The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down Language Analysis

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In these essay I will consider the question about the problems and barriers that occur because of language miscommunication. The author Anne Fadiman wrote a book called The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down published on 1997, which talks about a Hmong family and their child named Lia who suffered from epilepsy, but the family thought it was because her spirit got scared and ran away. The doctors had multiple miscommunications mainly due to language barriers. I will demonstrate some specific times that language played a crucial moment in the health of Lia. I will also be telling you how I can relate to Lia’s family and how language became an obstacle base on my own experience as a person born from another country. In this Anthropology course we talked about linguistic competence …show more content…
Until this day that problem has decreased, since the clinics hire more interpreters, but there are still some places that face language problems. In Lia’s situation this problem caused her the ability to have a normal life like any other human on earth. When Foa and Na Kao took Lia to the hospital she was prescribed some medications, but Lia’s parent did not understood the instructions step by step. Peggy stated, “Lia continue to have seizures, but was she having those seizures because she didn’t have enough phenobarbital in her blood or was she having seizures in spite of having enough phenobarbital in her blood? And if the parents weren’t giving what we told them to give, was it because they hadn’t understood or because they didn’t want to? We just couldn’t tell” (Fadiman, 58). Language became a barrier when the Lees could not explain to the doctors about their reason for their visit to the hospital, since Lia was back to normal once they reached the hospital they could not explain to the doctors about how she was feeling and how often the seizures
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