Page 184 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Religion 167

(Barrett 2005). After the show aired, Hmong viewers debated the accuracy
and likelihood of the shamanic hospital ritual on blogs and discussion groups
(“Yellow Content” 2005). Another anonymous viewer thought the conflict
was overemphasized. Her family, she explained, respected both Western
and traditional healing practices, even though many of her male relatives
were physicians and her mother was a shaman (“Racial Pro-File” 2005).
These Internet discussions bring together the life-worlds of young Hmong
television consumers and convey the kind of negotiation that the Hmong
have engaged in to bring their ritual healing practices into hospitals and
Western medicine into their communities. At about the same time as the
episode aired, Hmong shamans in Merced, California were wearing hospital
badges and performing animal sacrifices in hospital parking lots (Udesky
2006). The Hmong have transposed the sacred landscape of their villages in
the mountains of Laos onto American parking lots and back yards.
There is much diversity in Hmong-American communities, as evidenced
by the wide-ranging discussion about “Grey’s Anatomy.” In response to
postmodern and postcolonial theorizing about grand narratives, scholars have
begun to pay more attention to difference both within and between cultures.
Wendy Doniger advises looking for “the particular flash of difference” in
the context of sameness that can illuminate comparative work (Doniger
2000: 72). The Hmong are in conflict not only with Western institutions
but with their own families who want to suppress traditional practices. In
contrast to the anonymous Hmong posting, a Hmong student told me about
the tensions that arose in her family because her mother was a traditional
healer and her uncle was a born-again Christian who denounced shamanistic
healing as the devil’s work. Conflicts within families suggest that religions
do not always “dwell” comfortably. They often coexist in tension with
one another, in this case challenging both American Christian and Hmong
traditional ways of being religious.

Slam dancing and chanting for God

Though I have been pointing to religious activity in unexpected places, such
as park benches and hospital parking lots, popular film and music can be
found unexpectedly in places that are explicitly religious. Every summer
since 1983, the sounds of Cornerstone Christian music festival have been
heard on the remote back roads near the small town of Bushnell, Illinois. In
2004, journalist Andrew Beaujon was strolling through the exhibition tents
at Cornerstone in the midst of 20,000 other festival-goers. He was surprised
that not all the festival-goers looked the part of conservative Christian
youth. Beaujon noticed, for instance, that a popular “Rock for Life” booth
displaying T-shirts that said “STOP KILLING MY GENERATION” was