Two Spirit People: Gender and Transgender in Native American Tradition

In Native American cultures, people that we would usually call gay or transgender are known as 'two-spirit people': people who embody both male and female spirits. Sometimes these two-spirit people are known in anthropological literature as 'berdache'.

This video beautifully presents the two-spirit tradition. It emphasizes that the two-spirit role is a spiritual one, which makes it different from gay or lesbian identity, which is based on the physical and social.

"Traditionally, the Two-spirited person was one who had received a gift from the Creator, that gift being the privilege to house both male and female spirits in their bodies. " Having both male and female within gives two-spirit people the ability to transcend boundaries, including the boundary between the earth and the spirit world. Thus they can provide a conduit to the spirit world. For this reason, two-spirit people were traditionally respected, and held powerful and important roles as teachers and healers.

Native American writers Sandra Laframboise and Michael Anhorn say, "Many tribes had rituals for children to go through if they were recognized as acting different from their birth gender. These rituals ensured the child was truly two-spirit. If parents noticed that a son was disinterested in boyish play or manly work, they would set up a ceremony to determine which way the boy would be brought up. They would make an enclosure of brush, and place in the center both a man's bow and a woman's basket. The boy was told to go inside the circle of brush and to bring something out, and as he entered the brush would be set on fire. The tribe watched what he took with him as he ran out, and if it was the basketry materials they reconciled themselves to his being a 'berdache'."

Sandra Laframboise and Michael Anhorn have posted a detailed article on two-spirit people written from a positive gay identity. They point out the controversy between traditionalists and two-spirit people, in the post-colonial context of today's America, and urge us all to learn from this heritage, which can enrich all of us.

Stages of Acculturation

Acculturation is the process of adapting to living in a new culture. It's something all immigrants go through, and though most writers on the subject seem to think the stages last for weeks or months, I know from experience that it can take place over years. It has taken me ten years to proceed through them, and in the disorienting wilderness of the middle stages, it would have been helpful to have had a description of the process, as a map to guide me toward home.

Stage 1: Euphoria
In this stage, a person is full of excitement at their new surroundings. I remember sitting happily under the grapefruit tree in my tiny backyard during my first long California summer, smelling the jasmine and orange blossom, and living off corn tortillas and avocados. I loved racoons, NPR, all the ethnic food I could get so easily in California, and the natural beauty of the area. This stage lasted several years for me.

Stage 2: Culture Shock and Alienation
In this stage, a person becomes keenly aware of the cultural differences between him/her and the host culture. They feel the loss of aspects of home. Feelings range from irritability to panic. A person can feel deeply lonely and sad, homesick and confused, or angry and hostile at people who do not understand them, and customs that seem wrong. Immigrants in this stage seek out compatriots, and often complain about the local people, culture and customs.
I was filled with a feeling of homesickness in this stage, longing for Europe, seeking out French food, movies and books, and feeling lost in the US. I felt confused about where I ought to be, and found myself often despising the way things were done in America, while trying to hide my prejudices and judgements from my close US friends. It would have been very helpful to me at this stage to have known that it was a phase in a gradual process of settling in, rather than a sign that I had made a big mistake in relocating to the US.

Stage 3: Anomie, or Culture Stress
In this stage, a person gradually restabilises. Some of the stresses of culture shock are solved, and some continue. A person in this stage may experience an identity crisis, feeling at home neither in their home culture, nor in their new culture. In this stage, I used to joke ruefully that I was stuck in the middle of the Atlantic. I knew that there were many things about California that I loved and appreciated, but I still felt confused about my feelings of homesickness for Europe.

Stage 4: Assimilation or Adaptation
In this final stage, a person either assimilates or acculturates.
Acculturation permits a person to find value and meaning in both cultures and identify with both. An acculturated person accepts the new culture, and feels able to negotiate it and live within it, without compromising who they are. They are able to feel similarity with the people of the host culture, as well as identity with their own culture and language.
Assimilation means that a person's old cultural values and beliefs are replaced by the new culture. They leave behind the culture of their parents, for example, and take on "American ways".
As I acculturated to California, I began to take walks around the little Northern California town I live in, smiling at its beauty. I relished soy chai and Thai food, and local farmer's markets. I loved the vast computer-linked library system, the local geeks, quaint wooden cottages, and bay trees. I felt fully myself, with all of my European-ness, living in California, and I began to deepen my relationships with American friends. I decided to apply for citizenship.

All immigrants negotiate these stages differently. Our reasons for coming here make a difference to our acculturation process. For example, did we choose to come, or were we forced to leave our home as refugees, or political exiles? How much trauma and loss were involved? What and whom did we leave behind? What were we able to bring, and what were we able to recreate once we got here? Can we exercise our profession, or did we lose our socio-economic status and earning power when we took up residence here? Is our kind accepted here? Is our being here a matter of struggling to survive, or does it represent an opportunity to thrive?

Trauma Work In Congo Using Local Metaphors

Here's a nice blog post from 'Beyond Trauma', the Somatic Experiencing blog. It describes a group intervention using local metaphors to educate people in Congo about the effects of trauma. Instead of the usual metaphor of "it's like having the brake and the accelerator on at the same time", the trainer uses a locally applicable metaphor of being chased by a wild animal. The audience responds from their experience.

Somatic Experiencing is a trauma therapy methodology developed by Peter Levine. Its basic premise is that PTSD happens as a result of the body's normal fight/flight reactions getting blocked. For example, after a scary event, the body naturally trembles. If we stifle the trembling, then the adrenalin 'locks in', and the fear stays in the body. It's better to allow the body's natural processes of trembling, tears, and so on to move through, bringing calm in their wake. Levine's practitioners focus on retraining the body, and safe release of previously stored trauma.

The Anthropology of Money

Students at the University of California at Irvine have created an online exhibition on the anthropology of money, drawing on information from relatives and friends in immigrant communities in Southern California. The home page says:

"This project took the student researchers to Little Saigon, Little India, the Cambodian Corridor of Long Beach, Los Angeles's Chinatown, Little Armenia, the clubs of Hollywood, the dorms of UC Irvine and the barrios of East LA. It also involved phone calls to far-away relatives and friends, and travels through memories contained in family photo-albums, scrapbooks, and sacred texts."

The exhibition discusses:

• various types and uses of lucky money in Hawaiian, Chinese and Muslim culture
• tandas and cundinas: Mexican-American and Latino-American rotating credit associations
• Lakshmi and ritual uses of money in Hindu culture
• the mid-Lent festival in Armenian culture
• ghost money in Chinese culture
• 'edible money' in the form of dumplings in Chinese culture.

Roots Trump Radiation? A Vital Lesson from the Ukraine

I came across a fascinating article about a community of elderly Ukrainian women who live in the Chernobyl dead-zone, in evident good health. After initially being relocated out of the radiation-contaminated area around the nuclear plant, these women decided within a few weeks to return home to the villages that had been their ancestral home. They have been there for the last twenty-five years.
The women farm beets, potatoes and other crops in the irradiated soil, forage for berries and mushrooms, and hunt game in the forest. Deer are said to be heavily contaminated, yet they are eaten. Although one of the women has thyroid cancer (which is treated), they have, on average, out-lived their peers who did not come back, by ten years.
The article suggests that the psychological effects of forced dislocation, separation from one's land and one's roots, and from one's community, are more dangerous than massive doses of radiation.
This is a deeply provocative idea, but in the context of massive doses of radiation in Japan, some of which have drifted to the US, it's a paradoxically comforting one.
Could it be that grounding into a deep relationship with the land, living in a close-knit community, eating humbly and locally, and living a very simple lifestyle, is in itself curative? These elderly Ukranian peasant women know something profound, and their indigenous wisdom holds an important lesson for the rest of us.

Susto: Loss of Soul Through Terrible Fright

Susto is a disorder you might get in Central or South America, resulting from your soul having left your body as a result of a severe fright. (A more severe form of susto is called espanto, and considered potentially fatal.)

Symptoms of susto include: nervousness, insomnia, despondency, lack of attention to your appearance, listlessness, fear of the event happening again, and stomach upsets. Susto clearly has much in common with PTSD, including the fact that sometimes it doesn't set in until months or years after the event that caused it. See the list of symptoms listed by one curandera, and you will note that many of them correspond to those of PTSD.

But the notion of soul loss captures something essential to the experience of great fear--something that is not captured by the notion of PTSD and the neurological explanations that go with that diagnosis. Great fear (and also great loss) do make you feel as though you had lost some essential part of oneself. The lively, life-filled part: your soul.

Susto is treated by local healers in the US using herbal teas, limpias (cleansing rituals) and barridas (sweeping rituals). During the barrida the client recounts the traumatic event, and then receives a healing usually involving having his or her body swept with a crucifix or some other ritual object such as an egg. Usually a series of barridas is necessary to heal a person from susto.

According to Dr. Dennis O'Neil, at Palomar College, California: "Among the Maya Indians of Southern Mexico and Guatemala, [the] ceremony typically involves a lengthy series of ritual actions in the presence of the patient's friends and relatives. It usually begins with prayers to the Catholic saint of the village. Next, a chicken egg and special herbs are passed over the patient's body to absorb some of the illness. Later, the egg may be left where the soul loss occurred, along with gifts to propitiate the supernatural being who has the patient's soul. The patient is then partly stripped and "shocked" by liquor being sprayed from the curandero's mouth. The patient may then be massaged and finally "sweated" on a bed placed over or near a hot stove. Alternatively, the patient may be covered with many blankets to induce profuse sweating."

A Lacanian Reading of Koro

Koro is the belief that one's penis is retracting fatally into one's body--or that is has been stolen, through witchcraft or spirit medecine. It can be a personal or a social delusion, and it affects men in parts of Asia and Africa.

In 1967 there was a major epidemic of koro in Singapore, which lasted for about ten days of general panic. Emergency rooms filled up with men clutching desperately at themselves in an attempt to stop the syndrome.

In rural parts of China, penises have been traditionally stolen by a spirit in the form of a fox, who wanders the countryside looking for victims. It sounds whimsical, but in some parts of Africa, people have been lynched for stealing someone's penis.

Koro is listed in Appendix I of the DSM-IV-TR. Clearly in the West it corresponds to Panic Disorder, and perhaps to Body Dismorphic Disorder. But what underlies it is more interesting than its classification. In that respect, perhaps a rereading of Freud would be more useful--or perhaps better still Lacan.

Lacan rereads Freud's "penis" as the "Phallus"--not the physical, literal organ, but a metaphor for the power in the world that a man is granted by virtue of being male. Phallus envy makes sense in a way penis envy does not.

In the case of koro, narcissistic injury, symbolised as loss of Phallus (a man's power and status in the world), might be experienced as "my penis is shrinking". Interpreted this way, the disorder becomes less of a curious folktale for and more a deeply comprehensible expression of fear and distress.

Koro From A Taiwanese-American Perspective
This detailed comment was sent to me by Mindy Chang.
In some rural parts of China, there is the belief that fox spirits are responsible for stealing the penises of hapless male victims. The fox spirit is well known in Japanese folklore as a kitsune and in Chinese folklore as hu li jing. Some are good and some are bad. They are often feared because they are powerful and cunning, and if you anger one, you will be punished and cursed. Some of the bad ones appear in the form of beautiful women who seduce young men because they are deficient in yin life force; hence koro.

In some ways, they are similar to the Chinese snake spirits that appear as beautiful young women and seduce men, much like their Western succubae counterparts. The tiger spirit, a.k.a. tiger mother, also is invariably a female spirit that steals young babies to eat; male babies are especially desirable since they are traditionally valued more than girl babies. The snake and tiger spirits are also cunning like their fox spirit sisters.

Either way, these malevolent female spirits represent the unconscious fear Asian men often have of strong Asian women in a predominately patriarchal society. Therefore, it makes sense that a peasant living in rural China might believe these folk tales and be conservative enough to accuse a woman of stealing his penis or masculinity.

According to traditional Chinese medicine, a man’s life force resides in his seed, which is expelled through his penis. This belief is not unlike the passage in the Bible where God chides Onan for spilling his seed upon the ground. One may also recall the passage in Amy Tan’s book “The Joy Luck Club” where the woman who cannot get pregnant is confined to her bed so that her husband’s seed will impregnate her and his yin will not go to waste.

There are some Chinese people who still partake of traditional Chinese remedies that are particularly exotic, such as dried tiger penis. Although officially use of ingredients from exotic animals is illegal, there is a thriving black market trade, thanks to demand, that is met by poachers. The idea is that if a man eats a tiger penis, he will take on the strength and virility of the male tiger; essentially, the tiger’s yin.

When treating koro, it might be beneficial to use traditional Chinese remedies (other than the illegal dried tiger penis). Whether the remedies actually work or the effects are psychosomatic, it matters not so long as the patient believes he will get well because he believes in the remedy.