Commentary The (H)mong Shamans’ Power of Healing Sharing the Esoteric Knowledge of a Great Mong Shaman.docVIP

Commentary: The (H)mong Shamans’ Power of Healing: Sharing the Esoteric Knowledge of a Great (H)mong Shaman by Jacques Lemoine, Hmong Studies Journal, 12: 1-36. Commentary: The (H)mong Shamans’ Power of Healing Sharing the Esoteric Knowledge of a Great Mong Shaman By Jacques Lemoine, Ph.D. Hmong Studies Journal Volume 12, 36 Pages Abstract In this work, the author clarifies and provides additional information about his anthropological work over the past several decades with Mong Master Shaman Xyooj Tsu Yob and his disciples. This commentary article is intended as a response to Dr. Nicholas Tapp’s “Perspectives on Hmong Studies” published in Volume 11 of the Hmong Studies Journal. Keywords: Hmong, Mong, Shaman, Shamanism My choice to study the (H)mong Contrary to most researchers on the (H)mong, whether in Laos or Thailand 1 (except for Bill Geddes), I was a professional sinologist trained in anthropology (student of André Leroi-Gourhan and Claude Lévi-Strauss) and graduated in sociology, ethnology and linguistics. I volunteered in 1960 to work in Laos because of its Chinese cross-border minority nationalities and especially the Miao-Yao group I had selected as a possible proto-Chinese stock in the context of my encyclopedic synthesis of the anthropology of 2 China In my eyes, the (H)mong were also a rare example, in the anthropology of China, of a completely illiterate society with an exclusively oral tradition. I started studying the (H)mong in late 1960 when I finally arrived as a high school teacher in the old city of Xieng Khouang, northern Laos. Half my students were 1 I was at the time Head Librarian of the Institute of Advanced Chinese Studies, at La Sorbonne University, Paris. 2 ? L’Asie Orientale ?, 550 pages published in Ethnologie Régionale 2, Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, Editions Gallimard, Paris 1978 1  Commentary: The (H)mong Shamans’ Power of Healing: Sharing the Esoteric Knowledge