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appendix D Flower Village Demographics Flower Village was originally established around 1947, across the spur of the hill a short distance from its present location. Its original site is now inhabited by a small group of Mien (Yao) people, northern Thai hill dwellers who are closely related to the Hmong, especially linguistically.1 The majority of villagers (58 percent) moved to Flower Village looking for land; the first inhabitants were members of the Muas clan and came from the border of Laos. According to the Hmong, Flower Village and its environs have particularly fertile land. That 31 percent of the inhabitants live there due to marriage reflects the patrilocal residence rule. Another 1 percent came to the village because they had been ill elsewhere; Hmong who suªer from repeated health problems of any kind will relocate to avoid trouble with a spirit in the original house, or will move to a diªerent house within the same village—a phenomenon I observed twice during my fourteenmonth stay. The shamans say that those whose problems continue after such a move are in danger, perhaps due to the influence of a bad spirit. In such cases, the family usually moves quite a distance away. Over the course of the next decade, other clans moved into the village; 36 percent of the population was born elsewhere. Scholars who have studied the structure of Hmong villages (Cooper 1984:47–55; Geddes 1976:91–93; 270 Tapp 1989a:21–26) have found that in earlier times all of the inhabitants were members of a single clan. In keeping with the rules of clan exogamy and patrilocalresidency,daughters—“otherpeople’swomen”—frequentlymoved farfromtheirnatalvillagewhentheymarried.InFlowerVillagetoday,young women often are able to marry men who live within their natal village, as several diªerent clans are in residence there. Thus, they do not marry into a family of strangers, as frequently happens, and they are able to maintain warm and close relationships with their natal families and their neighbors. The Muas, the original inhabitants of Flower Village, represent the largest clan (41 percent), followed by the Hawj (27 percent), Vwj (16 percent), Yaj (4 percent), Thoj (3 percent), Vaj (1 percent), and miscellaneous other clans (8 percent). In 1988 there are 248 males and 239 females in Flower Village. Over half of the population (52 percent) was under fifteen years of age (see table d.1). There were more male children than female between the ages of two and ten, but this is not a significant gender diªerence. table d.1 Age Distribution in Flower Village, 1988 Age (years) Males (248 total) Females (239 total) 0–1 6.0% 9.2% 2–5 16.9% 13.8% 6–10 16.5% 16.3% 11–15 12.9% 12.5% 16–20 14.1% 11.7% 21–35 18.9% 19.7% 36–50 9.3% 12.1% 51+ 5.2% 4.6% In Western countries, having 50 percent of the population under the age of fifteen would be considered problematic, an economic burden to society , but in Hmong society, young people are an asset because they contribute to production at a very early age. The small elderly population in the village reflects the shorter life span as compared to more developed countries. Flower Village has large households, the size of which is comparable to that reported in other studies on the Hmong (Lee 1981; Tapp 1989a:21). The 271 Flower Village Demographics most common household size was seven to nine people (31 percent), followed by four to six (27 percent), and ten to thirteen (20 percent). Only 14 percent of the households consisted of one to three people, and these were single-generation households—a widowed man living alone, and a widowed woman and her unmarried retarded son. The 8 percent of households with fourteen to sixteen family members were either multigenerational or included many children. The overwhelming majority of Flower Village households had two or more generations (95 percent), and within that number 36 percent contained three generations, and 1 percent contained four. This leaves a high percentage of two-generation nuclear families (58 percent ), which are composed of parents and children. This may reflect the short life span of grandparents, or a change in family structure as children marry and move to their own dwellings (Kunstadter 1984). Most of the nuclear families live next door to one another and are related, so they function as extended families. All of the...

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