Based on anthropological fieldwork in a number of Hmong communities in Laos, the focus of this article is on the Hmong term tu siab, literally "broken liver". This is usually translated as "sadness" in the dictionaries, but the authors say that, although it is certainly the closest thing the Hmong have to a word meaning sadness, it is not the same because:
The instance of becoming ‘sad’ in Western contexts is that ‘something bad happened’... This may involve disappointment in personal relationships, but also other afflictions beyond the social realm. At the core of the emotional experience of ‘sadness’ are basic violations of values deeply embedded in Western conceptions of the individual. The afflicted individual feels resigned, passive, out of control...
In short, the argument is that the Hmong "broken liver" differs from our "sadness" in being an active response rather than a passive reaction, a social statement rather than an individual feeling, in having a moral dimension, and so on.In Hmong language, the concept of ‘broken liver’ has a strong emphasis on kin relations. It pertains very often to social situations of isolation and neglect from one’s kin including consanguines, patrilineal ancestors, or affines or their unmarried daughters in cases of romantic love. Persons with a ‘broken liver’ may have been voluntarily offended, excluded, or separated from these persons by bad fortune...One of the highest Hmong values, a person’s vital social integration, is at stake here. However, a state of ‘broken liver’ is usually far from resignation. Contrary to the assumed passivity of a ‘sad’ individual, a ‘broken liver’ is an affective marker highly mobilising social relations and interdependencies ... having a member in one’s group whose liver is ‘broken’ appeals to the collective commitment of all relatives...[like the English "guilt" and "shame", but unlike "sadness"] ‘broken liver’ demonstrates characteristics of a socio-moral emotion in everyday pragmatics of Laotian Hmong villages. It is typically evoked in a – conscious or unconscious – transgression of an important sociocultural rule. When a man is assumed not to accord to basic principles of social reciprocity by keeping substantial gains from an opium sale for himself, close relatives may develop signs of a ‘broken liver’ signalling their disapproval...
But isn't that much like our "broken heart"?
"Breaking someone's heart" is a moral issue. It's not good to be a heartbreaker. If someone broke your friend's heart, you'd be angry. It's a specifically social emotion in the sense that it generally results from betrayal, abandonment, or disrepect. It's true that while the Hmong's "liverbreak" seems to extend to all close relationships, "heartbreak" often has a romantic connotation; but we do talk about "breaking your mother's or father's heart", so even that's not an absolute rule.
Consider this recently broken heart. Doesn't Tulisa's heartbreak fit the tu siab bill?
If so, then the main difference between Hmong and English terminology is that they only have a concept of 'heartbreak', and lack a general concept of 'sadness'. That's quite interesting, but I'm not sure how much to read into it. English doesn't have a word for 'déjà vu'; we had to borrow it from the French, but surely that doesn't mean that no English people ever felt it until the French explained it to them.
I'm no expert but judging by this paper, Hmong emotion terminology is really very similar to ours. The big difference is that the Hmong (in common with other East Asian cultures) link emotions to the liver, which to Westerners sounds silly, but it's no more silly than our talk about emotions being in the heart. They're both just metaphors.
Replace "liver" with "heart", and the following Hmong terms (listed in the paper) look very familar -
- zoo siab ‘pleased, happy’ (lit. ‘good liver’)
- siab npau ‘angry’ (lit. ‘liver boiling’)
- chob siab ‘inwardly offended’ (lit. ‘pierced liver’) etc.
This is certainly a very interesting paper, but it didn't leave me feeling that the Hmong's emotional life is all that different to ours.
Postert, C., Dannlowski, U., Müller, J., and Konrad, C. (2012). Beyond the Blues: Towards a Cross-Cultural Phenomenology of Depressed Mood Psychopathology, 45 (3), 185-192 DOI: 10.1159/000330944
14 comments:
Isn't this very very old news?
Where do you think the word "love" comes from anyway?
To the first commenter, if you're indicating that the word 'love' comes from 'liver', I'd love to see a reference. I did a quick etymology check and found nothing, so I'd be interested in the source. I did see mention of a Roman physician linking passion to the liver, reason to the brain and emotions to the heart, but surely that can't be it?
Interestingly, the Malay term for liver is 'hati', but when not referring to the actual organ, its use matches the metaphorical use of 'heart' in English (the Malay word for the heart as an organ is actually 'jantung').
So the heart symbol is referred to in Malay as 'hati', but does not trigger any links to the liver (at all), when used in that context.
Oh, and 'hati-hati' would mean 'beware', 'careful' or 'caution'. Not to forget that the general rule (not without exceptions, of course) for pluralisation in Malay is to use a word twice (e.g. 'kucing-kucing' to refer to 'cats').
I went to this online Hmong dictionary:
http://www.hmongdictionary.com/speakhmong.php
It tells me that siab means liver or heart.
English speakers often use the term stomach to refer to either their abdomen or the part of the intestines between esophagus and duodenum.
Neuroskeptic,
"it didn't leave me feeling that the Hmong's emotional life is all that different to ours."
I share that feeling and find it somewhat conforting.
And, since the Hmong's are very poor Big Pharma might let them alone for the time being...
"having a member in one’s group whose liver is ‘broken’ appeals to the collective commitment of all relatives... " might be safer in term of side-effects.
To my mind, this means that social psychiatry is on offer for everyone.
Very humane and civilized of them I would say!
DS,
Well done. It seemed counter-intuitive that the Hmong might not have chosen the organ you can feel pulsating when emotions are very strong- or after you had run your heart out.
French idiomatic vernacular has-still in use but isolated: "to get the livers" (to be scared to death.)
On the contrary of numerous French idiomatic expressions using the heart: "Ils mettent le coeur à toutes les sauces" (they serve it with any kind of gravy)
http://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais-anglais/c%C5%93ur/16819
The liver was thought of as the seat of emotion long before the heart in the West. Have a look at Aristotle.
As far as etymology:
OH German for liver = leber
OH German for love = liebe
You could argue that they're false friends, but that's pushing the bounds of believability.
Mark E - Good point. See also lily-livered (scared, cowardly), and of course 'bile'...
It's not only the Hmong, I've never heard of these people before, ancient egyptians also believed that the place of emotios was the liver. duskhadi
From the teaching I received long ago-and to be checked:
Aristotle like the ancient Egyptians put the mind in the heart.
For his medecine system he was a proponent of holistic medecine more interested in classification and "biology" so to speak than medicine but the black and green and whatever colors of biles of the great Hippocrate- always cited in latin but he thought and worked and wrote in ancient Greek-were not refering to the product of the gall-bladers but sedimentation of the human blood.
Interesting that this study chose to translate "tu siab" as broken + liver ... a more accurate translation of "tu" in this context is to stop the flow of something or sever/cut-off; another common Hmong expression is "Kuv lub siab tu nrho" or my + liver + severed + completely ... in this context "tu" never means broken [consider "puas siab puas ntsws" broken + liver + broken + lungs or "puas hlwb" broken + brain ... "puas" is the correct term for broken when referring to feelings or mental state]. So, the literal translation of "tu siab" is severed/cut-off + liver.
Anonymous: Thanks for the comment. They do mention that issue, in an aside.
Well... from a constructivist point of view it suggests that individuals and societies do create their own common meanings depending on the active/passive role that the individual is in in a specific context. Too prove that one doesnt need to go so far.
You may definitely translate the english "i like it" as "ca me plait" or "es gefaellt mir", but the meaning is totally different. In the former, the agent is active while in the latter two formulations the agent is nearly passive. And we are talking about western societies here!
Do other east asian cultures assign meaning like this to the liver?
There's a similar system in China, not sure about elsewhere.
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