Events

ABOUT THE FILM

This presentation examines such concepts as global, integrative, and complementary health and healing through screening and discussion of short documentary video vignettes about Hmong in the diaspora. The product of a collaboration between a Hmong American filmmaker/activist and a media studies white American anthropologist, the 4-8 minute case studies are part of a project-in-progress, Shamans, Herbs and MDs, designed to show the diversity of approaches to health-seeking that are found among Hmong from Laos now living in the US. Through intimate portraits of such stories as a young father traveling to Thailand to seek herbal treatments for terminal kidney disease, a female MD who practices both Western medicine and Christian faith healing, and a family deliberating over whether the father will undergo chemo or seek traditional alternatives for liver cancer, the vignettes make the case that health care is increasingly pluralistic and a result of patients’ active participation.

ABOUT THE CO-DIRECTOR & PRODUCER

Louisa Schein teaches Cultural Anthropology as well as Women’s and Gender Studies, Asian American Studies and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers. She has done fieldwork with Miao/Hmong for three decades, and is author of Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics (Duke University Press 2000) about gender and ethnic politics in postsocialist China. She is co-editor with Tim Oakes of Translocal China: Linkages, Identities and the Reimagining of Space (Routledge 2006) and with Purnima Mankekar of Media, Erotics and Transnational Asia (Duke University Press 2012). Her articles have appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Social Text, American Quarterly, Journal of Asian Studies, Modern China, positions, etc. She has written about celebrity, Chinese cultural politics and the Miao popular singer A You Duo and is co-director of two documentary films on Hmong Americans, Better Places (2011) with Peter O’Neill and Shamans, Herbs and MDs in-progress with Va-Megn Thoj.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. Do register early as seats are available on a first come, first served basis. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP to Jonathan at jonathan.lee@nus.edu.sg indicating your name, email, designation, organisation/affiliation and contact number.