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Hmong Shaman Performing Hu Plig Ceremony, Fresno 2005
I am late to my first Hu Plig. The ceremony is already in progress. Two young women sit on a bench in front of an altar in the kitchen of a 1970s ranch-style tract home in southeast Fresno. Behind them a dead pig lies belly-down on the floor, its legs splayed out to the sides. A rope is tied loosely around the young women, connecting their souls to that of the pig. An older woman wearing a black hood slowly circles the pig and the two young women, beating a gong and chanting in low, musical tones. Completing the circle, she puts down the gong and picks up a large, black saber with a thick, wide blade and drags it around the same circle, chanting. Next she picks up a small bowl filled with rice, water and an egg and positions herself behind the pig. Shouting an incantation, she takes a mouthful of water from the bowl and sprays the young women. After repeating this twice, she unties the young women, who are now free to go.
The Hmong are Southeast Asian hill tribe people who came to America in the late 1970s as refugees of the CIA's secret war in Laos. They believe that if you become ill, experience bad luck or suffer any kind of loss or hardship, it has happened because your soul has either wandered away from your body or been kidnapped by the dab, spirits which can be either good or bad, depending on the circumstances. The purpose of a Hu Plig (soul calling ceremony) is to return the soul to its proper owner. This involves the sacrifice of at least one animal, whose soul is bartered for the missing person's soul in the spirit world. The Hmong believe that pigs and chickens are always reincarnated as other pigs and chickens, so that their soul is only borrowed for the ceremony. Like Americans, who kill a turkey or pig at Thanksgiving and then gather with family to eat it, the Hmong invite all of their relatives for the ensuing feast. No part of the animal is wasted.
After the two young women leave the room, the shaman lowers the black hood over her face and goes into a two-hour blind trance. Filled with musical chanting, wild exhortations and talking in tongues, the high-energy performance goes on as complacent family members casually saunter into the kitchen for a cold drink and then go back to the living room to watch Hmong bullfights on videotape. Meanwhile, the intensity of the hooded Shaman's performance builds as she begins leaping up and down on the bench, occasionally leaping off the bench to the floor and then jumping back up again.
For the Hmong, the bench in front of the altar represents a horse, which the Shaman rides up into the spirit world to negotiate the return of the missing person's soul. The Hmong were once an equestrian people, riding small, sturdy horses with thick, bristled manes throughout the mountains of southern China. Very few of these animals are found in either China or Laos today, as motorbikes, tuk tuks and other modern conveyances have made them nearly obsolete.
After more than two hours of intense physical and emotional exertion, the sweat-soaked shaman steps off her wooden horse, pulls off her black hood, mops her brow and joins 40 relatives and a guest photographer for a feast of barbecued pork, chicken soup, rice, boiled vegetables, a congealed blood dish, and assorted cooked entrails. She gives one of the young women a new, secret Hmong name, in order to trick the dab into thinking that she is another person so that they cannot steal her soul again.
– Joel Pickford
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