This dissertation is concerned most fundamentally with understanding the various cultural and psychological adaptations that result from migration to different locations. I employ a person-centered ethnographic approach to investigating these patterns in a transnational group of Hmong families that migrated to both Thailand and the United States. Morality and personhood are particularly fertile domains for investigating these psychocultural variations that emerge in different contexts. The methodological design of this project involves a comparative, transnational, and intergenerational framework that provides a unique basis to addressing these questions. I begin by documenting some of the important changes that are occurring in Hmong refugee communities in the diaspora. These include language shift, changing kinship and ritual networks, and the proliferation of several messianic movements that I encountered in my fieldwork. I argue that these changes can be attributed at least in part to the ways in which social dispersion in the Hmong diaspora have disrupted traditional religious practices and dispersed kin-based ritual networks.

I proceed to describe a Hmong cultural model of 'ancestral personhood,' which is a prominent way that Hmong imagine the life course that includes post-mortal existence and regular interactions between living and deceased kin. This model of personhood drives reasoning about the three ethics (autonomy, community, divinity). Through a transnational comparison of parents and children in Hmong refugee families in both Thailand and the United States, I argue that families in both locations manifest similar life-course trajectories in moral development. This trajectory entails a spike in autonomy-oriented thinking in late adolescence, which is partially displaced by ethics of community (and to a lesser extent divinity) in later life. Given the nature of this carefully selected comparative sample, I argue for an interpretation of these data that emphasizes a Hmong-specific life course trajectory in explaining observed generational differences. These trends challenge the predominant social science models of "acculturation" and "assimilation" in important ways. Coupled with my exegesis of ancestral personhood, I ultimately argue for the importance of considering changes in moral thought over the life course and challenging the linear assumptions of some theories of social change in migration scholarship.