Paper short abstract:

We propose a Hmong Intellectual History Project that analyzes Hmong ways of knowing and the history of ideas in Hmong society. We develop the concept of ancestral personhood through an analysis of Hmong oral ritual texts as an example of new insights that emerge from such a mode of inquiry.

Paper long abstract:

Decolonization, radical indigenism, and ontological turning each similarly call for alternative modes of scholarship that escape narrowly Western ways of producing knowledge about human experience. To this end, we propose a “Hmong Intellectual History Project” that seeks to illuminate Hmong ways of knowing and critically consider the history of ideas and concepts in Hmong society. Framing inquiry in this way enables several critical possibilities. First, it elevates Hmong ritual knowledge—transmitted orally through master-student apprenticeships—to the same level as written texts, the customary data of intellectual history. Second, it flattens the conceptual playing field by putting theories of human being inherent in these texts (including interpretations of practitioner-theorists) on the same level as social theory, considering both as mutual sources of understanding about human experience. As an example of what Hmong Intellectual History as a mode of inquiry can produce, this paper provides a preliminary analysis of the theory of human being developed by Master Shong Ger Thao, whose analysis of Hmong oral ritual revealed a particularly nuanced model of personhood that goes beyond that articulated by most theorists and laypersons. We sketch out the implications of this understanding, which we call “ancestral personhood,” and which is rooted in an analysis of Hmong oral ritual texts and Hmong understandings of the three souls that constitute a human being. We conclude by commenting how approaching this Hmong model of personhood as an intellectual history project enables new insights that would be more difficult to arrive at through traditional ethnographic engagement.