Healing in the Diaspora: Hmong American and Hmong Lao Practices of Care
Résumé
This chapter asks: How does the medical travel of plants, humans, and kinship reconstitute a displaced community? How are the processes of transnational caring, as care work, shaped by the cultural, historical, social, and political characteristics of Hmong diaspora? While migration for care can be hopeful, we ask why does care also entails ambivalence? In answering these questions, we draw on both of our fieldwork from Laos; one multi-sited ethnography carried out in Hmong herbal medicine markets in Laos and consisting of interviews with traditional healers, with plants sellers, and pickers in different villages; another multi-sited ethnography investigated sites of returns for health and healing for Hmong Americans that included visiting herbalist and consuming Hmong herbs in Laos.