model ethnographer
Caitlin
One of my favorite ethnographic accounts is a book called “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Daughter, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures” by Ann Fadiman. Lea, a Hmong immigrant toddler has severe epilepsy, which her family diagnoses as a flight of her soul from her body. Fadiman’s half-narrative, half-analysis of immigrant culture clash in California illustrates some of the big issues faced by medical anthropologists in terms of biomedicine and traditional or spiritual ethnomedicine. Fadiman’s writing is intimate and moving yet informative and self-consciously unbiased.