Anne Fadimans The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down...

The interviews in Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down and Joshua Reno’s Waste Away both have their fair share of barriers to overcome, even though their research could not be more different. Anne Fadiman conducts interviews in two drastically different topics, Hmong culture and medicine. Joshua Reno favors a landfill in Michigan; interviewing residents living next to Four Corners Landfill. However different these two areas of research may be, both books show that interviewing individuals is a research method incredibly valuable when working to determine a person or group’s feelings and ideas. Both anthropologists use interviewing as a method to gain information, but are careful to align with the culture of each of the†¦show more content†¦Without an interpreter present, Fadiman would not be able to ask questions and get responses from most of the Hmong people she interviewed. Fadiman confronts another interviewing barrier when she works with the medical staff of Merced County Medical Center, the hospital where Lia Lee was taken and treated many times. Fadiman constantly reviewed Lia’s medical records, as well as consulted and interviewed many of the physicians and nurses who worked with Lia and her family. Fadiman had to alter her interviewing style and the way in which she planned the interviews while interviewing the staff of Merced County Medical Center. These individuals did not require an interpreter because they were native English speakers. Because of this, Fadiman had an easier time communicating with the interviewees, but had to remember the culture they were used to. The resident doctors and nurses Fadiman was discussing Lia’s case with worked at the Family Practice Residency, which receives most of its payment through government programs like Medi-Cal or Medicare (Fadiman 1997:24). Because of this, most patients this staff was use d to seeing were low-income, and many of them were Hmong refugees, who had differing styles of treating the sick than Fadiman was used to in Western medicine. The background of the staff Fadiman interviewed colored their medical opinions, as they were personally invested in many of the cases