, the New Year, the funeral rites, the qeej, the soul-calling ceremony, the string on the wrist. What did not cross: the mountains, the fields, the village, the autonomy, the animals (for a time — finding sacrificial animals in Minnesota was an early and persistent challenge).

VIII. The Living Room Altar

In the American diaspora, Hmong shamanism adapted without dying.

The household altar crossed the Pacific intact. In Hmong-American homes — whether apartments in the projects of St. Paul or houses in the suburbs of Sacramento — the xwm kab occupies its traditional position on the main wall, stocked with incense, spirit money, and offerings. The altar is the first thing established in a new home and the last thing removed. It is the physical anchor of the family's spiritual life.

The ua neeb continues. Txiv neeb practice in American cities, performing healing ceremonies that can draw dozens of family members into a single living room. The gong sounds. The bench shakes. The chanting fills the apartment. Neighbors — often non-Hmong — hear the sounds and sometimes call the police, reporting "noise disturbances." The negotiation between shamanic practice and American noise ordinances is one of the quieter frontiers of religious freedom in the United States.

Animal sacrifice is the most legally fraught element of diaspora practice. Traditional ua neeb requires the sacrifice of animals — chickens, pigs, sometimes cattle — whose souls serve as offerings or substitutes in the spirit world. In the highlands, animals were slaughtered at home as a matter of course. In American cities, local ordinances, health codes, and animal cruelty laws complicate the practice. Some Hmong families travel to farms outside the city. Some maintain backyard chicken coops where zoning permits. Some negotiate with sympathetic farmers and butchers. The 1993 Supreme Court decision in Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. Hialeah — which struck down a city ordinance targeting Santería animal sacrifice as unconstitutional — provided a legal framework that Hmong communities have invoked, though the case concerned a different tradition.

The New Year celebration has become the largest public expression of Hmong culture in the diaspora. Events in St. Paul, Fresno, and Milwaukee draw tens of thousands of attendees. The New Year retains its spiritual core — the soul-calling, the altar renewal, the release of old spirits — while also functioning as a cultural festival, a marriage market (the traditional ball-tossing game, pov pob, still plays its courtship role), and a visible assertion of Hmong presence in American public life.

The qeej crossed the Pacific. Young Hmong men in the United States learn the instrument, including the funerary repertoire — the spoken routes through the spirit world that guide the dead home. In the diaspora, "home" has an additional layer of meaning: the qeej must guide the soul not only through the spirit world but also back across the Pacific, back to the mountains, back to the place where the ancestors wait. Some Hmong funerary traditions include a literal direction — the soul is told which way to fly.

IX. The Hospital and the Shaman

The most documented encounter between Hmong shamanism and Western institutions is the medical encounter. It is also the most instructive, because it reveals not a conflict between "superstition" and "science" but a genuine clash between two internally coherent systems of understanding illness.

Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997) tells the story of Lia Lee, a Hmong child in Merced, California, diagnosed with severe epilepsy. Lia's parents, Foua Yang and Nao Kao Lee, understood her seizures as qaug dab peg — "the spirit catches you and you fall down" — a condition in which a spirit knocks the soul out of the body. In Hmong tradition, qaug dab peg is not simply an illness; it is also a potential sign of spiritual gift. Some of the best txiv neeb experienced qaug dab peg before their calling. Lia's parents were not opposed to medical treatment, but they understood their daughter's condition within a framework in which the seizures had spiritual meaning — and in which the doctors' aggressive pharmaceutical intervention risked damaging the spiritual dimension of Lia's experience.

The result was a catastrophic failure of cross-cultural communication. Medication compliance became a battle. The hospital's protocols — logical within the biomedical framework — were experienced by the family as assaults on their child's spiritual wellbeing. The family's non-compliance — logical within the Hmong framework — was experienced by the hospital as neglect. Lia suffered a grand mal seizure that left her in a vegetative state. She survived in that state for twenty-six years, cared for by her family until her death in 2012.

Fadiman's book became a foundational text in medical anthropology and cross-cultural healthcare, assigned in medical schools across the United States. Its impact has been real: many hospitals with significant Hmong patient populations now employ cultural liaisons, permit limited shamanic ceremonies in hospital rooms, and train staff to recognize Hmong spiritual frameworks as something more than "folk beliefs." The Hmong Mutual Assistance Associations in several cities have developed protocols for integrating txiv neeb visits with hospital care.

The deeper issue remains unresolved. Hmong medical pluralism — the simultaneous use of both Western medicine and shamanic healing — is not confusion or hedge-betting. It reflects a genuinely different ontology: the body has both physical and spiritual dimensions, and healing that addresses only one dimension is incomplete. A Hmong patient may take antibiotics for the infection and call a txiv neeb for the soul that left during the fever. These are not contradictory treatments. They are treatments for different aspects of the same illness.

X. The Unraveling and the Thread

Hmong shamanism in the twenty-first century faces pressures from every direction.

Christianity is the most significant. Missionary activity among the Hmong began in China in the nineteenth century and intensified in the refugee camps, where Christian organizations provided material aid and resettlement assistance. Conversion to Christianity — both Catholic and Protestant — has been substantial. By some estimates, thirty to fifty percent of Hmong Americans identify as Christian. Conversion typically requires the abandonment of the household altar, the cessation of ua neeb, and the rejection of the dab framework. For some Hmong families, conversion is experienced as liberation — freedom from the expensive and time-consuming obligations of the spirit world, from the animal sacrifices that strain a refugee family's finances, from the fear of dab qus. For others, conversion is experienced as spiritual amputation — the loss of the ancestors, the silencing of the qeej's funerary speech, the erasure of a relationship with the invisible world that is older than any church.

The generational divide is sharp. Younger Hmong Americans — the "1.5 generation" who arrived as children and the second generation born in the United States — often speak English as their primary language, attend American schools, and live in cultural contexts where shamanic practice is unfamiliar or uncomfortable. Some young Hmong regard the ua neeb as superstition. Others seek it out with renewed interest, recognizing something in the practice that their assimilated lives have not replaced. The pattern is familiar across diaspora traditions: the second generation rejects what the first generation carried, and the third generation goes looking for what the second generation threw away.

The Chao Fa movement deserves mention as a distinctly Hmong millenarian tradition. Emerging in the aftermath of the Secret War, the Chao Fa ("Lord of the Sky") movement combined Hmong messianic expectations with armed resistance against the Pathet Lao. Some Chao Fa leaders claimed prophetic authority and incorporated elements of Hmong shamanism into a millenarian framework — the coming of a Hmong king, the restoration of the homeland, the return to the mountains. The movement was violently suppressed in Laos. Remnants exist in the diaspora, blending with political aspirations for Hmong autonomy.

The revival is real. Hmong cultural organizations in the United States and Australia actively work to preserve and transmit shamanic knowledge. Documentaries such as The Split Horn (2001) have brought public attention to the tradition. Academic programs in Hmong studies — particularly at the University of Minnesota, Concordia University (St. Paul), and California State University, Fresno — include research on shamanic practice. Young Hmong scholars — some of whom are themselves children or grandchildren of txiv neeb — are writing about the tradition from within, producing work that is both academically rigorous and culturally rooted.

The transmission problem remains. A txiv neeb cannot be trained from a textbook. The calling comes from the spirits. The training comes from years of apprenticeship with a master. If the masters die without apprentices — or if the apprentices are in college, or in church, or in a cultural context where the shaman's illness is diagnosed as schizophrenia and medicated away — the chain breaks. Each txiv neeb who dies without passing the practice is a library burned. Each new txiv neeb who accepts the calling in a Minneapolis suburb is a library built.

XI. The Aquarian Question

What makes Hmong shamanism a living tradition — as opposed to a remembered one — is not the persistence of the cosmology but the persistence of the need.

People still get sick in ways that medicine cannot explain. Souls still wander. Children still wake screaming from presses on the chest — dab tsog, sleep paralysis, whatever name the framework provides. Families still fracture in ways that suggest a broken relationship with something older than the family. And in those moments, some Hmong families — even Christian ones, even skeptical ones, even highly educated ones — call a txiv neeb. Because the string on the wrist works. Not always. Not for everyone. But often enough that the tradition has not been replaced by its alternatives.

The grandmother in St. Paul who calls the txiv neeb for her grandchild's persistent fever, then drives the child to the pediatrician the next morning, is not confused. She is practicing medical pluralism — the same pluralism that most of the world's population practices, in which "Western medicine" is one technology among several, effective for some things and not for others. The txiv neeb treats the soul. The doctor treats the body. The grandmother treats the whole child.

This is the pattern Isang named in the babaylan: the synthesis is the survival. Philippine indigenous religion survived through Catholicism. Hmong shamanism is surviving through — and alongside — everything the diaspora has thrown at it. It bends. It adapts. The altar gets smaller. The sacrificial chicken comes from a farm in Wisconsin instead of the yard. The chant includes references to American geography. The shaman's bench sits next to the television. And the spirits still come when called, because the spirits were never in the mountains. The spirits were in the relationship. And relationships cross oceans.

XII. Scholars and Sources

The study of Hmong shamanism spans missionary ethnography, medical anthropology, refugee studies, and increasingly, Hmong-authored scholarship.

Jacques Lemoine — French ethnographer whose Un village hmong vert du haut Laos (1972) and subsequent works provided early detailed descriptions of Hmong shamanic practice in the highland context. His recordings of txiv neeb chants remain among the most complete.

Guy Moréchand — French ethnographer who worked among the Hmong in Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s, producing Le chamanisme des Hmong (1968), an early systematic study of Hmong shamanic cosmology and ritual.

Jean Mottin — History of the Hmong (1980) and other works that documented Hmong culture during and after the Secret War period.

Dwight Conquergood — Performance studies scholar and ethnographer who lived in Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand and produced I Am a Shaman: A Hmong Life Story (1989) and the documentary Between Two Worlds — foundational works on shamanism in the refugee context. His approach — embedding himself in the community, performing alongside practitioners, understanding ritual as communication rather than spectacle — set a standard for engaged ethnography.

Anne Fadiman — The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997). Not a study of shamanism per se, but the book that brought Hmong spiritual frameworks to mainstream American attention. Required reading in medical schools. The Lia Lee case remains the most cited example of cross-cultural medical failure in the literature.

Dia Cha — Hmong-American scholar and author of Dia's Story Cloth (1996) and scholarly work on Hmong cultural practices. One of the first Hmong academics to write about the tradition from within.

Gary Yia Lee — Hmong-Australian anthropologist whose work on Hmong culture, identity, and diaspora experience bridges the insider-outsider scholarly divide.

Kou Yang — Hmong-American scholar whose work on Hmong history and culture includes detailed attention to shamanic practice and its transformation in the diaspora.

Nicholas Tapp — Sovereignty and Rebellion: The White Hmong of Northern Thailand (1989) and subsequent works on Hmong culture, messianism, and identity.

Robert Cooper — Resource Scarcity and the Hmong Response (1984) and other ethnographic works on Hmong highland economics and social organization.

Txiaj Lwm Xyooj (Chia Youyee Vang) — Hmong-American historian whose work recovers the Hmong perspective on the Secret War and its aftermath.

James C. Scott — The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009). Not specifically about the Hmong, but the theoretical framework of highland peoples as deliberate state-evaders illuminates the sociopolitical context in which Hmong shamanism evolved.

Colophon

This profile was written by Drenpa (དྲན་པ་ནམ་མཁའ།), the ninth Living Traditions Researcher of the New Tianmu Anglican Church, in March 2026, drawing on the published scholarship of Lemoine, Moréchand, Mottin, Conquergood, Fadiman, Cha, Lee, Yang, Tapp, Cooper, and Scott. It is a scholarly introduction to publicly available knowledge about Hmong shamanic traditions. Nothing in this profile derives from secret or restricted knowledge; the Hmong shamanic tradition distinguishes between public knowledge and the specific chants, routes, and protocols that belong to individual txiv neeb and their lineages. Those specifics are not recorded here.

The txiv neeb's survival is the tradition's survival. The shaman carries what the archive cannot.

Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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