Describe your initial reactions to Fadiman’s or Namu and Mathieu’s narrative. What are your thoughts thus far? What has surprised you? What has challenged you? Refer to specific examples from the text.

DISCUSSION ESSAY

During this term, you were assigned to read either Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Culture or Yang Erche Namu and Christine Mathieu’s Leaving Mother Lake: A Girlhood at the Edge of the World. For this first Response Paper, draw upon your respective text, as well as our textbook by Barbara Miller, Cultural Anthropology, lectures, and additional course materials to provide an anthropological analysis of the events that have transpired in the first half of Fadiman’s and Namu and Mathieu’s books.

Instructions:
Your Response Paper will consist of two sections:

Section 1 (400 Words): Describe your initial reactions to Fadiman’s or Namu and Mathieu’s narrative. What are your thoughts thus far? What has surprised you? What has challenged you? Refer to specific examples from the text.

Section 2 (400 Words): Apply the anthropological and ethnographic materials you have read from Miller, additional texts, and lectures to either Fadiman’s or Namu and Mathieu’s work.

If you are reading Fadiman: What could, and should, an anthropologist have been able to provide to the situation(s) presented so far? How might a trained cultural anthropologist begin leading towards productive relationships between the family, social services, and the hospital staff?

If you are reading Namu and Mathieu: Imagine you are a trained cultural anthropologist interested in examining the kinship structures of the Mosuo people. What aspect of their lives might you be most interested in that could be impacted by their kinship structures?
Combined, all three sections will amount to 800 total words.