Contraceptive practices and fertility among Southeast Asian, black, and white mothers attending a maternal infant care program

The purpose of this analysis was to determine if there were differences in selected fertility characteristics including parity, pregnancy spacing, age at 1st pregnancy, age of menarche, breastfeeding postpartum, and contraceptive practices among white, black, Hmong, and other Southeast Asian mothers attending a maternal infant care program in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during 1980-1982. White and black mothers were younger than the Hmong and other Asian mothers. The lowest mean age of 1st pregnancy was among blacks. Ages of 1st pregnancy were similar for whites, Hmong, and other Asians, although the mean age of menarche was approximately 2 years later for Hmong and other Southeast Asian mothers compared to the white and black mothers. Based on self reports at the 1st postpartum visit 1 month after delivery, 39% of the whites and 25% of the blacks were breastfeeding. In comparison 8.7% of the Hmong and 17% of the other southeast Asian mothers were breastfeeding. Maternal aged age at 1st pregnancy were significant predictors of parity for whites, blacks, Hmong, and other Southeast Asians. Ever-use of contraception was significant predictor of parity only for Hmong. The highest proportion of ever-users of contraception was among the white mothers (80%) followed by the blacks (69.3%) and other Asian mothers (34.85). Hmong mothers had the lowest proportion having used contraception (17.1%).     

Contraceptive practices and fertility among Southeast Asian,black, and white mothers attending a maternal infant care program

Abstract

The purpose of this analysis was to determine if there were differences in selected fertility characteristics including parity, pregnancy spacing, age at first pregnancy, age of menarche, breastfeeding postpartum, and contraceptive practices among white, black, Hmong, and other Southeast Asian mothers attending a maternal infant care program in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during 1980–82.

White and black mothers were younger than the Hmong and other Asian mothers. The lowest mean age of first pregnancy was among blacks. Ages of first pregnancy were similar for whites, Hmong, and other Asians, although the mean age of menarche was approximately two years later for Hmong and other Southeast Asian mothers compared to the white and black mothers.

Based on self reports at the first postpartum visit one month after delivery, 39 per cent of the whites and 25 per cent of the blacks were breastfeeding. In comparison 8.7 per cent of the Hmong and 17 per cent of the other southeast Asian mothers were breastfeeding.

Maternal age and age at first pregnancy were significant predictors of parity for whites, blacks, Hmong, and the other Southeast Asians. Ever‐use of contraception was a significant predictor of parity only for Hmong.

The highest proportion of ever‐users of contraception was among the white mothers (80 per cent) followed by the blacks (69.3 per cent) and other Asian mothers (34.8 per cent). Hmong mothers had the lowest proportion having used contraception (17.1 per cent).     

Ethnomedical pathogenesis and Hmong immigrants' sudden nocturnal deaths

Scores of seemingly healthy Hmong immigrants have died mysteriously and without warning from what has come to be known as Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome (SUNDS). To date medical research has provided no adequate explanation for these sudden deaths. This study is an investigation into the role of powerful traditional beliefs in illness causation. In Stockton, California, 118 Hmong men and women were interviewed regarding their awareness of and personal experience with a traditional nocturnal spirit encounter. An analysis of this data reveals that the supranormal encounter acts as a trigger for Hmong SUNDS.     

Plant Diversity in Hmong and Mien Homegardens in Northern Thailand

Plant Diversity in Hmong and Mien Homegardens in Northern Thailand. We surveyed 180 homegardens in three Hmong and three Mien villages in northern Thailand to study their floristic diversity and composition and to understand the impact of forced migration and ecological conditions for the development of the rich homegarden flora. We also looked at the role of culturally important species as carriers of cultural identity. We found 406 species: 341 (99 families) and 270 species (90 families) in Hmong and Mien homegardens, respectively. Five lowland villages had the richest homegarden flora, in part due to the presence of many widespread species. Twenty-two species were widespread in tropical countries and found in most Hmong and Mien homegardens, and 14 additional common species were shared between Hmong and Mien homegardens. Seventeen species were exclusive to Hmong homegardens and eight to Mien homegardens; these we have designated as culturally important species. The presence of culturally important species determines the homegardens’ characteristics and reflects the cultural identity related to plant uses of a group. Similarities in floristic composition of the two groups can be attributed to widespread and common species. Floristic variation and diversity in homegardens were strongly related to homegarden geographical location, personal preference, and cultural background of the owners.     

Health of Hmong in Thailand: Risk factors,morbidity and mortality in comparison with other ethnic groups

Demographic and health conditions among Hmong in Thailand were examined in comparison with other ethnic groups which closely resemble the ethnic origins of Southeast Asian refugees in the U.S. Thailand Hmong have very large extended family households, very high birth rates, low use of contraception, very young age at first marriage, and, compared with other highland minorities, relatively low infant and crude mortality rates. Hmong use of tobacco and alcohol and other stimulants is lower than other ethnic groups, and is much more frequent among men than among women. Opium was used by 15% of the men in the surveyed village, lower than among another highland group, but higher than in surveyed lowland villages. Fewer illnesses were reported by Hmong in the 7 days prior to survey than in other rural groups. Relatively low Hmong morbidity and mortality as compared with other highland ethnic groups may be associated with low use of tobacco and alcohol, and with the sharing of child care responsibilities within the large Hmong extended family households]This is the revised version of a paper presented at the Psychosocial Workshop of the Population Association of America Annual Meeting, Boston, 27 March 1985. Research was supported by National Science Foundation grant BNS 7914093, and by the East-West Center. Opinions expressed are those of the author.     

Translating Christianity: Some keywords,events and sites in Western Arrernte conversion

This article considers a range of Western Arrernte terms employed by missionaries at Hermannsburg to translate the Bible and the Lutheran liturgy and hymns. My argument is that initially words were employed as metaphors in order to convey a Christian transcendental and ritual order quite different from the Arrernte one the terms had named previously. I examine the events and the Western Arrernte response that, over time, redefined some terms and shaped an Arrernte Christian vernacular.     

Hmong infrapolitics: a view from Vietnam

Drawing upon notions of indigenization of modernity, agency and resistance in the context of an egalitarian society – the Hmong in northern Vietnam – I explore whether agency that is directed at diverting modernization is automatically intentional and patent, whether under certain circumstances it becomes resistance, and whether it is necessarily a project. I suggest the Hmong in Vietnam use infrapolitics while being tactically selective about modernity. I note that agency and the power to act appear and evolve in context and must be studied in relation to the specific circumstances that have formed the acting subjects. My argument relates to Sahlins’ proposition that ‘Local societies everywhere have attempted to organise the irresistible forces of Western World system by something even more inclusive – their own system of the world, their own culture.’     

Hmong gardens: Botanical diversity in an urban setting

Since the end of the Vietnam War, thousands of Laotian Hmong have immigrated to the United States, many ultimately resettling in the Central Valley of California. In the innercity environment of Sacramento, the Hmong continue their agrarian traditions by creating urban gardens where they grow traditional plants. In this study, we document 59 Hmong garden species grown at a site in South Sacramento. Most of these species are documented in the Southeast Asian botanical literature as either food or medicinal plants. Uses of the plants are discussed as is the importance of urban gardens in maintaining Hmong cultural identity and practices.     

Social and River Networks for the Trees: Wounaan's Riverine Rhizomic Cosmos and Arboreal Conservation

ABSTRACT   The effects of environmental conservation and development are of significant anthropological interest. Recent focus on the politics of knowledge and translation has shown the importance of cosmology in conservation encounters. I examine how Wounaan indigenous peoples and extralocal conservation practitioners "translate" eastern Panama based on their own cosmologies. ¹ Specifically, I explore how Wounaan's social and river-networked rhizomic cosmos is overlooked in the practice of forest-focused conservation. This results from Panama's environmental history, in which actors simplified early representations of a complex landscape to one characterized by forests, as well as a Western bias toward forests with scant attention paid to cosmology. Finally, I note how Wounaan negotiate this cultural disconnect by emphasizing their ties to forests. In so doing, they buttress the arboreal bias, in turn reinforcing power relations, but also giving themselves political leverage in conservation activities. These results inform recent discussion about politics and scientific praxis in conservation.     

Animal Metaphors and Metaphorizing Animals: An Integrated Literary, Cognitive, and Evolutionary Analysis of Making and Partaking of Stories

Humans use metaphors to explore their relationship with nature. Our ability to make and understand metaphors appears to be an automatic cognitive process, one that likely evolved along with our ability to create and understand language. Because metaphors are processed automatically, without conscious appraisal, they can be used to rapidly communicate, or manipulate. Applying theories of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science to literary texts, we explored the role of animal metaphors in the making and partaking of stories in the context of a course in environmental studies. We investigated how humans are animals and yet use culture to shield themselves from this reality. We read and analyzed literature in which animal metaphors are central, such as Honoré de Balzac’s short story Passion in the Desert and Langdon Smith’s poem “Evolution.” Throughout the course, the overarching theme is that animal metaphors are powerful tools for framing our relationship with the environment and that they can be best understood in the context of humans as evolved animals.     

广西少数民族成年女性体成分的差异及年龄变化规律

本文分析了在广西调研的860例(毛南族200例、仫佬族200例、苗族244例、瑶族216例)少数民族女性的体成分数据,结果发现:1)不同民族的体成分比较,脂肪量苗族最高,仫佬族最低,肌肉量毛南族最高,苗族最低,组间差异多数具有统计学意义(P<0.05)。2)广西毛南族、仫佬族、苗族和瑶族成年女性的身体质量指数(I_(bm))、腰臀比(R_(wh))及体脂肪率(P_(bf))差异明显,根据I_(bm)、R_(wh)或P_(bf)评价的肥胖人数比率最高的均为苗族,且与其它民族的差异具有统计学意义(P<0.05)。3)广西毛南族、仫佬族、苗族和瑶族女性的脂肪量均随年龄的增长先升高,一般至50-54岁达高峰再稍下降,而去脂体重随年龄的增长逐渐波动降低;四民族女性的肌肉量总体随年龄的增长呈波动下降的趋势,毛南族最为明显;四民族各年龄段之间的体成分比较,组间差异绝大多数具有统计学意义(P<0.05)。综上所述,体成分存在民族差异,苗族女性的体成分状况最不健康,表现为脂肪含量过高而肌肉量和骨量偏低;随年龄的增长,本研究四个少数民族的体成分均可能呈现少肌性肥胖和骨质疏松的危险倾向。     

Moral Agency,Identity Crisis and Mental Health: An Anthropologist’s Plight and His Hmong Ritual Healing

During anthropological fieldwork, the author had a serious accident on the outskirts of a Hmong village in the highland of Laos. However, this dramatic incident turned out to be the occasion of his ritual initiation into the local village community. An analysis of narratives of the incident reveals Hmong conceptions of the anthropologist’s physical, mental and moral affliction, its causative concomitants and his ritual healing. Hmong mental health and identity are situated in a moral space of exchange relationships to significant others, challenging basic assumptions of concepts of the person widely held in psychiatry and beyond. The healing ritual transformed the author’s being from indeterminate “other,” in a life-threatening state of identity crisis, to a wholesome Hmong “self,” in a state of health and moral agency. This exemplary rite de passage highlights the affinity of ritual healing and constitution of self in a moral space. The underlying relational concept of the person is in sharp contrast to psychiatry’s concepts of the person, which are deeply shaped by values of individualism. Psychiatric services must accommodate substantial differences in the concepts of the person when treating Hmong migrants from Laos.     

Causes and consequences of increase in child survival rates: ethnoepidemiology among the Hmong of Thailand.

The Hmong "hill tribe" minority in Thailand has much higher exposure to factors usually associated with risk of child mortality (high fertility, low status of women, low education, less use of modern medical care for births, exposure to warfare, economic and physical disruption, and poor hygienic conditions) than the rural ethnic Thai population. Nonetheless, infant mortality has declined from over 120 per 1000 to under 50 per 1000 live births among both these populations in the past 30 years. The reason for the rapid increase in child survival among the Hmong appears to be better access to and more use of modern curative and preventive medical care associated with road construction rather than major changes in social or hygienic conditions. Conventional wisdom suggests that high fertility is both a cause and a consequence of high infant and child mortality and that parents will not reduce fertility until they see that mortality has declined. Most Hmong parents recognize the decline in child mortality and attribute it to better access to modern medical care. Most Hmong parents also say that, if they were starting to have children now, they would want to have fewer children. Fear of child death is infrequently mentioned as a motive for having more children, and the perceived decline in child mortality is rarely mentioned as a reason for reduced fertility. Most Hmong parents explain their desired family size in terms of economic conditions rather than perceived risk of child mortality. Results of this study suggest that fertility and child mortality can vary independently of one another and that major reductions in child mortality can be accomplished without waiting for major social changes (e.g., improved education or status of women) or major reductions in fertility.     

High prevalence of antiHTLV-1 antibodies in the Boni, an ethnic group of African origin isolated in French Guiana since the 18th century

Antibodies to HTLV-1 (ELISA test using disrupted virus) were studied in different ethnic groups in French Guiana, including 135 blood donors from Cayenne, 97 Boni Blacks and 57 Wayana Indians from Maripasoula area, and 57 Hmong from Cacao village. We observed significant differences between Boni Blacks and Wayana Indians, having respectively 10.3% versus 0% of high antibody titers. The Hmong, recent refugees from Kampuchea, exhibited an intermediate level (3.5%) of infection. These results favour an African origin of HTLV-1 and raise, for the Hmong, the question of an infection acquired in Guiana.     

客家人起源的遗传学分析

客家人是南方讲客家话的特殊汉族民系,其来源学术界有一定争议。该研究对福建长汀的148个客家男子做了遗传分析。从父系遗传的Y染色体SNP的主成分分析看,客家人与中原汉族最近,又偏向于苗瑶语族群中的畲族,不同于其他南方汉族偏向于侗台语族群。混合分析发现客家人数据结构中汉族结构占80．2％,类畲族结构13％,类侗族结构6．8％。各族M7个体Y-STR单倍型的网络结构分析发现客家人中类苗瑶结构有两个来源,其一来自湖北,其一来自广东。客家人之类侗族结构应来自江西土著干越。客家人母系遗传的线粒体Region V区段9bp缺失频率为19．7％,与畲族很近,不同于中原汉族。客家人的主要成分应是中原汉人,畲族是对客家人影响最大的外来因素。与客家话中的苗瑶语特征相印证,客家人可能是古代荆蛮族的核心成分不断加上中原汉人移民形成的。客家话等南方汉语方言最初也可能是南方原住民语言在中原汉语不断影响下逐渐形成的。     

Epigenetic metaphors: an interdisciplinary translation of encoding and decoding

Looking at the new and often disputed science of epigenetics, we examined the challenges faced by scientists when they communicate scientific research to the public. We focused on the use of metaphors to illustrate notions of epigenetics and genetics. We studied the “encoding” by epigeneticists and “decoding” in focus groups with diverse backgrounds. We observed considerable overlap in the dominant metaphors favored by both researchers and the lay public. However, the groups differed markedly in their interpretations of which metaphors aided understanding or not. We conclude by discussing the role of metaphors and their interpretations in the context of a shift from pre-deterministic genomic metaphors to more active, dynamic and nuanced epigenetic metaphors. These reflections on the choice of metaphors and differences in encoding/decoding are important for science communication and scientific boundary-maintenance.     

Linguistic Knowledge and Cultural Knowledge: Some Doubts and Speculations

The boundary between a speaker's knowledge of a language and his/her knowledge of the world poses deep and still unresolved analytical problems. Semantic systems and pragmatic rules build on and presuppose basic cultural assumptions about cosmology, time, causality—about the world described and manipulated by language. For a Western language, those assumptions are shared by speaker and linguist and need not be analyzed. But a non- Western language, such as Kwaio (Solomon Islands), may incorporate a very different model of the universe. Assumptions about ancestors and causality, magic and mana, infuse and motivate semantic systems and pragmatic rules. The challenges of articulating linguistic and ethnographic analyses are explored. [language, pragmatics, semantics, world view, sociolinguistics]     

Synthetic biology: building the language for a new science brick by metaphorical brick

Changes in the biosciences and their relations to society over the last decades provide a unique opportunity to examine whether or not such changes leave traces in the language we use to talk about them. In this article we examine metaphors used in English-speaking press coverage to conceptualize a new type of (interdisciplinary) bioscience: synthetic biology. Findings show that three central metaphors were used between 2008 and May 2010. They exploit social and cultural knowledge about books, computers and engines and are linked to knowledge of three revolutions in science and society (the printing, information and industrial revolutions). These three central metaphors are connected to each other through the concepts of reading/writing, designing and mass production and they focus on science as a revolutionary process rather than on the end results or products of science. Overall, we observed the use of a complex bricolage of mixed metaphors and chains of metaphors that root synthetic biology in historical events and achievements, while at the same time extolling its promises for the future.     

Zombie Linguistics: Experts,Endangered Languages and the Curse of Undead Voices

The alarming projection that up to ninety per cent of the world's languages will become extinct by the end of this century has prompted a new sense of urgency among linguists and other language scholars to rush out and record the last utterances from the last speakers of ‘endangered languages’. As the last speaker utters her/his last words, the ‘expert’ is there to record this important moment and preserve it for all time. Among the benefits from such preservation efforts is the ability to play back the recordings at any time in any place. In popular media this process is described as ‘saving the language’ through recording and documentation. Unfortunately, these recordings are not living voices. Rather, they are zombie voices—undead voices that are disembodied and techno-mechanized. They are cursed with being neither dead nor alive. They become artefacts of technological interventions, as well as expert valorisations of linguistic codes. Expert rhetoric compounds the problem by the use of metaphoric frames such as death, endangerment and extinction. Metaphors not only frame discourses of language endangerment, but they also frame and influence actions and interventions. This essay critically evaluates the metaphors used by language experts to understand the unintended consequences for community members who are actively revitalising and reclaiming their languages. The essay also identifies key strategies used by community language activists to ignore existing metaphors, while creating new metaphors to potentiate new solutions to language death to promote emergent vitalities.