13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

FALK, Cathy

How and Why the Hmong Sing to their Dead

Oral communication has been the vehicle for the transmission of information, knowledge and empowerment amongst Hmong and Miao people for over 5 000 years in widely geographically-dispersed contexts ranging from southern China and South-east Asia (Laos, Thailand, Burma and Vietnam ) and, after the end of the Vietnam war, to Australia, France, the US, Canada and French Guyana. The extensive Hmong repertoire of manipulation of speech (‘flowery’, ‘turned’, secret and evasive languages; myths, stories, riddles and proverbs; expressive songs, sung poetry and ritual song and instrumental texts) has, along with a clan system, been the only readily portable indicator of Hmong identity in a long history of forced and voluntary migration. Intersecting with the speech-song continuum are other axes which define both performance structures and ‘Hmongness’, including the gender of performers and recipients; the intentions of communication, whether of strong personal emotion or of esoteric communal instruction; differentiated audiences amongst the living, the dead and the world of spirits; and the extent of creative choice or mandated reproduction of poetic text and musical setting in performance. The texts of Hmong communicative genres, both sung and performed instrumentally, also articulate other markers of Hmong history, cosmology and identification, including the absence of definitive characteristics which the Hmong observe in the dominant cultures which have always surrounded them, such as literacy and orthography, institutionalised religions and the possession of territory. This paper will discuss the traditional genres of the speech-song continuum, in particular the texted funeral instructions played by the multiple-reed pipe, ‘qeej’, to the soul of the deceased.