Hmong Musicians in America, 1978-1996: Interactions with Three Generations of Hmong-Americans

Advancing the literate behaviors of a Hmong American fifth grader through cross‐age, paired, interactive tutoring

In this article, Stacey Lee examines the phenomenon of low educational participation and achievement among Hmong American women. She argues that the focus on cultural differences as the sole explanation for this fact ignores the existence of economic, racial, and other structural barriers to Hmong American women's educational persistence and success. Lee shares the stories of several Hmong American women who are pursuing or have completed higher education in the United States, investigating the factors — economic, racial, and cultural — that helped or hindered their decisions to continue their education. These women are part of a movement within the Hmong community that questions traditional expectations for women and girls, in particular early marriage and motherhood. Lee illustrates how these women's experiences are also shaped by social factors such as welfare policies and racism. Their stories demonstrate that cultural transformation is neither a smooth nor unambiguous process.

Book Reviews undertaken through analyses of Indians and mestizos in Ecuador, Turkish Cypriote in the UK, Bunu Yorubas in Nigeria, and Hmong Americans, amongst others, the once inevitable antonym to ethnic dress—western dress—gives way to the term "cosmopolitan dress," a term more appropriate to contemporary geopolitical realities. Analyzing the function of dress as a fluid, shifting styling of ethnicity, the authors explore its responses to contact with other cultures and to processes of intracultural differentiation, its modifications in the course of migrancy, and its adaptations to historical exigencies, as in the case of colonialism 's artificial administrative regrouping of peoples. Together with many recent critical interventions across the disciplines, which explore what Eric Hobsbawm calls modernity's "invention of tradition" (1983), the essays replace ahistorical notions of ethnic continuities on the temporal axis with a meticulous historicizing of inventions and discontinuities. Thus, the history of modern nationalisms becomes pivotal in accelerating the emergence of dress as a variable signifier of ethnicity. Masami Suga's essay, "Exotic West to Exotic Japan," demonstrates this expertly when she analyzes the contemporary Japanese return to traditional wedding dress as the new fabrication of a pre-Meiji "old Japan" (101). She attributes this development to present-day Japan's desire for an exotic, internal other at a moment when Japan's integration of Westernness has resulted in the loss of the West as its (exotic) other. Likewise, on the spatial axis, the essays quite compellingly stress the fashioning of ethnicity as a consequence of dynamic interactions across boundaries. Eicher and Erekosima's essay "Why Do They Call it Kalahari?" offers a brilliant analysis of the centrality of trade between the coastal Nigerian Kalahari people, India, England, and Italy in creating Kalahari dress. A process the authors analyze as cultural authentication, which selects, classifies, incorporates and transforms non-indigenous elements, produces clothing that is both specifically Kalahari, functioning inter- and /Virra-culturally, yet also the creative recombination of products of transnational trading. The Kalahari chief's costume, a light-colored ankle-length gown (doni, from imported silk or wool) together with a grey, formal English top hat and cane, is an example of such syncretic dress, used for the collection 's cover illustration. If one of the collection's strengths lies in emphasizing vestimentary authentication as process, it also deserves praise for its rigorous historicizing of appeals to traditional, authentic dress, analyzing these appeals as tactical responses to specific social, political and cultural configurations. Elizabeth L. Constable University of California, Davis Efrat Tseëlon. The Masque of Femininity. London: Sage Publications, 1995. Pp. 152. $19.95. "Cultural psychology" is what the author calls her field of study in The Masque of Femininity. By drawing on extremely diverse materials—ranging from Old Testament accounts of femininity to contemporary women's questionnaire responses and from psychoanalytic gender theories to impression management—Tseëlon is able to offer her reader a multifaceted understanding of how femininity in Western culture is projected, received, shaped, and experienced. While at times these disciplinary leaps can be too swift and even seem over generalized, this book is an impressive example of cross-disciplinary scholarship. Tseëlon arranges the first five chapters around what she terms core "paradoxes": "the modesty paradox"; "the duplicity paradox"; "the visibility paradox"; "the beauty paradox " and then goes on to illustrate how these centuries-old "paradoxes" continue to pulse through our daily experience of Western culture. VOL. XXXVII, NO. 1 113 L'Esprit Créateur These paradoxes are sharply framed and elaborated. The first four chapters illustrate in significant ways how the paradoxical representations of women throughout history continue to shape and trouble our experience of identity in relation to appearance. In contrast to the power of these chapters, Chapters 5 and 6 are less convincing. First, I was perplexed by Tseëlon's use of Lacanian registers of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic which seemed to obstruct rather than facilitate her argument, and often it was unclear whether her brand of psychoanalytic inquiry was Freudian or Lacanian; indeed, Tseëlon offers up a Freud that looks a good deal like Lacan and a Lacan that looks a bit like Sartre. The last chapter, which...

This is the second of two articles focused on the role of dress in the formulation of Hmong American cultural life. The first article focused on the performance of two versions of Hmong American New Year and how dress is used by Hmong Americans to make sense of their position between the cultural world of the past and contemporary American culture. This paper centers on the transmission and reconstruction of female gender roles in the American context as expressed through women's headdress worn to the Hmong American New Year celebration. Both uses of dress arose out of attempts to reconcile the cultural life of the past with their lives in the United States; both are expressed visually through the dressed and evaluated body within the context of the Hmong New Year celebration.

The effects of Tai Chi Chuan on the health of Hmong American older adults were investigated. The Tai Chi Chuan Program Inventory was used as a pre‐test and post‐test. Significant improvements were found in Tai Chi Chuan knowledge, attitudes, and behavior, as well as in resting blood pressure, stress level, and shoulder and knee flexibility. These results provide further documentation of Tai Chi Chuan's beneficial health effects.

Within performed ritual, Hmong Americans use dress as a medium to express a vision of cultural life responsive to both their cultural past and their new American context. This article is a part of a larger research project focused on the role of dress in the formulation of Hmong American cultural life. This paper focuses on how dress is used within two different New Year performances to make sense of the position of the Hmong in America. Public and private Hmong American New Year rituals are arenas wherein dress is used to express the struggle for reconciliation between the older and younger generations, the old and new ways, and Hmong and American cultures. Separate and differently focused New Year celebrations formally acknowledge the valued roles of Hmong elders as links to the Hmong past and Hmong youth as links to an American future. Both celebrations incorporate a recognition of the core problem of reconciling Hmong and American cultures. Both use dress to give voice to the young and the old as they struggle for cultural definition in the United States.

Since Laos fell to the communist Pathet Lao, many Hmong people have relocated to the United States. Because of the vast cultural differences, the Hmong have had a notoriously difficult time adjusting to life in the United States. In view of the many problems faced by Hmong Americans, it is likely that many of them will seek or be referred to non‐Hmong professionals for various counseling services. This article provides an overview of Hmong culture and a history of their migration to the United States. Specific adjustment and mental health problems are noted and suggestions are provided for designing appropriate counseling interventions for Hmong Americans.