Severing ties: ritual objects and the category of religion in Hmong American families

This article considers two objects at the center of the Hmong ritual life - the wrist strings tied during a khi tes ceremony and the meat of ritually sacrificed animals - and analyzes the diverse ways that Hmong American Christians have understood the significance of these objects and managed the family and community controversies surrounding them. Drawing on oral histories, news media coverage, and archival sources, this article shows how Hmong American Christians held markedly different interpretations of traditional Hmong ritual objects that surfaced the blurry boundary between religion and non-religion. The decision by Catholic and mainline Protestants to view wrist strings and ritual meat as non-religious cultural objects reflected ongoing commitments to maintaining family relationships amid broader transformations in Hmong religious and spiritual life in the late twentieth century. More broadly, this case illustrates the role of materiality in the discursive inventions of religion and non-religion.