Projectland: Life in a Lao Socialist Model Village 9780824888671

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Projectland

New Southeast Asia Politics, Meaning, and Memory Justin McDaniel and Nancy J. Smith-Hefner Series Editors

Projectland Life in a Lao Socialist Model Village

Holly High

University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu

© 2021 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 ​23 ​22 21   6 ​5 ​4 ​3 ​2 ​1

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: High, Holly, author. Title: Projectland : life in a Lao socialist model village / Holly High. Other titles: New Southeast Asia. Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021. | Series: New   Southeast Asia: politics, meaning, and memory | Includes bibliographical   references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021012104 | ISBN 9780824886653 (cloth) | ISBN   9780824888671 (pdf) | ISBN 9780824888732 (epub) | ISBN 9780824888749   (kindle edition) Subjects: LCSH: Socialism and culture—Laos—New Kandon. | Katu (Southeast   Asian people)—Laos—Kandon. | Katu (Southeast Asian people)—Laos—New   Kandon. | New Kandon (Laos)—Politics and government. Classification: LCC HX400.4.K38 H54 2021 | DDC 306.209594—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021012104 Cover art: Detail of Wiphat’s medals. University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-­free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

For Gadsby, Evander, and Ed

Revolution, then, is a project, and it is important to say whose project it is. —Michael Walzer

Contents

Ac­know­ledg­ments   xi Note on Transcription and Personal Names   xv Abbreviations    xix Maps  xxi

1.  Introduction to Projectland  1 2.  Who Are the Katu?   27 3.  Welcome to Kandon, Culture Village   54 4.  Open Defecation Free and Model Healthy Village   73 5.  “Are We United?”   95 6.  “Women’s Preserve”: Weaving and Women’s Value   121 7.  “My Children Have Eaten Only Tears”: Family Dramas in Kandon  142 8.  “You Will Reach the Katu”   165 9.  Conclusion: The Problem with Projects   191 Notes  203 Works Cited   217 Index  231

Acknowledgments

I first visited New Kandon village in 2009 as part of a prefieldwork scoping trip funded by a Faculty of Arts Research Scheme grant from the University of Sydney. In 2011, I was granted fieldwork permission from the government of Laos (via the National University of Laos) for a research project in the village. I made my first trip there as an official researcher in September 2011, funded in part by the Evans Fund, Department (now Division) of Anthropology, University of Cambridge and accompanied (for the first night in the village) by the very capable and talented Champathong Phochantilath. In 2012, I was awarded an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award (DE120100503). This enabled my presence in Kandon again in February 2012, and then for three months, from September to November, the same year. In 2013, I spent February and March there, as well as July and September; the July and September fieldtrips were made when I was pregnant with my first child. During the July 2013 trip, a bout of Salmonella poisoning resulted in my emergency evacuation (my first ever since working in Laos), cutting short the first of these two trips. The pregnancy was unharmed, but on the next trip I took my husband as an extra precaution. His job was to procure and prepare my food so I wouldn’t get sick again. His assistance allowed me to fully focus on my work. While my husband’s presence was graciously accepted by our hosts, the village committee informed us on departure that if I ever wanted to bring an assistant to the village again, I would need to obtain full permission from the central, provincial, and district levels, just as I had done for my own access. Knowing the time involved for this sort of request, I realized that, for practical reasons, I would not be able to return to Kandon again during my pregnancy. Furthermore, having been through the Salmonella event, I was now more cautious about the health implications of taking an infant into the field. Given these circumstances, it seemed likely that my fieldwork would be arrested for a couple of years at least. In this space of great uncertainty about when or even if I would be able to return to Kandon, and acutely aware that I had not “finished” my fieldwork, I began writing this book. I presented the first sample of this work, now part

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of chapter 3, at the Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre (TAEC) at Luang Prabang in 2012. My thanks to the staff there that made me so welcome, connected me to other Katu specialists, and helped me think through some early ideas. I presented chapters 3 and 4 at the Australian National University Anthropology Seminar, in 2015 and 2018. My thanks go to the hosts and participants for this important sustenance during this long project. I presented a very early version of chapter 5 at the Macquarie University Anthropology Seminar series, chapter 6 to a symposium organized by the Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis, and chapter 7 to the Sydney Institute for Psychoanalysis, all in 2013. A much shorter version of chapter 8 was presented at the Australian Anthropology Society meeting in 2015. All of these were important and stimulating occasions for me, challenging me to find what it was that I had been trying to say, while also making me acutely aware of just how far I still had to go. Gillian Cowlishaw, Mark Treddenick, Kai Åhrem, and Chris Gregory read the first draft of the book in full in 2017 and made detailed and thoughtful comments: it was, at that stage, a case of “tough love,” and I am grateful that they were able to speak so frankly about the manuscripts’ flaws and how much work it still needed, as well as encouraging me. Pierre Petit, Vianne Tourle, and John Boulton read the second draft, and Simon Creak read the first couple of chapters, in 2018. Ed Annand, a glass of red wine in one hand and feet up on our yellow sofa, listened to this entire manuscript as I read it aloud. I am immensely grateful to all of these readers (and one listener) for putting wind in my sails when I needed it most and pointing out when I’d drifted off course. Much of what is best about this book as it stands now came about after thinking about conversations with these people for months afterward. In 2017, I was awarded a Brown Fellowship at the University of Sydney, an award designed to support research that has been interrupted by caring duties. This was an unexpected boon and gave me the time I needed in 2018 to complete my field research for this project. My Australian Research Council fieldwork funds were still available to fund the fieldwork costs, and my research ethics approval was still valid. Adding to the good news, the government of Laos approved my request to return to Kandon with my family and a carer for the children. I spent November 2017 and then July and September 2018 in Laos largely arranging field permission letters, appropriate paperwork, and village accommodation. Again, it was the Faculty of Social Sciences at the National University of Laos who supported me by facilitating research permissions. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the excellent work of Simonekeo Senesathith, Sisouvong Vilaithieng, and Salika Onsy. Kung, of the wonderful

Acknowledgments : xiii

Kham­phouxay clan, adventurously came with me to Kandon to look after Evander when I took him to the field in November 2017. In October, November, and December 2018, I lived in Kandon with my two sons and husband. In the village again at last, I was able to discuss the main content of this book, tie up many lingering questions, and see how the issues I had first noticed in 2009 had developed over the space of a decade. It was an enormously fruitful and satisfying period that I could not have completed without “Team Kandon”: Buoy, Wet, Chitnakhone, and Wiphat. My writing and fieldwork required a “home front” too: my deepest thanks to Mary and Peter Annand, Vianne Tourle, Hannah Coe, Louise Brown, Softly Dunstan, and Darren Price, and all the others whose acts of kindness, big and small, has kept our family flourishing. It was a delight to work with University of Hawai‘i Press in bringing this manuscript to print. Justin McDaniel gave me excellent advice when it was most needed. Masako Ikeda shared my enthusiasm for the manuscript. Two anonymous reviewers gave the manuscript careful attention, and I am grateful for their time, expertise, and encouragement. Grace Wen and Ivo Fravashi gave careful editorial support to the manuscript under the difficult circumstances of 2020. Olivier Rey Lescure of Cartolab Services spent hours with me perfecting the maps. Anne Jackson prepared my images for print. I had a large quantity of images (more than eighty images in the draft of the manuscript that went for review), but I was able to include only a fraction of these here. The remainder can be found at www.hollyhigh.net, with thanks again to Anne Jackson for preparing the images for the website, doing the legwork to get it up and running, and teaching me the ropes. Ed Annand accompanied me to Kandon twice, charming everyone even though he spoke no Lao or Kantu. When I left Kandon for good in 2018, Chitnakhone let me know that, though people had liked me for my cay yen (L: cool heart), they loved Ed more, even though he is cay hoon (L: hot heart). Ed adopted all kinds of superhuman contortions in the name of finding a way to let me complete this book. Thank you, Ed. Thanks, too, to the intrepid Gadsby and Evander Annand. It has moved me to watch you, at such a young age, experience one of the strange truths of anthropological fieldwork: while it is hard, sometimes lonely, and full of strange and strong emotions, somehow it always leaves you wanting to go back. Picton, 2019

Note on Transcription and Personal Names

Lao words are written in italics according to the modification of Allen Kerr (1972) that I have used elsewhere (see High 2014) and indicated by the abbreviation “L.” Kantu words are written in italics and according to the conventions used by Paul Sidwell (2005) where possible and, where this is not possible, approximating the transcription I have used for Lao words. Kantu words are indicated by the abbreviation “K.” Proper nouns follow conventional spellings in English, even when this differs from the transcription system outlined above. I have changed the names of some localities and people to protect the identity of informants, especially when the material discussed was sensitive. However, it was not possible to disguise the true identity of the village that is the subject of the bulk of this study. The village under discussion here is unique in Laos, and some excellent article-length contributions have already been made to its ethnography by Futoshi Nishimoto (Nishimoto 2010a, 2010b, 2011; and Shimizu and Nishimoto 2008) and Yves Goudineau (2000). This raised a particular ethical question for me: how could I balance my objective of writing as true and accurate an account as possible with the interests of my informants? Anonymization is valuable to the degree to which it protects informants’ privacy and reputations while allowing the researcher to make contributions to knowledge. However, because I could not anonymize the village, I also could not anonymize some of the residents. One of my most important informants was and is Wiphat Sengmany. He is such a strong personality he would be instantly recognizable to anyone who had visited this village even if I changed his name in the text. Furthermore, the periods and locations of my fieldwork were approved and known perfectly well by the Lao government (research permission was arranged through the National University of Laos via the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), so there was no way the location of my research would ever be “anonymous” in that sense. People at my previous field site said that, years after I left, representatives of the state and World Bank had come asking about a Poverty Reduction Fund project I had documented there even though I anonymized those publications (High 2009, 2014). After all, there are not many villages in

xv

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Laos that have had an anthropologist live with them for over a year: if you want to know where an anthropologist’s study happened, all you need to do is ask local authorities. I know from experience, then, that anonymizing one’s research is not a guaranteed means of protecting one’s informants. Anonymization is also not an ethical end in and of itself. It is one possible tool that can be used in data storage and writing up, and the overarching end aimed at is that of “beneficence”: that is, the value of the research must outweigh costs, including costs to participants (NHMRC 2007). Wiphat Sengmany invested significant time in this project by explaining the village history and cultural distinctiveness, along with his own personal story. When I raised the question of anonymizing the text with him, he was very disturbed. He said that it was important to him that my study record details correctly. He saw anonymization as a form of deliberately introducing errors into the text as well as detracting from his personal investment in its accuracy. As will become apparent in the following chapters, his work with me was just one part of his larger effort at cultivating the image of this village as exceptional. He was dismayed that I might turn this extraordinary story into a generic one of some village somewhere in Laos. I warned him that I was considering anonymization because I would write about everything I saw, not only the positive things. He vehemently agreed that accuracy should be my aim: not a one-sided account, not an anonymized account, but an account as true and accurate as I could manage. If phrased in terms of the principles I identified above, he was asserting that the principle of contributing to knowledge was more important than the principle of protecting the privacy of informants, even his own. The problem is that truths can be hurtful. The village I will discuss, Kandon, has a dark side: there are entrenched cases of domestic violence, selfdestructive alcoholism, and drug abuse. Some of these problems affected Wiphat directly. Locally, this is all common knowledge, but I may well be the first to write about it in a public forum. When I experimented with writing these darker events and situations as if they involved anonymous people in an anonymous place, I found that it had the effect of making these appear to be generalized problems—possibly to do with ethnic minorities in general—when in fact in the cases I knew best these were problems connected to the particular and often identifying characteristics, history, and social relationships of individuals and groups. Anonymizing had the effect of pathologizing the entire ethnicity, even all ethnic minorities in general, whereas the point I wished to make was about the importance of circumstances. While I have endeavored to consider various people’s preferences about representation where I can—including Wiphat’s preference that I be as honest

Transcriptions and Names : xvii

and accurate as possible—writing what others wish me to write was never a core aim of this book. I am solely responsible for the content of the chapters that follow. I have made the decisions about what to include and how to represent it. I have settled on a mixed model: the names of the village and some people appear as they really are. The exceptions occur where I judged that the content might be harmful or embarrassing to an informant and changing the names would effectively protect their identities while not significantly damaging the meaning of the story.

Abbreviations

CLTS DRV HRCSP Lao PDR LPRP MoH NGO ODF WHO WSP

community-led total sanitation Democratic Republic of Vietnam Historical Research Committee of Sekong Province Lao People’s Democratic Republic Lao People’s Revolutionary Party Ministry of Health nongovernmental organization open defecation free World Health Organization Water and Sanitation Program

xix

Maps

Map 1. Laos, showing Sekong Province. Source: Cartolab Services.

Map 2. New Kandon, Old Kandon, and some of the other villages visited by the author in the region of Old Kandon. Source: Cartolab Services.

1 Introduction to Projectland

The Sekong River flooded in September 2009. Homes were washed away. A landslide lay across the slim line of road we had been following up into the Annamite Ranges. The windshield wipers on our four-wheel drive could not keep pace with the pelting rain. The wheels slipped and threatened to stick in the mud. That red mud stuck to everything. It sucked in shoes, stained clothes, and left tracks across the floor of the Sekong Museum, where we finally retreated from our attempt to go east into the mountains. I was looking for a new field site. My previous study had been of a single ethnic Lao village long established on an island in the slow and graceful flows of the Mekong. That area had seen a faltering armed resistance to the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP) that petered out just before my arrival, and what I witnessed was a resignation to the rule of the single Party-state. In this space of disgruntled submission, what struck me was the proliferation of hope: for personal transformation, consumer products, jobs, experiences, and comforts. Surprisingly, many people who expressed distrust of the state nevertheless also aspired for their children to complete their state schooling and ideally get a government job at the end of it. My study of poverty ended up being a study of desire (High 2014). I wanted to know now what things in Laos looked like from another political, cultural, and geographical perspective. In September 2009, I’d been in my previous field site—that island in the Mekong River—on a rushed visit to mourn the sudden death of my adopted sister there with her family. It was rushed because I’d come in the middle of a teaching semester. I was in a tangle of grief and guilt, wanting to be there but also knowing I had to leave, and that I wanted to leave, and feeling even guiltier about that. At the end of my visit, I invited my dead friend’s daughter, Khancay, on an adventure. We’d hire a car and go to the uplands to the east, scouting for my new field site. There was something crazy in the idea. I wanted to get away,

1

2 : Chapter 1

and to get Khancay away, even if it was only for a little while. My adopted Lao mother begged us not to go. She had already told me scandalized stories about the highlanders, things she remembered from her days running a coffee plantation in the Bolaven Plateau when the men in loincloths would come begging for work and food, and would sleep on the floor around her kitchen hearth. Thick grey clouds drove in from the east over the mountains, but we drove into them anyway. Out the window the colors of banana trees, coffee farms, papaya, and wet rice fields were saturated by sunlight filtered by clouds. Occasionally there was a eucalyptus looking pallid and out of place. To the right were mountains: glimpses of Sekong Province, the driver told me. Once we got past Salavan, the rice fields were fewer and dotted with trees, then lapsed again into forest. No bridges now: we had to ford streams and the roads were unsealed. We stopped. An old man with wooden plugs in each earlobe begged for money. Flocks of children came to stare. A young man offered to sell a mysterious fluffy creature in a cage and a long snake coiled in a plastic bag. They said we wouldn’t get any further along this road. We turned back, heading this time through Sekong township and toward the mountains. But the Sekong River was engorged, unbridged, and the unsealed roads leading beyond were impossible to travel. As it turned out, the unfolding disaster around us was the landing of Typhoon Ketsana in Laos. When it slammed into the Annamite Ranges, the mountain streams swelled suddenly then bloated the river. Perhaps if the sudden death of my adopted sister had not driven my trip—in its timing and emotional weight—things would have turned out differently. Perhaps I would have come in the dry season, at a more measured pace, and made it to the mountains. But then I might not have met Wiphat. As it was, Khancay and I abandoned our adventure and returned to Sekong township. That is how we found ourselves at the Sekong Museum. The museum is an ornate, white-and-gold two-story building in a grassy field near the center of Sekong township. We followed a trail of muddy footprints up the stairs of the tiled entranceway. Inside the oversized entry hall were nothing but more footprints and two closed doors. A third door was open. Beyond it, people were clustered around a giant map on the floor and cutting cardboard. They explained that the museum was not yet officially operating and they were still setting up the displays, but we were welcome anyway. Jumbled remnants from the war, handicrafts, herbal medicines, old tools, coffee beans, musical instruments, and arrows lay on wooden tables. Masses of photographs were pinned on colorful noticeboards. These featured seem-

Introduction to Projectland : 3

Figure 1.1. The display under construction in Sekong Museum, 2009.

ingly endless photos of official-looking meetings and award ceremonies. Among these were panels dedicated to culture. There were pictures of carved caskets and something called a ho whathanathum (L: palace of culture) that featured carved buffalo motifs. The labels on the photographs explained that these striking examples came from one village: Kandon. The staff happily explained that Kandon was very accessible, even in this extreme weather, and one staff member offered to come with us to visit this “Culture Village.” I felt like the alien in the cartoon demanding “Take me to your leader,” except I was an anthropologist demanding “Take me to your culture.” On the sealed road that led out from Sekong toward the Bolaven Plateau, our guide from the museum said that this entire stretch was inhabited now by ethnic Katu people who had been resettled to this plateau area in the past two decades from the rugged mountains to the east. When schools let out at 11 a.m., we passed fleets of children in white shirts on bicycles or walking hand in hand. Above them, electricity lines ran trailing verdant vines. Wagons hitched to tok toks (L: tractors used in rice fields and for transport) chugged by loaded with people and produce. Buses veered madly around them, horns beeping. Staked cows and buffalo found what feed they could on the slim line between the road and the fenced fields. Behind the fences were smallholder

4 : Chapter 1

plantations of teak, Burmese ebony, struggling mulberry trees, and silk worm sheds, all punctuated by clumps of giant bamboo and coconut palms. A dirt road forked off from the main conduit, bumping between some houses before settling in between the terraced rice fields and their ripening, waterlogged crops. On our right, beyond the rice fields, rose the silent march of rubber trees. On our left, sloping fields with plots of corn and rice, many with a small bamboo field hut. And behind them, forested foothills and mountains in scraps of mist. Eventually, a cluster of signs on either side of the road at the edge of the residential area announced some of the various certifications Kandon has achieved: “Women’s Three Goods Village,” “Development Village,” and “Open Defecation Free and Model Healthy Village.” The road became the village’s main street, flanked by mostly Lao-style houses raised on stilts with corrugated iron roofing, although some had the thatch roofing and carved lintels of traditional Kantu homes. Most had a carved post—a sacrifice stake— prominently out front. The road terminated at a village plaza, a wide area of orange earth beaten flat, the central feature of which was a traditional Kantu communal hall constructed from carved wood and thatch. The museum staffer directed the driver to pull up at a Lao-style house on the main street. Wiphat came out to greet us. He was very lean but energetic. Deep grooves ran from his nose to his mouth, and his voice was slightly hoarse—clues to his being middle-aged—but his hair was thick and black. It took me years to put my finger on who he reminded me of: Mick Jagger. Something about him—his entertaining, ready-to-please, personable manner; his quick, alert intelligence; his stories—caught all of our attention. Wiphat asked us upstairs to share a shot of rice whiskey. He regaled us with stories about the bad old days when he and his covillagers had lived four days’ walk to the east. It was all malaria, measles, carrying the sick on his shoulders over the steep mountains to medical care, and always, always being short of rice to eat. Here in the resettlement village, by contrast, there are a primary school, adult literacy programs, wet rice fields, and work on the rubber plantation, and the coffee fields of Paksong are not too far off. He told me that the village had a proud revolutionary past and was home to many Lao People’s Revolutionary Army veterans (including he himself), some of whom are now receiving pensions. Wiphat told me, too, that in 2001, five years after the first resettlement, eighty-seven people had decamped back to the old site to the east. I asked him why and he claimed not to know: “Bo cak nam khaw” (L: I don’t know what they were thinking), he said dismissively. He took us on a swift tour of the village. His first stop was the ceremonial

Introduction to Projectland : 5

Figure 1.2. The cinaar (K: ceremonial hall) in New Kandon, 2011.

hall. Inside front and center were carvings of Grandmother Mek and Grandfather Dog, the ancestral couple. Around them were carvings of figures playing traditional instruments, carrying rocket launchers, and, in one case, wearing a suit and tie. This last image, Wiphat explained, was of the government. There were also carvings of toucans, monkeys, turtledoves, pangolins, and lively images of a dog catching a lizard. The solemn faces carved at the bottom of the supporting columns, bearing the heavy weight of the roof, were the ancestors: once thinking of traditions, they were now thinking about development, Wiphat said. Later, a man named Malo told me that the columns on their heads were carved to look like intertwined sprouts. The ancestors’ thoughts were twining together like the lives of the villagers, who—in the old days—had such unity and solidarity that they married only within the village and never moved away. Wiphat showed us to a waterfall at the town’s edge and some elaborately carved coffins under a granary. When I asked about the ho whathanatham (L: palace of culture) that I’d seen photographed at the museum, Wiphat apologized, saying that the keys were lost. Our tour was at an end. We were clearly not the first to receive Wiphat’s introduction to Kandon, but he delivered it with tremendous energy. His spiel was an intrinsically interesting story, and what piqued my interest even more was that his account suggested a point-for-point contrast with my previous field site: here was an ethnic-minority, non-Buddhist, resettled village that had been on the winning side of the war. And what anthropologist could resist a locked palace of culture? Perhaps I’d find the keys!

6 : Chapter 1

But it was his comment about the returnees—“bo cak nam khaw”—that truly hooked me. I saw that I would be able to find in this community both people who strongly desired resettlement (as Wiphat’s main story claimed) and those who did not. I conceived of a research project in which I would base myself in New Kandon and from there establish links to Old Kandon that was now home to the group that had moved back there in 2001. I got my chance to learn more about Old Kandon in February 2012. By then I was a regular guest at Wiphat’s house in New Kandon. One of the people who had decamped back to Old Kandon came to visit Wiphat. Canphon is a tall, thin (even gaunt) man in his sixties with a shock of black hair above a high forehead. His eyebrows slant over soft eyes so that his face has a sad look to it. His movements have a quiet care and dignity. Canphon’s only wife is the sister of Wiphat’s third wife. Wiphat used the Lao word aye (L: older brother) to describe his relationship with Canphon, but the Kantu term, ayass, is more specific. It indicates the spouse of one’s spouse’s brother or sister. Given that a man often marries the sister of his wife,1 the relationship between these two men was one of equivalence, even interchangeability: an “it could have been me” relationship. Wiphat was not dismissive now but solicitous, taking care to welcome his guest. The two shared a pipe upstairs in Wiphat’s house, sitting on the woven plastic mats that Wiphat’s daughter-in-law had spread out for us. I asked Canphon directly then about his motives for returning to Old Kandon. He wove a convincing story: in New Kandon one of his children got involved in drugs and ran up debts at the local stores, promising payment later from the household rice crop. When the crop came in it was all owed to others, and the family had nothing to eat. His son ended up stealing family possessions to pay for his debts. “Poor there, poor here,” said Canphon, and he invited me to go and see Old Kandon for myself. In October that year, I took up that invitation, hiking to Old Kandon with Wiphat and some others. Old Kandon is spectacular, perched high on a rocky mountain under a giant fig tree said to be planted by village founders in a time out of mind. When I spoke with him there, Canphon stuck by his story about that troublesome son, whom he said had come good once they returned to Old Kandon, but now he added a new layer of explanation for his son’s behavior. This and many other misfortunes had been caused by kinuh, the presence animating the territory where the old village was located. This presence manifested in a stone just outside the village. It was a large stone, very much like the many stones that dot this mountain peak. The part of the stone that emerged from the soil was grown over with climbers, roots, and moss.

Introduction to Projectland : 7

Figure 1.3. The fig tree at the head of Old Kandon, 2012.

The presence animating the stone cared about the residents of Kandon and policed even their most intimate behaviors. It didn’t accept the residents’ resettlement, so it caused sickness, death, and social decay in New Kandon, including that which had plagued Canphon’s family. Since Canphon’s group had returned, kinuh has stopped these attacks and now even ensures the prosperity in New Kandon. While people live in Old Kandon under the shade of the old fig tree, Canphon explained, the people there and also those in New Kandon would be protected under the shade of kinuh. While Kandon might be spread over two locations now several days’ travel apart, both Canphon and Wiphat assured me, it was still “really one village.” Wiphat and Canphon both told stories that introduced their village to me, an outsider, as a truly amazing place. Canphon’s story focused on the relationship between the village and the presence of the stone, which he said granted the village all kinds of extraordinary powers. Wiphat’s version focused on the successful transformation from a village of poverty, superstition, and backwardness into one of progressive modernity. Wiphat’s story presented the village as living proof that the Lao People’s Democratic Republic’s socialist dreams of total social and cultural transformation were possible to realize. His are the kind of representations that are repeated in the official promotion of New Kandon, such as the Sekong Museum display, while Canphon’s depiction found no traction in official accounts.

8 : Chapter 1

This book is about Kandon’s success. New Kandon is a Lao socialist model village. It is used as a living example of the best-case scenario of the good life available at a village level in Laos, provided one follows the policies and projects of the Lao state. In my first book, Fields of Desire, I examined everyday politics in a politically marginal and materially disadvantaged ethnic Lao village. I asked, why, even when poverty reduction projects fail, do bureaucrats and everyday people keep returning with renewed interest to poverty reduction projects? My answer was desire, which I theorized as a serious social science conceptualization of the sometimes inchoate motivations that arise from lack. Kandon presented me with a related but different scenario: this was not a marginal or deprived village but a relatively well-serviced local hub, and the leitmotif here was not failure but success. Studying success—how it was framed, achieved, and maintained—promised to reveal a different side of Lao rural politics, specifically, what it is to embody a political ideal. Yet, as with my earlier study, it was also apparent from my earliest conversation with Wiphat that the people of Kandon articulated themselves in relation to desire. Close analysis of personal dramas revealed that people in Kandon often identified acting on unmoderated desire as a cause of severe illness and even death. People habitually denied that they had acted on their own desires, or even that they had any, even when others gleefully gossiped about them in terms that suggested the direct opposite. And when people denied that desire was the cause of their actions, they tended to point instead to “necessity.” Success and necessity are the two poles of this book, just as they are the two poles that I heard in the metalanguage evaluating daily dramas in Kandon. A metalanguage is a vocabulary, shared with others, that can be used to describe and appraise events. It allows a person to account for themselves to others from a shared vantage (Keane 2003, 231). All metalanguages are ideological and reach into evaluations of self and other as moral persons (Moore 2009). It is from listening for this kind of metalanguage that the core concepts of success and necessity caught my attention. But before going further into how these concepts were framed and deployed in Kandon, it is important to explain an important part of the context in which these elements of metalanguage were spoken: Lao socialism.

Pushing Lao Studies Past the Posts A core argument of this book is that Laos is a socialist country. My position is that there is such a thing as Lao socialism, and that it needs to be un-

Introduction to Projectland : 9

derstood on its own terms, as it is actually lived, discussed, and deployed in that country. In doing so, I am arguing against two tendencies evident in English-language writing about Laos: to hold that either Lao socialism is not a current issue because Laos is already postsocialist, or that Lao socialism is not “real” socialism because it is not the same as socialism elsewhere. I shall deal with each of these in turn. In an influential formulation, Grant Evans wrote that Laos was “postsocialist” because while the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party continued in power, “ ‘socialism’ no longer represents an economic program, or a program of social and cultural transformation” (Evans 1998, 2). This statement was published in the heyday of “postsocialist studies” that arose in the wake of the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1989. Many researchers studying Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia turned their attention to the social and cultural dynamics of “transition.” Evans’ formulation that Laos, too, was also a postsocialist country effectively joined Lao studies to this much wider discussion in anthropology and cultural studies that was taking up themes such as nostalgia, concepts of modernity, and authoritarian power (e.g., Hann 2002). Yet Lao policymakers have never declared a postsocialist agenda. There has been no moment in Laos comparable to the Soviet Union’s perestroika or Vietnam’s Doi Moi.2 Instead, actual policies up to the current-day display an ongoing attempt by the LPRP and the state to extend control over the economy using a range of approaches, including market mechanisms, but also more classic socialist approaches. For instance, Grant Evans himself used the collectivization of agriculture in the 1970s and early 1980s as a key example of zealous Lao socialism in which “the communists in Laos [began] the process of economic development from scratch” (1988; see also 1990). Evans describes the collectivization effort as chaotic and short-lived, only superficially overlaid across the bedrock of the peasant economy, and an effort that quickly ceded to “market-socialism” and then “postsocialism” by the late 1990s. Yet between 2009 and in 2010 the government of Laos passed a series of laws and decrees on cooperatives—using the same word, sahakoon, that had been used to describe agricultural collectives in the 1970s and early 1980s—and in 2013 a Department of Agricultural Extension and Cooperatives was established in the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (Castella and Bounthanom 2014, 186). I do not mean to suggest that these new instances of sahakoon are replicas of the earlier naa sahakoon (L: agricultural collectives), but I do want to acknowledge the continued and abiding interest from the government of Laos in collectives as foundational to the agrarian economy. Norihiko Yamada says simply, “Socialism has always provided the LPRP regime with its most fundamental

10 : Chapter 1

source of political legitimacy. By abandoning socialist ideology, the party would itself lose legitimacy. Nevertheless, the LPRP has constantly had to adapt its interpretation of socialist ideology to the prevailing socio-economic conditions” (2018, 718). This adaptation is central to my second argument, against Eurocentric or other ethnocentric views that claim Lao socialism is not “real” socialism because it does not match up with images from elsewhere of what socialism could and should be. The socialism that has taken root and developed in Laos was always already an amalgam: from the 1940s, the Indochinese Communist Party and then the Viet Minh introduced goals, techniques, and metalanguage to Laos that combined Marxist-Leninism, Confucianism, and nationalism. The adaptations and amalgams have continued. It is for this reason that I reject the notion that the existence of market mechanisms in Laos itself and alone renders Laos postsocialist. To such an argument, I also counter that Lao socialism was never a purely economic platform to begin with. Lao socialism also includes values, ideals, aesthetics, moral positions, and symbolic meanings.3 These are condensed in a metalanguage that has been installed among “the masses”—most notably through the Pathet Lao’s groundbreaking literacy campaigns—and has formed an important part of that country’s lingua franca up until the current day (Creak 2018). Another problem with taking “postsocialism” as a rubric for Lao studies is that it is part of a wider tendency to discuss socialism mainly in the past tense and in terms of failure. Michał Murawski argues that failure-centrism in discussions of socialism is heavily inflected by Cold War ideology: this way of presenting socialism seems to suggest that socialism was bound to fail from its beginning, as it was based on an erroneous, even perverted, view of human nature (2018, 909). Socialist regimes, architecture, and ideals are all depicted in this genre as crumbled or crumbling. This Cold War triumphalist tone is evident in much foreign-language writing about Laos, most of which insists on describing socialism there in the past tense, as “post.” The following chapters instead examine socialism in Laos as a live political culture and a politics of culture. As a political culture, socialism has shaped the language and morality through which claims to legitimacy, resources, and fact are articulated. As a politics of culture, socialism is alive in contemporary cultural policies and the spaces people find for cultural expression. The photo collage I saw at the Sekong Museum in 2009 is an example of the liveliness of Lao socialist aesthetics. Vladislav Todorov identifies the photographic collage as an art form symptomatic of Soviet aesthetics and suggests that collages as a political art form are a metaphor for “the political surgery of

Introduction to Projectland : 11

Figure 1.4. Detail of one of the photo collages in Sekong Museum, 2009.

Modernism”: the snapshot of the camera pinches in vision, producing a cut-off view that is then rescued from meaninglessness by gluing it together with other images (Todorov 1991, 369). In the collage and in the socialist collective, social bodies, broken off from their former contexts, find meaning when joined in new, massed groupings. The aesthetic is that of the mass created from a series of innumerable snaps. The collage of photographs in the Sekong Museum also shows the ongoing importance of emulation in Lao political culture. Kandon was included in the display as a certified model village and a “culture village.” Certifications and rewards for model individuals and groups who embodied core values were an important part of the emulation campaigns implemented by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam from the 1948 onward, inspired by Confucian notions of duty and emulatory learning (Lentz 2019, 107–108, 156), as well as lessons learned by Bejing and Moscow on mass mobilization (Goscha 2012, 146). The Culture Village certification program, along with the numerous other similar schemes currently underway in Laos (some of which are examined in chapters 3 and 4), can be understood as a continuation of this long-running influence in Laos of Vietnamese revolutionary techniques for transforming reluctant peasants into agents of social transformation. Some photos in the collage showed the certification ceremony itself.

12 : Chapter 1

Village leaders from Kandon stood side by side with district, provincial, and Vientiane bureaucrats and cadre in some photos. Other photos showed villagers performing “traditional” dances and music. Others depicted government meetings, speeches, and official events. This massing of images suggested by visual association that New Kandon was a success to the degree to which the village had carried out the Party-state’s guidance in a way that had been endorsed by the Party-state. That is to say, the collages provided a visual sense of Lao political vanguardism. Ho Chi Minh followed Vladimir Lenin in arguing for an “elite vanguard party” (Marr 1984: 375). A small core of Party members assumed the burden of intellectual leadership for the wider revolution. This influenced Indochinese Communist Party and Viet Minh mobilizations. For instance, early “rectification” drives in Vietnam “corrected, improved, and above-all homogenized thinking along party lines” (Goshca 2012, 150). The main goal of rectification sessions was to bring about an “epiphany” and “an awakening to the ‘mass line’ ” (Goshca 2012, 150). In 1952, rectification campaigns were extended from Vietnam into Laos. These rectification programs were based on two important ideas that are still current in Laos today: first, that socialism is a moral project, about how to become a certain kind of person, and second, that the values instilled in that transformation are provided by the vanguard. Vanguardism is written into the current Lao constitution. The 1991 constitution stipulates that state agencies will operate according to the principle of “democratic centralism.” This is a Marxist-Leninist principle whereby open discussion is encouraged in deliberations, but the minority must recognize the decision of the majority, and lower levels must follow decisions made at higher levels (Brown and Zasloff 1994, 225). The constitution also enshrined the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party as the country’s “leading nucleus” (Lao PDR 1991, article 3). To this day, the LPRP is the only political party in Laos (referred to simply as “the Party” or the “Party-state”). As described in Party documents, it is “the leading core of the entire political system, hub of intelligence, [and] . . . formulates and revises the major lines and policies on national development in all spheres” (quoted by Brown and Zasloff 1994, 206). The political vanguard drives the metalanguage of Lao politics. It is significant that the metalanguage of contemporary Lao politics is a socialist one. This metalanguage was instilled in the wider population through literacy campaigns, education, and strict control of the media.4 Vanguardism has produced a scenario observable in everyday village life, whereby one’s fluency in the state’s metalanguage, and in its socialist concepts and meanings, is an index of one’s political prowess.

Introduction to Projectland : 13

Michael Walzer (1980) argues that a revolution led by an intellectual vanguard will tend toward producing a doctrine that differentiates people according to their access to and proficiency with that doctrine. Joining such a revolution is an educative transformation: it involves acquiring fluency in certain concepts. Displaying competence with doctrine becomes crucial in any bid for political influence. Among lower-ranking revolutionaries such as Wiphat, speaking in the idiom Lao Party-state thidsadii (L: doctrine) is a sign of political savvy and know-how. Wiphat quoted thidsadii when he told me his village history. He placed his own decisions about leading the village in the context of various policy directions, including the 1991 constitution. He not only spouted thidsadii, he also seemed to embody it. His energetic open-mindedness can be understood as a manifestation of the kind of personality promoted in Sekong among the highlanders by the revolutionaries from the 1950s onward (see chapter 2). Wiphat put himself forward as someone who was eloquent in the language of the Party-state, one who follows its guidance, and who is also (therefore) quick-witted, able, and proactive. This brings me to my final observation about the collage at the Sekong Museum: it was arranged according to an aesthetic of projects. This is an aesthetic of white four-wheel drives, meetings at long tables, other meetings in dusty villages, people posing in front of newly erected signs, opening ceremonies, and men (for it is mostly men) in office wear. Walzer observed that “revolution . . . is a project, and it is important to say whose project it is” (1980, 203). He noted that most activist and academic writing about revolutions tends to be about how to get a revolution started. By contrast, “there has been less interest, surprisingly little, in outcomes” (201).5 But outcomes are crucial: a vanguard revolution, he warned, results in an elite that jealously holds on to dictatorial power through terror (210). Understanding Lao socialism as an ongoing outcome of a vanguard project helps to explain some of the most striking characteristics of the Lao state, such as its frequent recourse to “secrecy, falsification and denial” (Baird 2018). Walzer reserved the term “revolution” for “conscious attempts to establish a new moral and material world and to impose, or evoke, radically new patterns of day-to-day conduct” (1980, 202), and noted that there have been relatively few genuine examples of revolution. The Lao case provides one such example. As an attempt to impose “radically new patterns of day-to-day conduct” the Lao revolution has been a remarkable success, at least in New Kandon. Indeed, one of the revolution’s major successes has been the degree to which it has occupied the definition of success itself. In his village tour, Wiphat presented himself and his village as a success

14 : Chapter 1

using the metalanguage of the Lao revolution. The successes of the village include early and heroic support of the revolutionary movement and outstanding contributions to Laos’ “struggle with foreign aggressors” (that is, the First and Second Indochina Wars); the subsequent successful consolidation of villagers who had been scattered by the war into a single village, and the resettlement of that village from the remote mountains to a fertile and well-connected plateau area; and the attainment of numerous certifications, including being Sekong’s first “Culture Village” and the nation’s first “Open Defecation Free and Healthy Model Village.” Chapters 2, 3, and 4 look in depth at recognition of the village as a success. The subsequent chapters describe the limits of “success” as a way of understanding lives lived in Kandon. During my time in Kandon, I observed that the concept of success often found its limit, or perhaps its countervalue, in the concept of necessity. For instance, when Wiphat shared his story of the village’s successful transformation from mountain savagery to prosperous plateau, he usually emphasized that the village—at his behest and in line with Party-state policy—had “thrown out 80 percent of their traditions.” But he would always go on to explain that “the 20 percent that remain are the part that can’t be thrown out because our lives depend on them.” They are, he would say, cam pen (L: a necessity). Necessity is also the key theme of Canphon’s story. His story did not present his return to Old Kandon as being in opposition to the government’s resettlement scheme. Actually, he seemed very keen to impress upon me that his return to Old Kandon was endorsed by the state (Wiphat later poured scorn on this claim, as I discuss in chapter 2). When Canphon posed for a photo for me, he took care to put on his medals, just as Wiphat did, although Wiphat had many more. Clearly, success in the state’s idiom was not irrelevant for Canphon. But it was not the only, or even the main, consideration for him. His version of events suggested that his return was a necessity born of the exceptional relationship between the people of Kandon and the powerful presence of the land, kinuh. The cost of his heeding this necessity (as I will show in chapters 2 and 9) was his political marginalization. The metalanguage of socialism includes “necessity” as an articulation of the limits to which one can conform to the Party-state’s definition of success. This sets up an inverse theory of human agency: an appropriately agentive person (counterintuitively) is one who follows Party-state guidance, while noncompliance with policy is conceived of as an act of nonagency. The two poles—success and necessity—revolve around each other, imply one another,

Introduction to Projectland : 15

almost as if they were magnetically charged with the positive and negative force of agency on the one hand and nonagency on the other. I have chosen Projectland as the title of this book because it aptly sums up my analysis that New Kandon is an outcome of the Lao socialist project to reform everyday life. The word “project” has multiple meanings: as a noun, it can indicate a top-down policy intervention. It can also indicate a personal pursuit that implies that one understands oneself as having a future that is open to manipulation through one’s own will, agency, and initiative. It can also be used as a verb, as in projective identification when an ego projects an inner part of him or herself (often a negative part that ego would like to deny) onto another person, thereby ultimately denying the other’s difference from ego. Agency, incidentally, also has a double meaning: it can refer both to an institution that governs and guides the lives of populations, and to a person’s capacity to act (Ahearn 2000). The notion of “projects” present in both topdown projects and projective identification, I will argue, share common ground in their problematic relationship to the difference and agency of the other. The concept of projective identification (borrowed here from psychoanalysis) teaches that the agency of others cannot be perceived, much less tolerated, when the other merely serves as an extension of one’s self in the form of projections. Projectland is about lives as lived in a model village, a village that is sometimes a stage where ethnic Kantu are lit up by projections cast by the fantasies generated within Lao socialism. Canphon and Wiphat’s stories are in many ways at odds with one another. The story Wiphat told hinged in part on casting Canphon and the other returnees who decamped back to Old Kandon as foolish. Theirs was the kind of credulous belief in outmoded superstitions that was precisely the sort of thing Wiphat was leading his village, New Kandon, away from. Meanwhile, Canphon’s respect for kinuh carried with it a subtle but unmistakable reproach of Wiphat and others for so recklessly abandoning so many of the old ways: to ignore these is to ignore the necessities of life. Canphon’s version suggested that the resettlement to New Kandon that Wiphat engineered had invited trouble not only for himself but for everyone connected with the territory. Canphon resurrected a past through ritual and return. Meanwhile, Wiphat pointed to exemplary transformations in pursuit of progress evident in New Kandon. Both versions of Kandon’s story were expressed—to me at least—in what I argue is a metalanguage of the Lao state. What I was given, in both cases, were stories rooted in socialist-inspired concepts of human agency in relation to a revolutionary project.

16 : Chapter 1

Controlling the Flows It is relatively easy to hear the stories of people like Wiphat and Canphon; they are village leaders and used to speaking with outsiders. It was Sum who first introduced me to some of the particularities of women’s experiences in Kandon. Sum is plump and has a wide smile. She is in her thirties but the height of a preteen—people in Kandon called her “the short one.” When we first met it was in her store, which at that time was little more than a few low sheets of corrugated tin hammered over a basic wooden walls and floor. It was hot and stuffy inside. But as it was located near the majestic cinaar (K: ceremonial hall) where tourists sometimes take photos, and as there were few alternatives, her store was a magnet for any outsiders who came to the village. Sum sold drinks, food, and everyday items in tiny quantities. She often accepted rice in payment from locals, which she collected in great sacks and then traded in town. She also made small loans in rice or cash to villagers at outrageous interest rates. In addition to being a moneylender, village gossips told me that Sum would also try to give outsiders anything they wanted, intimating that Sum was effectively a prostitute. Early on, during one of my first stays in the village, Sum acted briefly as a kind of voluntary research assistant for me as I attempted to collect various versions of the flood myth. The myth recounts how, after a cataclysmic flood that changed everything, there were just two survivors—a woman and a dog— stranded on the highest peak (Kunking Mountain), which had become an island surrounded by flood waters. The survivors saw smoke across the waters on another peak, on Katoe Mountain. After many attempts, the dog was able to bring some burning embers back to the woman. They started a fire together and united, thereby producing the offspring that went on to repopulate the world. 6 The flood myth appears in official publications about the Katu (IRLCS and Costello 1993). Carvings of the two main characters of the flood myth—Grandmother Mek and Grandfather Dog—are the central features of the cinaar. I had thought that collecting various versions of the flood myth would be an uncontroversial way to get to know different people in the village during my earliest days. Sitting under a house one day, I was surrounded by a crowd who wanted to know what I was doing in the village. I explained my research—cultural and economic change—and asked if anyone would tell me the myth. An older woman offered to tell me if I went to her house later. However, when I arrived as promised at her home, I was mystified to find that she claimed now to not

Introduction to Projectland : 17

speak Lao. I told Sum about this and she volunteered to go with me to the older woman’s house: Sum would translate. One night, together with Sum, I again asked the older woman if she could tell her version in Kantu. She did so, but seemed flustered, in contrast to her easy smile she’d had the day I met her. When we left, Sum told me she thought that the woman had produced a substandard rendition. Sum offered to take me to her “older sister” (her cousin) for a better version. I was surprised. When we first met, one of the first things Sum had told me about herself was that she was an orphan who had been raised by her uncle, and that he had starved her. When she was a teenager, Sum found a partial escape by working in a factory in Vientiane. During this time, the uncle arranged a marriage for Sum’s sister against the sister’s wishes. The uncle took the bride-price anyway, and the woman felt unable to escape. She drank rat poison and died. Since then, Sum had refused to live in her uncle’s house. Despite this, Sum confidently took me to that house and walked in. It was one of the last remaining houses in the village that was roofed with thatch and featured the carved lintel on either end. But unlike traditional Kantu houses, it was small and low-roofed. Inside, it was incredibly smoky. The household members were all avid pipe smokers, and there was an open cooking fire at the rear with no ventilation. Sum started coughing almost as soon as we sat down: she had rejected smoking, along with many other elements of traditional Kandon life. Sum’s “older sister” had a black fringe straight and high across her forehead. The rest of her smooth black hair was tied back in a knot neatly revealing ears plugged with disks of wood. Around her neck were strings of agate and glass beads. She was garrulous, especially when speaking in her native Kantu, and she readily gave us a rendition of the myth. Sum translated into Lao for me. However, as the rendition went on, Sum’s translations grew fewer, and we relied more on my voice recorder, telling ourselves we would go over it later. I took the recording to her small store the next day. We sat hunched on the floor under the masses of tiny bags of monosodium glutamate, chili, and sugar hanging from the roof. Two other women came to see what we were doing and contributed to the attempts at translation. In this way, Sum and the other women told me about a period “before the flood” when people were stars and stars were people; animals were people and people were animals. With the flood, the sky and the earth swapped places, the moon and the stars swapped, and so on. Before the flood, some rats had been plucked, as one does when preparing to grill. That is why these days some people have hair and others are bald, men have beards and women don’t. With the flood, everything changed places. These shreds and patches did not seem to form a narrative, just a series of observations about the transformations brought by the flood.

18 : Chapter 1

When I later asked Wiphat about “before the flood,” he agreed with what I’d learned, but berated me for consulting the others. He was worried I’d be given the wrong information and that my resulting report would contain inaccuracies. He said that if I had any questions about the myths, I ought to ask him. And only him. After this, no one seemed to be willing to tell me myths other than Wiphat. Wiphat was a sort of spokesperson for Kantu culture. His calendar was filled with trips taken to represent the Kantu ethnicity: for instance, displaying Kantu handicrafts at a museum in Luang Prabang, dancing in the parade at the Sekong annual festival, a trip to sadaeng silapa (L: display arts) at the That Luang festival in Vientiane, and a study tour in Vietnam. His home was plastered with posters from various development projects and with photographs of the sponsored trips he’d taken. Wiphat offered unstinting hospitality to the steady stream of visitors that arrived in Kandon. One such occasion was not long after Sum had tried to help me with the flood myth. I was typing up my field notes at Wiphat’s place when he asked me to pause and join in hosting the workmen who had come to build the waterworks. A young woman had been rostered on to serve the meal and drinks. Sum also arrived. She explained to me that the workers had come to drink beer at her shop the night before, and they wanted to see her again. The Scotch whisky I’d brought for Wiphat from England was passed around, followed by a tobacco pipe. Sum was chatty, as she tended to be in these situations, and made an off-hand comment that I didn’t fully catch about how different things were now as opposed to prior to the resettlement. Wiphat responded sternly, saying, “You, born yesterday or the day before, are lying.” Sum protested her innocence: it wasn’t a lie but a personal memory. He reemphasized, still in Lao so that everyone could understand, “One, I am older than you, and, two, you don’t know anything. So don’t you speak about it. You lie.” Sum was visibly shaken, but she did not let Wiphat’s comments discourage her effort to entertain the workmen. When the men left that afternoon for their guesthouse in Thateeng, she rode in the cab of their truck while the men who had made way for her rode in the back. She was grinning and giggling. To me, it seemed that both Sum and Wiphat were willing to invest sometimes vast amounts of time and generosity in visitors who seemed to have very little to offer in return. The incident with the workmen shows that it was not only influential bureaucrats and aid workers that were courted, sometimes competitively, by these two. Both Wiphat and Sum understood themselves to have been personally transformed by the resettlement of the village. In the case of Wiphat, his transformation had brought him prestige, and he phrased it in terms of the markers of success under socialism: the rejection of backward superstition and the

Introduction to Projectland : 19

embrace of progress. Sum, too, had worked hard to transform herself and her situation in her own lifetime. Unlike most other women in those days, she did not smoke, she lived alone, she often wore jeans, and she had even adopted Buddhism (see High 2016).7 But in the case of Sum, she was socially marginalized. She said, I never do anything out of line. I never say anything wrong. When there is a crowd, I keep silent. But people in this village hate me. When they kill a buffalo or cow in the ceremonial hall, they never give a share to me. When I host guests during the village festival, it is not with meat from these animals— every year I must go to the market to buy meat instead. People in the village would never give me a share. They say it is because I already mii [L: have]. But I know it is because they sang [L: hate] me. But people from elsewhere like me. I speak a lot with others, but I do not speak at all with people in my own village. In the village I don’t speak much to anyone. Wiphat is angry with anyone here who is my friend.

I wondered sometimes if Wiphat particularly disliked Sum because he perceived a competition in their shared interest in outsiders. Wiphat positioned himself as the manager of every flow in and out of the village. Development projects, water, information, stories, potential marriage partners for ­villagers— all of them seemed to go through his hands. He even managed the flow of words, that is, what could and could not be said. Sum told me once that when she was entertaining guests that Wiphat did not want her to, he cut off her electricity in retribution. Sum’s efforts to find some way to tap into the flows connecting the village to outsiders was more fantastical than Wiphat’s. Many of her male friends from outside the village who she said “loved” her seemed to me to be using her as a prostitute. She was enthralled with a direct sales scheme called Zhulian in which rewards were offered for selling a limited range of alternative health products and cosmetics. She showed me a magazine and a DVD composed of hundreds of images of Zhulian salesmen at a red-carpet award night held for the salespeople, with glamorous outfits and even a man (one of the owners, she said) wearing a crown. Sum was careful to point out when one of the awardees was Lao. I tell part of Sum’s story here, along with her tension with Wiphat, to flag that although this book starts with an account of how the village embodies the success on offer from the Lao Party-state (chapters 2, 3, and 4), it is also about the limits to that occupation of the definition of success (chapters 5, 6,

20 : Chapter 1

and 7). It is important that Sum is a woman. In one of my earliest conversations with Sum, she explicitly drew my attention to gender inequality. “Men pay a bride-price for their wives and take their wives as slaves. Look at the men,” she said, pointing at a passerby. “They just walk around and do this or that. It is the women who cart water, go to the fields, make food.” Sum’s comment, effectively, was that the socialist project of discarding harmful traditions and attaining gender equality remained not fully realized in Kandon. Transforming gender relations and bringing about samoe sit (L: equal rights) between the sexes is part of the Lao socialist project. In 1983, Kaysone Phomvihane expressed the goal of “achieving equality between men and women, real liberation for women, thus enabling them to contribute to the building of socialism” (as quoted in Ireson-Doolittle and Moreno-Black 2004, 26). The 1991 constitution states that “men and women are equal in all aspects, namely politics, economy, culture, and social and family affairs” (Lao PDR 1991, article 22). While observers have decried ongoing inequalities, such as the low rate of women in leadership roles (Ireson-Doolittle and Moreno-Black 2004, 25–26), gender inequality has been maintained as a goal and there have been significant concrete steps taken, including legal protections, schooling for girls, and child care services (there was even such a service in New Kandon). In New Kandon, one of my informants, Mrs. Buoy, recollected that during her own childhood in the mountains, it was common to see a woman with a heavy basket full of firewood on her back, a baby in a sling on her side, and a large pipe for her husband in her hands, while her husband walked beside her empty-handed. Women were responsible for most of the heavy work, such as weeding and carting water, firewood, and rice. Men’s work was limited to a few key tasks, such as building and felling large trees when opening a new field. Buoy said that the old people at the time had justified this by saying that women had a smaller stature, meaning their ability to think was not as developed as men’s, so they needed to do menial work and serve the men. She was moved to tears in telling me this, which she said was out of pity for her own mother, who had lived the best years of her life in such conditions. Buoy said that part of the bodhian (L: lessons) taught by “the Lao” was that a man should shoulder at least half of the day-to-day work of home and fields. Buoy observed that while women’s lives are still harder than men’s, she felt that things had improved in her own lifetime. Sum and Buoy might well have agreed with the comment, made by a Vietnam Women’s Union representative in the 1970s, “We have equality but we are not yet equal” (Marr 1984, 248). In other words, socialism had provided a metalanguage for speaking about and valuing gender equality, but not necessarily a lived experience of gender equality.

Introduction to Projectland : 21

Kandon is both a model of successful change (in Wiphat’s version) and a case of still-unresolved inequities and injustices (according to Sum). As with the flood myth, there are many versions of the story of Kandon’s transformation. As with the flood myth, I encountered a problem recording this diversity: namely, I was listening for multiple perspectives in a context where one version (Wiphat’s) was promoted as “the truth” at the expense of others. This meant that many of the alternatives to the dominant view were discernible only in patches or half-uttered intimations. The following chapters give voice to multiple stories, even when they aren’t all as coherent as Wiphat’s, even when they don’t form full narratives, and even if they don’t follow the prevailing line of what counts as success in socialist Laos.

The Basics of Old and New Kandon The name of the village, Kandon, is derived from the waterway that these people lived by until the 1996 relocation to Tok Lok. The village established at Tok Lok is now called New Kandon and the former site, now inhabited by Canphon and his family, is called Old Kandon. According to the village chronicle, the physical location of the village shifted ten times before 1964 but was always in the vicinity of the Kandon waterways from which the village derived its name. The Kandon waters are mountain streams that rise on a slope very close to the border of Vietnam, in currentday Kaleum District of Sekong Province. These waters eventually run into the Sekong River. In this area, the flow of the water defines boundaries between groups: waters that flow west into the Sekong signal Lao territory, while waters that flow east indicate Vietnamese land. The waters of Kandon flow north, indicating Kaleum District, while on the other side of the mountain the water flows south into Daakcheung District. The name Kandon, then, indicates an amalgam: Kandon is the waterway, its directional flow, the territory it flows through, and the people who lay claim to that territory. Kandon is relatively well-known by the standards of Lao anthropology. Yves Goudineau has published an article about the village’s famous drums (2000). He mentions Kandon in his survey of the colonial records (2008) and has made a brief mention of his gift of some photographs to them (2015). Villagers report that a Japanese ethnographer, Futoshi Nishimoto, lived among them for three years after the resettlement. Nishimoto has produced four articles on the village (2011, 2010a, 2010b; and Shimizu and Nishimoto 2008).

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These deal mainly with themes of spirits, ancestors, and sacrifice, and have been extremely useful in my own attempts to understand the village. Today, New Kandon is located on the eastern edge of the Bolaven Plateau in Thateng District, Sekong Province. About nine hundred people established this village in 1996 as part of the government-sponsored resettlement of the entire population of the village. Prior to this, the New Kandon land had been occupied by Tok Lok, an ethnic Alak village. By 1992, Tok Lok was home to fifty people. They were relocated that year to join another village by the main road between Thateng and Sekong. New Kandon now lays claim to roughly 1,977 acres, divided between upland fields, forests for gathering, wet rice fields, and gardens. Originally, 3,020 acres had been promised by the district, but in the years following their resettlement the original occupants of Tok Lok and the other surrounding villages objected and were able to retain control of a significant amount of their original territory, to the detriment of the new settlers. Also, in 2006, the district authorities granted 208 acres of Kandon rice fields and garden land to a Vietnamese rubber company, CBF.8 New Kandon is not a poor village by official government standards. It currently has a population of around 1,261. Just over half the population are students (573 individuals) or children too young to study (67 individuals). Another twenty-two people were invalids due to age or disability (seven of these held old-age pensions recognizing service in the military). Most able adults (482 adults) identified themselves as saaw naa (L: farmers) or just pasaason (L: people). Most households have access to land. Yields were almost a ton per acre in the wet rice fields. The wet rice fields are the result of a government agricultural extension and irrigation project carried out as part of the resettlement: the previous owners of the land had used it for swidden. There are only three households in the village considered poor. These households had little land (in one case, just half an acre), and members took what work they could. For instance, work on a nearby asparagus farm brought in about seventy dollars a month. More prosperous households tended to hold more land (around five to seven acres per household) and an income derived from capital investment, such as hiring out agricultural equipment, running shops, and money lending. The category of occupation representing the next-largest number of individuals in New Kandon was the military, with thirty-seven adults listing “solider” as their main occupation. Many worked at Kong Hoy Ekalaad, a military base about nine miles from the village. The head of that base lived with his family in Kandon. Twenty-seven people listed work on the rubber plantation as their main occupation. Eighteen worked for the civil service,

Introduction to Projectland : 23

most commuting from the village daily to offices in the district or provincial townships (two lived further away, serving terms in Kaleum District, and returned to the village only occasionally). Fourteen people worked in the village full-time as teachers in the village schools: half the teachers were ethnic Kantu, and half were ethnic Lao. Only one person reported as being a full-time laborer for a private business (outside of the rubber plantation). That is, almost all existing employment avenues involved working for the state itself, or for one of the projects it had approved and promoted. New Kandon can be understood presently as a rice-based economy geared toward supporting its population through a transformation toward nonfarm work. New Kandon residents studying full-time, employed off-farm, or receiving nonfarm old-age payments numbered 677 in 2018. While the number of people reporting salary or wage employment (111 people) appears low compared to the number of people reporting farming as their main occupation (482 people), this must be understood in the household- and kinship-network nature of the former group’s employment. Education costs are often sponsored by extended families with the hope that salaried work would eventuate for the candidate. Work in paid positions in the military and civil service is secured through long unpaid periods as a “volunteer” and the payment of placement fees, which can reach tens of millions of kiip (thousands of dollars). These fees are often paid by household and family networks. There is a strong sense that the employed person is a product of a family effort, and employed people usually contribute cash to their households and wider families. When I commented on the relatively high rate of employment in the village, Wiphat agreed and noted that, furthermore, my census had captured only those who still identified as residents of this village: “There are many more who have moved away to be closer to their work, but who are really still of our village,” he said.9 Old Kandon contrasts with New Kandon in many ways. Old Kandon is relatively inaccessible: the village is located on one of the higher slopes of the major peak between Kaleum and Daakcheung townships. It is a landscape of steep slopes, forest, upland fields, and waterfalls. Mechanization, employment, and access to credit, markets, and education are all much more limited than in New Kandon. There is no electricity, piped water, road access, or biomedical clinic. Because the official definition of poverty in Laos involves a checklist in which electricity, roads, piped water, and medical services are four of only five criteria determining if a village is poor (High 2014, 180), the village is defined as “poor” by national government standards. The population at the time of my fieldwork was 150 people. All of them were farmers. They laid claim to 19,768 acres, of which 4,942 could be used for cultivation. These lands are

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located at the source of the Sekong River in the high mountains of Kaleum District, Sekong Province. The main economic activities in the village are now swidden farming, gardening, gathering and trapping in the forest, and raising animals. The fields are rotated on a fifteen-year fallow, the gardens on a fiveto seven-year fallow. This rotational agriculture is strongly discouraged by the district to the point of being considered illegal by the very people who practice it. However, given the topography of this particular village, it is the only viable form of food cultivation. Rice is the most valued crop, but according to residents the yield was never enough to last even one month. The main staple, then, is manioc, and this is supplemented with diverse garden and forest products. For the small population that has returned to live in Old Kandon, alternative income sources are few, especially now that the historically important occupations of trade and weaving have declined in profitability. Some people, acting on their own initiative, have started to establish coffee plantations, but they have no expertise, and connections to markets are poor. Since 2011, the district has permitted a Vietnamese company to log the area. This decision was made without consultation with the people of Kandon. “It is not about agreeing,” a village leader explained. “The decision was made by the government, so we went along. They let us do rotational agriculture, so we must let them do logging.” Villagers were supposed to be paid fifty thousand to seventy thousand kiip per tree (about five to seven dollars). In 2011, the village received fifty-one million kiip for twelve hundred trees ($5,500). However, after an even more intensive year of logging in 2012, the village received only five million kiip ($539). Because the village is defined as poor, attempts by the district to resettle the population have been more or less constant. When I visited in 2012, Old Kandon, along with two other villages in the area, had been slated to move into a Focal Village about two days’ walk distant. Focal Villages are notorious in Laos; they are places where government services such as roads, schools, and health services are available and people from the surrounding areas are encouraged to resettle there. The problem is that this usually means moving far from their traditional lands, which are important for material and spiritual reasons. Canphon said he was not entirely opposed to resettling again. However, he knew that in that particular Focal Village people were very poor. “They still eat manioc, just as we do,” he observed. Canphon had already approached the district chief to say that he wouldn’t lead his people to the poverty of the Focal Village. He suggested instead a sponsored relocation to the new district capital currently under construction.

Introduction to Projectland : 25

Figure 1.5. A photo displayed in Sekong Museum of New Kaleum District capital where the people of Old Kandon were considering moving to as an alternative to resettlement in the Focal Site Village. The caption read, “Project of building houses for the people, in New Kaleum District Capital.”

The notion of this possible resettlement, too, was viewed with significant ill ease in Old Kandon. When resettlement there was discussed in the village, local residents told me that fireballs shot into the air from kinuh’s stone, warning them that kinuh would not easily let them go. A photograph of that new district capital hung in the Sekong Museum in 2018. The picture, taken in 2014, showed houses under construction on a grid of recently cut roads, each with an identical blue roof. The camera lens made the straight lines of the grid bulge toward a vanishing point. The caption read, “Project of building houses for the people, in New Kaleum District Capital.” The photograph in its gilt frame seemed to dwell happily on the contrast between the clearing and its surroundings; the level ground of the new town contrasted with the mountain slopes. It was stark, white, and bare against the vegetation that stained the mountains blue. The town’s straight thoroughfares and lines of houses, like the straight lines made by the trees in the rubber plantation in New Kandon, draws the eye toward a vanishing point, as opposed to the hemmed-in field of vison created by wild forests and mountain ranges. The

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visual perspective of such grid layouts suggests a horizon stretching into infinity. New lives would be lived in these houses, the picture seemed to suggest, ones with new vistas and new futures, and fundamentally unlike the lives previously possible for the people of these mountains. The projects, like the rubber trees and lines of identical houses, seemed to stretch on forever.

2 Who Are the Katu?

It was 1948. Mouang was camped with his comrades just outside a Katu village in Quang Nam Province, Vietnam. A two-meter-high fence made of sharpened stakes separated him from the villagers. Beyond it was the sound of the women talking as they collected water where the mountain stream was diverted through bamboo pipes over the fence and into the watering place. He heard the calls of the children, chickens squabbling as they went under houses to roost, and the men in the communal hall talking together after a hunt. Mouang was preparing a simple evening meal: a handful of rice and a dried fish. The leader of this village claimed authority over twenty Katu villages in the area, and he was opposed to French colonialism. This leader suspected Mouang’s party of representing French interests. In fact, Mouang had been sent by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) high command. Little was known of the Katu by the DRV at that point. The Katu were best known for occasionally leaving butchered corpses of ethnic Kinh on forest paths. The French never truly controlled Katu territory. Mouang, a young volunteer who had joined the movement in 1945 with the electrifying events of Vietnam’s revolution and declaration of independence that year, had come to persuade these people to join the resistance. There was the whispery sound of something approaching his camp. Mouang jumped before realizing it was just a man, not a tiger. Like other men in the village, this one wore his hair long, held into a chignon by a curved pig’s tooth, and a simple cloth wrapped around his waist and between his legs. His teeth were filed into blackened stumps, his ears weighted down with oversized bronze earrings. By a distinctive tattoo down the man’s forehead, and a certain, confident gait, Mouang recognized the adult son of the leader. In broken Vietnamese, Mouang’s visitor asked, “Eat what?”

27

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“Rice.” Mouang gestured at the pot of white grains cooking on the campfire. “Com.” “Com,” replied Mouang. The young man smiled, and repeated, “Com.” Mouang held up a dried fish, looking questioningly. “ʔasiiw,” the young man offered. Mouang repeated it, turning the unfamiliar word over on his tongue. When the rice was cooked, he served a portion to the young man on a plate improvised from a wild banana leaf, and the two ate together with their fingers, occasionally passing back and forth between them the taste of a new word. The young man returned the next night, and then again a few nights later. He brought other young people with him. They taught Mouang how to smoke the bamboo pipe of sweetened tobacco, the broad lip of it passing from mouth to mouth. When Mouang had learned enough words, his visitors wanted to know about his mother, if he missed her, and why he left her. He tried to find the words—a cobble of Vietnamese and Katu—that might make them understand why he had come. How could he express what had inspired him about communism? He knew he must have been making little sense to them, but surely they could see his genuine emotion when he spoke about the need for people to overcome their old enmities, work together for everyone’s benefit, and take up arms against foreigner aggressors. One evening, his friend came early, and gestured for Mouang to put away his cooking pot and follow him through the gate into the village. The long houses were arranged in a circle around the ceremonial hall. The high thatched roofs and carved eaves were silhouetted against the darkening sky. The man led him to a particularly grand house, with geometric carvings on the balustrades painted in black, white, and red. A door of woven bamboo slid sideways. Inside was the smoke generated by a dozen hearths and even more pipes, orange in the glow of the fires, and the hubbub of a dozen families making or eating their evening meals. Along the far side of the building, on the low platform where people slept, Mouang made out the chief, sitting at a pipe, watching. His friend indicated he should sit in front of a woven tray upon which manioc mixed with rice was piled directly. “We don’t have anything. No sugarcane, no bananas.” Mouang mimed an overstated enjoyment of the meal. His friend offered him something from another dish. Mouang thought it might be meat of some kind, but it was dark and he couldn’t see much at this distance from the fire. He ate some, enthusing ebulliently despite the vile flavor that almost over-

Who Are the Katu? : 29

whelmed him. After the meal, he leapt to his feet, eager to help clean up. When he saw the dish that had troubled him by a fire, Mouang glanced at it furtively, trying to decipher its contents. He thought he saw maggots crawling on infested meat in the flickering cast by the flames. The account above is an imaginative reconstruction based on the materials available today.1 My purpose is to ask, what was it like when the involvement of the Katu in the First Indochina War hung in the balance? There was nothing inevitable about their joining the movement. These highland fortvillages could have repelled the early cadre, as they had done with earlier attempts to subdue them. But instead, Katu territories were some of the first “liberated” areas in Laos. Kandon village played the leading role in the Sekong Valley in the Laotian Civil War (Goudineau 2000, 556), which was part of the larger Second Indochina War (known as the Vietnam War in much of the English-speaking world). This was sparked when, after World War II, the allies supported the reassertion of French control over Indochina, despite a local movement, Lao Itsala, having declared independence. When the French withdrew, the United States stepped up support of the putatively neutral Royal Lao Government. The power of this regime was effectively concentrated in the major centers along the Mekong River, the heartland of ethnic Lao. The Lao Itsala, and later the Pathet Lao, controlled areas mainly to the east, many of them uplands areas inhabited by ethnic minorities. The bravery, fortitude, and suffering of Kandon and the other highlanders of Laos who bore the brunt of the American bombing is extraordinary. Yet their story is rarely at the forefront of English-language accounts of the war.2 However, it is common knowledge in Laos. The role ethnic minorities played in making the revolution a success is celebrated in history books and museum displays, such as the one I saw under preparation in Sekong. It is true that there is something weary about these presentations. After a summary of one Lao history book that made a claim about the importance of Khamtai Siphandon in the revolution in the south of Laos, one historian described it as a “mythin-construction” that is extremely indifferent toward the past as it was actually experienced. Official Lao historiography tends to leave out the actual experiences of real people and renders these histories quite alienating. Vatthana Pholsena notes, “Those involved in this historiographical project should ask whether today’s Lao people actually care about it” (Pholsena 2006b, 430). These propagandized myths-in-the-making do sometimes manage to catch the attention of local people. In Kandon, I watched Wiphat trot out his story about absolute poverty in the mountains and his transformation through his own wit and following Party-state guidance to the great pleasure of many

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audiences, including visiting tour groups, study “teams” from other villages, bureaucrats, and the university staff who delivered me to the village. I observed a wide range of people enjoying Wiphat’s performances. It is not always easy for an outsider to understand the stories of success told in socialist Laos, let alone to share in their pleasure. The metalanguage of ekaphap (unity), samakkhii (solidarity), and following the sii nam (advice) of the Party-state is easy to dismiss as empty socialist rhetoric. But these words can carry a real emotional weight. Notions of the savage or primitive also carry emotional weight: the detail about the maggots is not made up. Years later, Boonyoen Leewiedmuang, upon whom my portrait above is largely based, recounted his experiences to a historian and made a point of telling her about the maggots. The question “Who are the Kantu?” is a question about the emotions, such as awe, joy, and disgust, that run through historical accounts of the Katu.

The Katu in Historiography The Katu ethnicity is a Mon-Khmer/Austroasiatic group associated with a continuous stretch of mountainous land in the southeast of Laos and the adjacent area of Vietnam. Within Laos, according to official statistics the “Katu” are concentrated in Sekong Province, where they form about a quarter of the population. Likewise, in Vietnam, the Katu are concentrated in Quang Nam, a province that neighbors Sekong. The Katu number some 28,378 in Laos,3 or 0.4 percent of the nation’s population.4 All of the ethnic Katu people of Kandon Old and New in fact identify as ethnic Kantu. They understand “Katu” as an exonym applied to them by outsiders (although the term “Kantu” is probably also an exonym; see Goudineau 2008). The category “Kantu” does not appear in official accounts of ethnicity in Laos and as a result there are no official statistics regarding the “Kantu.” It is thus unclear what fraction of “Katu” identify as “Kantu.” In what follows, I will use “Katu” to refer to the ethnic group that was and is known and discussed in ethnography and historiography, and reserve the term “Kantu” for those people that I know identify that way, that is the Kantu of Kandon. In 1977, when the border was negotiated between Laos and Vietnam, border people were given a choice of nationality. Almost the entire Katu population of some districts of Sekong relocated to Vietnam (Hùng 2007, 17). In the 1990s, Laos commenced a concerted effort at relocating the remaining Katu of Kaleum to more accessible parts of Sekong Province. By 2006, approximately one-third of the total Katu villages of the district of Kaleum

Who Are the Katu? : 31

(thirty-seven) had been relocated west as part of this plan (Shimizu and Nishimoto 2008, 217). It is difficult to reconstruct a deeper historical picture of the Katu in the usual sense of piecing together archival evidence. The Cham ruled the land leading from the escarpment of the plateau to the coast from the eleventh century and were succeeded by Vietnamese rulers; it is unlikely that either ever directly controlled Katu territory. However, both relied on trade with the highlands (Salemink 2008, 57; Tana 1998, 119). This was reflected, for instance, in a Nguyên ritual cycle that included rites for both “opening the mountain” and “praying for a good sea wind” (Tana 1998, 119). In the nineteenth century, the Nguyên rulers initiated some military presence, trade monopolies (especially on salt), and combined trader/tax collectors called cac lai in the highlands. But by this time the Nguyên rulers were already under pressure from the French, who, under the pretext of defending their Catholic missionaries, conducted a series of attacks on Vietnam. France made Annam and Tonkin into “protectorates” in 1883. In 1893 the French used further gunboat diplomacy to seize all of Laos east of the Mekong. The opening years of the twentieth century were likely a confused time in the highlands as the cac lai system was dismantled, the Khmer influence contracted, and Lao and Thai raiders made incursions looking for trade or slaves in a context of weak French control. In this space, leadership fell to what Oscar Salemink has called “big men,” men who established a temporary power through prowess in managing trade and other contacts with outsiders, assertiveness, and sometimes through elaborate feasting (1991, 1997, 2008, 2011). The French colonists never truly controlled the Katu territory. There were sporadic accounts of “submissions,” but soon after the area would again be described as beyond French control (N. Århem 2014, 158; Goudineau 2008). The term “Katu” was, by French accounts, first coined by Léon Sogny based on some evidence of similarities of language and dress across the area (Le Pichon 1939, 8). Jean Le Pichon came to conclude that the term “Katu” was in fact a local word meaning “savage.” He recounts how he trekked into the mountains in the 1930s on a mission to “pacify” the Katu, and he asked if the local inhabitants were or knew the Katu. The usual answer was “no.” The Katu, he would be told, “are the men that live up there in the mountains.” And when he reached those mountains, those people in turn would indicate that the Katu lived further still, toward Laos. He wondered if the Katu actually existed, and concluded with the wry comment, “However, I did not assume that the savage did not exist in the region!” (Le Pichon 1939, 11).

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True to his word, Le Pichon emphasized the dangerous, even “bloodthirsty” nature of the Katu. His pamphlet on them is titled The Blood Hunters (1939). Le Pichon inferred that the Katu must have been living in a state of endemic intervillage warfare from his observation of the high fences around the villages.5 His mission was inspired in part by complaints from neighboring ethnic Kinh of periodic murderous raids from the Katu. He speculated that these raids were in fact spiritually motivated human sacrifice, although he presented vanishingly little evidence to support that interpretation. One of the pacifying effects of French control of the area, he fantasized, would be the enforcement of the full substitution of buffalo sacrifices in place of the human sacrifices he so fervently imagined (Le Pichon 1939, 41). Nikolas Århem (2014, 154) notes that in his retrospective memoire, however, Le Pichon (2009) paints a very different picture. He reveals there that Vietnamese cac lai understood the murders as often sparked by the unscrupulous activities of Vietnamese traders themselves. Here, his chief informant, Go, responds to a question about the murder of Kinh with the reply, “Would you allow termites to install themselves in your house?” (Le Pichon 2009, 60; see also 101). In this scene, Le Pichon is cast as a bystander observing the age-old enmity between uplander and lowlander, and his urge—experienced as ineffectual—is to intervene to protect the autonomy of the highlanders. By the 1940s, a cohesive body of French ethnographic work asserted the cultural unity of “Pays Mois.” It argued that the upland parts of Annam, Cochinchina, Eastern Cambodia, and Southern Laos deserved to be united as a separate country. This was justified by the notion of a fundamental difference of this upland region from—and natural antagonism with—neighboring lowland Vietnamese, Lao, and Khmer populations. The so-called Montagnards (uplanders of Indochina) were often assumed to have a sympathy with the French, though, and a need for French protection of their “autonomy” (Salemink 1991). Oscar Salemink concludes, “I would argue that the French constructed a Montagnard identity to further their own interests” (1995, 291). Salemink links this storyline of French colonial ethnography to the political context. There had been armed resistance to French plantations in the central highlands in the 1920s and uprisings and revolts in the lowlands of Vietnam during the 1930s. Peasants were supported by the newly formed Indochinese Communist Party. In the reprisals that followed, the Party was forced underground. On the Lao side of the ranges, the southeastern highlands were the center of some of the most significant resistance/millenarian movements, such as the Ong Keo uprising in the Bolaven Plateau (1901–1910), and its successor, the Kommadam resistance movement (1924–1937). It became

Who Are the Katu? : 33

apparent to the French that whoever controlled the highlands could control all of French Indochina. And control—or “pacification” in the language of the time—required knowledge of the ethnic makeup of the region. Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink quote Joseph Galliéni, “It is the study of the races who inhabit a region which determines the political organization to be imposed and the means to be employed for its pacification. An officer who succeeds in drawing a sufficiently exact, ethnographic map of the territory he commands, has almost reached its complete pacification, soon followed by the organization which suits him best” (1994, 20). The ethnographic maps that show the traditional territories of the Katu are much more detailed and extensive than the control actually asserted by the French over Katu territories, which suggests that mapping out and gathering ethnographic information on ethnicities was treated as a precursor to control (see, for instance, Cupet and Malglaive 1895). French colonial rule in those areas of the highlands that they did control could be brutal. For example, in 1949, around one hundred French veterans settled the uplands of Vietnam. They used forced labor recruited from the surrounding local populations (Salemink 1995, 275). Hired gangs raided villages to seize labor for the plantations. Even the Garde Montagnarde (an uplander wing of the French army) were not immune to the plantation’s hunger for labor (Salemink 1995, 286). Violence was used to force workers to sign binding contracts in an arrangement described as virtual slavery sustained by a “conspiracy of silence” among French bureaucrats (Salemink 1995, 285). This was politically self-defeating for the French, who had justified their rule in part on the moral victory of abolishing slavery. Le Pichon himself went on to author the French wartime intervention known as the action psychologique in 1950. Part of this was the forced resettlement of scattered highland settlements in large, defended villages that preempted the notorious “strategic hamlets” that were to follow in the Diem era (Salemink 1999, 317). The Kantu of Kandon were likely consummate traders during this era (as I argue in chapter 6), and through such contacts they likely knew about brutalities like these, even if they were not exposed to them directly. By the time I conducted my fieldwork, the French era was discussed in New Kandon as a period of exploitation: I was told that the French and the local elites they backed would violently seize sexual advantages, labor, and food from villagers. By contrast, the Viet Minh and, after them, the Pathet Lao hinged their appeal to the masses on occupying the position of caretaker providing for and protecting the population (cf. Lentz 2019, 42). During the 1940s, a network of French military posts spanned the LaoVietnam border, from Lamam (where Sekong capital is today) to Chavan (now

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Daakcheung, a district center in Sekong) and Kaleum (the District in Sekong where Old Kandon is located) and down to Attapeu. According to an official history of Sekong Province, Pawasat khwaeng Sekong, 1945–2010 (The History of Sekong Province, 1945–2010; henceforth “the pawat” [L: history]),6 penned by the Historical Research Committee of Sekong Province, there was a continual, if sometimes subdued, resistance in the highlands of southeastern Laos, first against the French (1945–1954) and then against the Royal Lao Government (1959–1975) (HRCSP 2012). At times, local resistance took the form of evading tax or labor obligations, making paths impassible, or setting booby traps. When I trekked to Old Kandon, I walked on a narrow pass; the drop on either side had been hollowed out so that the path was extraordinarily narrow. On either side, I was told, dry matter had been stored ready to be set aflame should the French approach, making the trail impassable. The first mention of Kandon in the pawat is an account of how, by 1939, people there and in other villages used “sharpened stakes in deadfalls, spears, booby traps, and poisoned arrows to kill 16 French, 6 of their lackies, [and] one interpreter” (HRCSP 2012, 44). The pawat describes such indigenous resistance to the French as a local part of a laudable “tradition of struggle” (5, 33) but concludes that these efforts never met lasting success against the sakdinaa (L: feudalists) and the cakkaphat tangdaaw phuuhukhaan (L: aggressive foreign empires) because the movement lacked a party to lead them (45). The Party provided this leadership (the pawat asserts) from 1945 onward with a combination of Lao (what the pawat calls idsalaa; i.e., the Lao Itsala) and Vietnamese soldiers and cadre and, from 1955, the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party. This movement won a significant ally when it recruited Sithon Kommadam, a respected highlands leader, who became active with the communists from 1947.7 By 1952, five districts in the area were considered “liberated,” including Kaleum, the location of Kandon. According to Thomas Engelbert (2004, 262), this area was beyond the control of the Royal Lao Government from 1954 through completion of the revolution in 1975. When the French were forced out of Indochina—first at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and then by the Geneva Agreements in the same year—the United States became increasingly assertive in the region, first politically, and then militarily. The Diemist regime they supported in Vietnam was unabashedly xenophobic, viewing the highlanders as an irrelevance at best. Wilfred Burchett described the situation of the minorities under the Diem regime as “a story of unrelieved horror that recalls the wholesale wiping out of the Red Indians in the USA or the Australian aborigines” (Burchett 1970, 128). Gerald Cannon

Who Are the Katu? : 35

Hickey noted a similar view toward Vietnamese highlanders, his frustration evident when he wrote, “An adviser to Diem, described the central highlands as a wilderness, a game preserve . . . . This ignorance unfortunately characterized many American leaders’ view of the highlands until the end of the Vietnam War” (2002, 56). Salemink argues that a preoccupation with depicting the minorities as credulous bearers of culture living in a remote wilderness worked to represent them as apolitical, and as thus noncommunist (Salemink 1991, 277). This kind of English-language wartime ethnography was a continuation of the French colonial assertion that there was an innate difference—and antipathy— between uplanders and lowlanders (Salemink 1991, 278). Vietnamese revolutionaries—many of whom must have been raised with various prejudices about the uplanders as dangerous, wild, and primitive— nevertheless reimagined them; for the DRV, the highlanders were courted as potential allies and heroes of the movement.

Revolutionary Ethnography It was the twelfth lunar month of 1964. Kandon was two days into the five-day harvest festival, so the village grounds were crowded. Everyone had come back from the field huts they had been living in during the rice-growing season. The village was taboo, which meant that all villagers needed to be inside the village, and no outsiders were allowed in. The day before, youths had been out clearing and repairing the paths, making them suitable for the spirit of the rice to travel along. This day, the internal grounds of the village were swept, and another boulder was dug out from the central plaza, smoothing it. The waterworks were replaced, the fence repaired. The village was gleaming. The lakam drums (prized possessions of the village, described further in chapter 5) were strung up in the ceremonial hall. When they were struck, their rich sound bellowed out across the valley. A boy with a cleft lip was digging out another boulder with the other boys. A buzzing made him and the others pause. There, in the sky, were two great hulking shapes. The boys scrambled on top of the boulder. From there, they could see right across the valley to the village on the opposite slope. It was a day’s walk to that village through difficult terrain, but the village could be seen in detail on a clear day from Kandon. The boys could see vividly as the shapes passed over that village. There was a pause, then flashes. The houses across the valley burst into flames. The boys heard thunder a moment later, and then the screams of survivors. The flying shapes rose in the sky, turned, and dipped

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again, flying close to the terrified people visible across the valley in that burning village, shooting them. There were more explosions, bullets, and screams. The shapes turned again and again. Kandon itself was not attacked, but the day after the bombing of the village across the valley, the people of Kandon scattered to the forest in small family groups. The Party had been preparing them for this eventuality: Wiphat’s family had already been taught how to dig a bomb shelter. Wiphat’s father was old; he could not climb in and out of the shelter that Wiphat and his siblings had dug, so he slept beside it. Wiphat—the boy with the cleft lip— had been born in 1955 and had never known a life without the presence of the Party and its teachings, or the threat of war. There was no question of growing rice now, but the family kept their manioc and gardens going. They worked in the very early morning, before the sun fully rose, with leaves strapped to their backs as camouflage. If an aircraft was heard approaching, they dropped to the ground, frozen. It was dangerous to collect water, so they learned to make do with little. After a few months, the forest around them would start to show the signs of human habitation, so they would dig a new shelter in a different area of the forest. The family kept a pig early on, but it made such a mess that the family started to think it might be visible from the air. It was killed, and the occasion brought on Wiphat’s first marriage. The bride was a nine-year-old relative who was living with the small family group. The pig had to be killed anyway, and the girl had no one else to look after her. Much of the bombing was indiscriminate because the purpose of the air war was always poorly defined. Some of the most intensive periods of bombing in Laos were the direct result of halts to bombing over North Vietnam; bombers were simply redirected over Laos during these phases (High, Curran, and Robinson 2014, 110). The height of the bombing came in 1970 when US president Richard Nixon made “interdiction” of the Ho Chi Minh Trail a top priority. It was never clear how severing a supply route could be achieved with airpower alone: roads, civilians, settlements, crops, and even buffalo were targeted. Wiphat’s father had beaten him when he first asked if he could learn to read, so he hadn’t learned as a child. When Wiphat was fifteen, he was invited to study “medicine” with the communist forces. At first, he used a sliver of bamboo dipped in iodine to learn to write. Later, he exchanged a chicken for his first ballpoint pen. When he graduated, only a few months later, his role was to walk from tiny settlement to tiny settlement, dispensing free Chinese and Vietnamese medicines and giving vaccinations to populations scattered in his area.

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Kandon itself, standing abandoned, was relatively spared from the bombing. The lakam drums, the other village treasures, and the local territory spirits protected the village while the inhabitants hid in the forest. Three times the village settlement itself was bombed, but miraculously there was no damage. It was only when the lakam was moved away to the forest for safekeeping that there was some damage from a bombing raid. Kandon was the only village in the area to escape complete destruction.8 Occasional enemy troops parachuted in. Most of them, Wiphat recalls, tried to run away on landing, but some stayed to fight. Kandon was able to successfully repel each of these attacks. One of the answers to the question “Who are the Katu?” is that they are revolutionary heroes. How did this come to pass? It is notable that a crucial part of the initial recruitment of highlanders into the socialist movement was a concerted ethnographic project on the part of the communists. From 1948, “communist missionaries” (Engelbert 2004, 253) with “evangelical impulses” (Goscha 2004) embedded themselves in ethnic minority communities, learning their ways and winning their trust before attempting to convert them to the movement. In the early 1950s, the campaign in the highlands was conducted under a policy of the “three togethers.” Cadre were enjoined to eat, live, and work together with local people in order to understand local daily lives, psychology, concerns and aspirations, and to determine the key social roles and relationships in the village. Essentially, these cadre were protoethnographers operating on the principle of methodological relativism.9 The Vietnamese who undertook this work reportedly learned the local languages, wore local attire, worked in the fields, changed their names to local monikers, and in some cases were adopted into headmen’s families or even married local women (Engelbert 2004, 253; Goscha 2004, 153, 155). One such example is Boonyoen Leewiedmuang, who was born in Vietnam and arrived in Laos in the late 1940s. He was interviewed by Pholsena (who refers to him as Bouanyeung), and told the historian that his mission was to become “one of the people” (L: khao pasason). “We had to do everything with the people. We had to become the people,” he said (Pholsena 2006b, 457). This man originally came to Laos from his native Vietnam as a revolutionary volunteer. He became so integrated into the local movement that he married a local woman (ethnic Nge), changed his name (it means “Father Nyoen” in Nge language), and became so fluent in Lao that he served as a member of the Lao Central Party Committee, secretary of the Provincial Party, and was provincial governor of Sekong Province from 1984 to 1988. He passed away in 2018,

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just months before I had planned to interview him. Wiphat remembered that when he was a very small child, Boonyoen lived on Kandon territory from the mid- to late 1950s in a hidden and highly protected base and that he relocated his headquarters to the provincial center in 1963. Boonyoen’s portrait hangs in the Sekong Museum: pale, gaunt, and tall, his picture is among a display of all those who have served as governor of Sekong Province. Each New Year his spirit, along with those of the other provincial governors, is evoked as a guardian of Sekong. He quite literally became one with the province he came to as a young foreigner. The goal of such revolutionary missionaries was not just integration of the agent into “the people” but also the introduction of change by the agent, slowly if necessary. Boonyoen Leewiedmuang was the chief advisor on the pawat (HRCSP 2012), and that book’s account of the early years of the revolution in the southeast gives some record of his and other early cadres’ approach to social change. The pawat explains that the work in the “Eastern Secure Zone” was difficult for cadre arriving from the late 1940s. The area “had a small population composed of many ethnicities, leading separate lives. Its cultural and political capacities were still limited. Therefore, creating a basic level of politics, building armed forces, and upgrading the people who came to fight the enemies was extremely difficult and complicated” (HRCSP 2012, 75). This is a similar trope to the one Christian Lentz notes for the Black River region of Vietnam, which the DRV consistently described as “vast land, sparse people” (Lentz 2019, 79). Lentz notes that this trope only makes sense in its implicit contrast with Kihn lowlands, which are described as “small land, many people.” The notion that the uplands were universally composed of small, scattered settlements contrasts with some of what is known of Kandon’s past, such as Wiphat’s frequent recollection of a Kandon “full of people” with dozens of longhouses, each with hundreds of residents. It also contrasts with the results of Yves Goudineau’s interviews and survey of the French archival material of the area, which suggested to him that the highlands in this region were characterized at the time by a number of “small cities,” Kandon among them.10 The DRV conceived of the Lao revolution as a separate movement, distinct from the Vietnamese struggle but linked to it through ties of common purpose and solidarity. As the pawat states, “The Party and the Committee for the Construction of the Secure Zone, the solidarity of our Party cadre, together with the rank and file voluntary Vietnamese soldiers, built resistance in every village and canton from a correct basis. They endured difficulties alongside the people, resolutely mobilizing, educating, and disseminating at every step to make the people aware of and understand the revolution and take arms to

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fight the enemies. Bringing all the people together to fight the enemy was our ultimate goal” (HRCSP 2012, 76). It was, the pawat says, the era of “everything for victory.” Early mobilization of the southeastern highlands was undertaken in wiak haa (L: five works). The first “work” was to address food security. People were educated to pool labor in order to cultivate more land and organize watches to protect crops from wild animals. The positive results not only eased the food shortages but also developed trust in the Party and their guidance. It showed “the power of solidarity” (HRCSP 2012, 78) and the results when people “care for one another the way they cared for the things they grew” (78). Another critical food situation was the salt blockade. The French had the highlands surrounded and denied the entry of salt into the area. The pawat recounts how salt donated by North Vietnam was portered in through mass cooperation between cadre, local villages, and Vietnamese volunteers. Again, the benefit was not only to local diets. When portering, various ethnicities were brought into contact with one another, with cadre, and with Vietnamese volunteers. In this way, a cosmopolitan society—free of the earlier feuds and antagonisms that had riven the highlands—was brought into being on the trails. The next “work” was to address directly that problem of feuding and interethnic antagonism. In direct contrast to the French fantasy of a united pays mois, the pawat understands internal feuding as characteristic of the region, a situation fostered deliberately by the French, as well as a consequence of ongoing traditional beliefs and practices, including entrenched local leaders referred to as cao kok cao laaw (L: ritual leader). These leaders are singled out in the pawat as agents of discord. The Party mediated disputes and outlawed things such as revenge killings. The pawat explains that when feuds were resolved there was instead a mood of fun, celebration, and fraternal cooperation. This mood is still evident in Laos today as the preferred one to display at standard official occasions. The third “work” was “mobilizing and propagandizing the people to resolve and reduce taboos and change the backwards rituals and traditions” (HRCSP 2012, 80). The pawat claims that it was the example set by the cadre, with their up-to-date attitudes and self-awareness, that led some villagers to consider their own cultural taboos as hindrances. The cadre encouraged the relinquishment of taboos, and—learning from experience in Vietnam and the Bolaven Plateau—took an incremental, experimental approach. First, in one village, a taboo would be deliberately broken, and results observed and discussed. After it was shown there that the taboos had no real power, that lesson could be taken

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to another village and the experiment carried out again (81). The pawat claims that such initially small steps ignited a full swing that ultimately had implications for the general way of life in the region: “Eating, living, wearing, carrying were clearly changed” (81). The pawat links the changes in ritual prohibitions directly to changes in a broad range of bodily and behavioral markers: “Young men and women no longer had to cut their teeth or pierce their ears. They no longer had to wear the maaw [L: a silver ring worn over the shoulder and under the armpit]. The men cut their hair short and wore shirts and trousers. Many families ate their food cooked, drank water that was boiled, swept their houses to make them clean and beautiful, wore clean clothes, ate clean food and drank clean water, and slept and lived cleanly” (81). The fourth “work” was literacy and the teaching of the Lao language. Both of these were initially almost nonexistent in the region. Working with Vietnamese education experts, the cadre offered classes that taught a small group, which was then able to teach others (see also Creak 2018). The fifth and final “work” was to consolidate control over the area through the strengthening of the cadre and the administration of the region itself (for instance, through further education and by identifying and removing double agents). At first, revolutionaries aimed to win over local leaders. But local leaders also embodied traditional authority. Younger people were recruited and sent for education elsewhere to undermine their acceptance of this authority. A purge was launched in 1952/1953–1963 to expel traditional leaders and other unwanted elements from the revolution in Sekong and to simultaneously encourage a new personality among the remaining cadre—one of active diligence, decisiveness, initiative, and independence (Engelbert 2004, 255). Combined, these “five works” suggested a comprehensive transformation of the economic, political, and cultural life of the region. Wilfred Burchett, who visited the highlands of south Vietnam and spoke to ethnic minority leaders in liberated areas there, said that the policy was one of “ ‘revolutionary humanism’ . . . to let a few rays of light into the backward lives of the tribespeople” (1970, 174). While inciting these people to take up arms was the “ultimate goal,” the means of obtaining that goal was by way of thoroughgoing changes to a total way of life. From 1954 onward, the Party held official celebrations whenever a village decided to abandon its “absurd beliefs” (Pholsena 2006b, 428). Engelbert recounts an example where locals offered to give up some specific customs in exchange for a school.11 In this case, the exchange seems quite explicit: one set of power relationships (the territory spirits and ancestors) was exchanged for another (the modernizing state). The “gift” given in this case by the locals in exchange for a school was the gift of an absence: by

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abolishing a set of beliefs in local spirits, they created a vacuum that the state was invited to enter. Given the importance of ethnographic methods to the cadre’s efforts in the highlands during this era, and the importance of the Katu to the revolutionary movement, there ought to be rich ethnographic commentary on the Katu available in the Vietnamese and Lao archives. However, the historical material available in the Vietnamese archives on the Katu is extremely thin (Hùng 2007). After an exhaustive search, Nikolas Åhrem reports only one war-era source discussing the Katu.12 Åhrem concludes that the lack of available wartime ethnographic data is due to age-old prejudices held by lowlanders about the uplands: “The Annamite Mountains were simply dark, inhospitable and dangerous places inhabited by savages whose nature bordered on that of animality” (2014, 148). It is also possible that the lacunae in the Vietnamese archives are not the result of negligence and xenophobia but rather the strategic importance attached to ethnographic knowledge: the ethnographic material exists but remains classified.13 A third possibility is that the ethnographic records exist but in a form that is at first difficult to recognize. The pawat, for instance, is a history of the revolution in Sekong, but it could also be read as a contribution to the ethnography of Sekong. For instance, in explaining how a feud between two Tarieng “factions” was resolved by cadre in the early 1950s, it becomes clear that the resistance movement’s knowledge of the microhistories of the two factions, their land use, and their social organization was intimate and detailed (HRCSP 2012, 80). Likewise, in discussing how food production was increased as the first “work,” the pawat mentions that ritual eating of buffalo was the main previous “know-how” people had for increasing production (78). This suggests that the cadre had information on how ritual and the agricultural cycle were linked. There are even mentions in the pawat of an existing practice of human sacrifice: “in some places it [the cause of the feuding] was because in ritual human blood was used to pay respects to powerful protective devices” (79). Furthermore, many of these observations were based on long-term residence with the people in question. What makes all this hard to recognize as ethnography is that cultural distinctiveness is discussed only as it is being deliberately changed. Local territory spirits are named at the point at which the village volunteers to swap them for a school. Buffalo sacrifice is discussed in the context of the move to replace it with solidarity. Teeth filing, ear piercing, and the maaw are discussed as things that were given up in the fervor of an exciting period of foment. Perhaps finding the elusive Vietnamese wartime ethnography of the Katu requires reading against the grain in this way: the style is not

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a salvage ethnography reconstructing a traditional past from glimpses caught in the present but a revolutionary ethnography creating a new future by overthrowing the lived vestiges of the past.

Solidarity Not all markers of tradition were earmarked for destruction. The pawat makes clear that some so-called traditional characteristics of the minorities were considered valuable. First among these was “a tradition of solidarity to struggle and never surrender” (HRCSP 2012, 51). Solidarity is a keyword in the pawat: it was both the best part of the existing traditions of the highlands and also that which the cadre promoted as a cultural innovation in their revolutionary missionizing.14 The keyword status of “solidarity” appears to stem from a wartime declaration by Ho Chi Minh, who promulgated “ethnic solidarity” (doàn kêt dân tôc) as the key principle of ethnic relations for the revolutionaries. The notion was based on a metaphor of sibling relations: the Kinh majority was elder brother to the ethnic minorities, with a duty to protect, respect, and develop them (Salemink 1997, 507). In Laos, the notion of solidarity is a guiding principle regarding the proper relations between ethnicities in a national frame. The pawat states, “Since they have had a People’s Revolutionary Party to guide them, a correct path forward has appeared, [and] the multiethnic people have slowly overcome their divisions, their malice, their quarrels between the various ethnicities with a spirit of alliance between the various ethnicities, which is increasing with every step, so that together in solidarity they can struggle against the enemy aggressors and from that comes a spirit of nationalism that is higher still and can’t be contained” (HRCSP 2012, 54). It was this guiding principle of “solidarity” that led the revolutionary missionaries of the highlands to emphasize trust, understanding, and good relations over violent enforcement of their ideology. Although they were committed to bringing about change in the highlands, they understood that this could be achieved only once they had been accepted. “Solidarity” was a method for infiltration. It was a local manifestation of Mao Zedong’s adage that guerilla tactics could be successful only if the guerilla was like a fish in the water of the local population (Salemink 1995, 288). Solidarity was also a method for military mobilization. The pawat’s detailed accounts of “everything for victory” in the highland resistance to first the French and then the Royal Lao Government affirms that solidarity was a first step and an ongoing technique

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in their success. Cultural change was part of attaining solidarity across ethnic lines. “Solidarity” is also a keyword in the presentation of the relation between the Lao and the Vietnamese nations. The border between the two slices through traditional Katu territory. This border has been described as “one of the few peaceful areas in Asia” (Hoang 2007, 9) and is officially described as “a border of fraternal friendship” (Evans and Rowley 1990, 67).15 It was negotiated under the principle of “strengthening the special solidarity and friendship” between the two nations (Hoang 2007, 10). If there are disagreements over some aspects of the border, these are a closely guarded secret. The “solidarity” espoused by Lao revolutionary “ethnography”—in which cultural differences are largely only mentioned in the process of being ­overcome—contrasts to the way difference was treated in French colonial ethnography. While both the French and the Viet Minh used a kind of methodological relativism to try to understand the ethnic minorities, and while both ultimately wanted to change them, the French always subordinated this effort to the goal of economic extraction from the highlands, while the Viet Minh were much more cautious, conducting an “ethnographic” infiltration of the highlands over a much longer period of time and consolidating solidarity first, before introducing changes (Salemink 1991). French colonial ethnography created a notion of upland uniqueness and an antipathy between uplanders and their lowland neighbors. In this storyline, the uplanders were fundamentally different, always on the verge of disappearing, and so were either doomed to destruction (as the plantation owners thought) or needed protection as well as guidance from their French protectors. The storyline of solidarity, such as that described in the pawat, by contrast emphasized the cooperation and mutuality between lowland and upland revolutionaries. If one of the strongest connotations of “solidarity” in the Lao political morality is fraternity between ethnic groups, it is also more than this. Even in my previous fieldwork in an entirely ethnic Lao village, the word “solidarity” was frequently evoked by ordinary farmers and officials alike (High 2006b). From building a local school to international relations, the word is used as a rallying term to enjoin people to work together for a common goal despite their differences. In this broad application, solidarity is a felt-thing of Lao politics, powerful as much for its absence as for its presence. People often find attaining solidarity a struggle (indeed “struggle” is another keyword in Lao political sentiments; see chapter 3). In the struggle for solidarity, it seems that what is sought is a certain emotional experience of being with others as much as any given material outcome. To act with solidarity is to find, accept, and exude a

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certain conviviality and warmth. It can mean sharing food, drink, and a dance. As the pawat recounted, once solidarity is attained, the mood should be fun, celebratory, and fraternal. The lam wong (L: dance in a circle) was adopted as a national dance and was taught to the highlanders by Party cadre. It has penetrated into the most intimate of family occasions, becoming a standard part of events such as weddings and funerals. Often a hot shot of rice whiskey has been forced on officials guests, such as anthropologists, with a one-word explanation that is also an offer that can’t be refused: samakkhii (L: solidarity). Solidarity is the mood and aesthetics of everyday socialism in Laos.

The Resettlement September 15, 2011. Wiphat is smoking his bamboo pipe behind me as I write. I can hear it burbling, and the smoke has already made a familiar haze around us both. As usual, he is cross-legged on the floor, leaning straightbacked toward the meter-long pipe resting on a plastic plate on the mat. The plate is filling with the tea-colored water leaking from the pipe. As the smoke gurgles through the water inside the pipe, the live coals flare up briefly. Other than this noise and the tapping of my keyboard, it is quiet. Most people have gone to the fields. The children are in school. My counterpart from the National University of Laos—who stayed this time one night to see that I had settled in adequately—has just left, the minivan easing gingerly up the still-damp road. The deserted main street of the village is visible to my right. I am aware of being nervous. I wonder how the welter of new things I am learning will ever coalesce. I am typing fast because Wiphat has told me so many things in just this first twenty-four hours. “He wants to be my everything,” I punch in. When I asked about employing a research assistant, he said he would do it. When I said I wanted to hear folktales, he said he would tell them. Before she left, my counterpart told me she thought Wiphat was very smart and capable. She had visibly enjoyed his rendition of the story he had already told me in 2009: how he had led his people down from the mountains and bargained hard for a good deal in their resettlement. “Village histories” are a standard part of bureaucratic fact-finding visits to villages in Laos. Someone like Wiphat could be expected to tell his “village history” dozens of times a year. But Wiphat transformed this tired genre. When I said that I wanted to know about village history in detail, Wiphat rested his pipe against the balustrades of the balcony and went inside. He emerged a moment later with a hardcover book. It was a handwritten village

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chronicle. Wiphat recorded in it things his father had told him about the history of the village and also—in much greater detail—the village resettlement that he had played a key role in orchestrating, as well as subsequent events. I worked on my understanding of the village chronicle with Wiphat for several days. In seven sessions with him, I amassed 215 minutes of audio recordings. Below, I summarize Wiphat’s version of how he led the people of Kandon out of the mountains, before turning to some other perspectives on the resettlement. The chronicle begins with the flood myth (chapter 1). It then tells how the descendants of Grandfather Dog and Grandmother Mek settled in a succession of ten village sites. Wiphat explained, “From the great flood until 1964, this has been but one village.” These sites are listed by the name of the water source, and all of the sites are still known today in Old Kandon territory. The first date to appear in the village chronicle is the twelfth lunar month of 1964, the second day of the harvest festival—the day when the bombs rained down on the village across the valley for the first time, prompting the villagers to disperse into hiding. In 1968, the Party asked Kandon residents to come together out of their hiding places in the forest to aid the cadre in offering state services. However, during war conditions, a full consolidation of the village would have created food shortages. So at first the villages formed three baan obphanyob (L: refugee villages), then in 1976 Kandon was reconsolidated into two villages: Small Kandon and Large Kandon. According to Wiphat, the postwar period was marred by extreme poverty.16 Although the socialist cadre had promised much, little was delivered after the revolution. Children in Kandon could hope to study only for two years of primary school in the village. Wiphat said, “All we had was manioc and corn, but it was never enough: perhaps it would last for three months. Buffalo and cows grew well, but it was forty miles to the closest city over rugged slopes. The soil was no good for crops and never had been.” By 1974, Wiphat was a father. By the time I met him, he’d fathered nineteen children. Ten of them died in Old Kandon. Wiphat despaired about his remaining children. According to him, the Party responded to his request for improvements with the reply, “If you stay in the mountains, we cannot help you.” In 1993, the then district chief personally hiked to Kandon village to speak about the central government’s resettlement policy. The village chronicle records the date of the chief ’s arrival as July 26, 1993. From this point in the chronicle, document numbers, names of official post holders, and statistics are frequent. The district chief visited both Kandon village sites and spoke with the council of elders who led the villages at that time. According to Wiphat,

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the elders were not interested in the chief ’s offer: “They said, ‘We have always lived here, and we are fine—there are people here who are eighty years old. We know how to live here.’ They were not worried about the children’s future, they only thought of themselves.” Disturbed by this response, Wiphat secretly wrote to the district chief. By that time Wiphat had left his work in the canton and was acting as village Party secretary. He described his letter as a kham hong (L: request) that said, “We are poor, we are short of food, so now as the head of this region I suggest you organize a resettlement for us. We want a flat area— in a plateau or valley. We don’t want to live in this place anymore.” The district chief sent this request to the central government. On June 23, 1995, almost a year after his original letter, Wiphat received news that his request had been approved on condition that the people ceased swidden cultivation in favor of wet rice production and gardening. Wiphat thought these conditions were reasonable: after all, swiddening had never been particularly successful in Kandon territories. He still had not told anyone else in Kandon about his request. On June 29, Wiphat let just three people in the village know about his plans. The first two agreed with the plan, the third did not. On September 21, Wiphat told a further twenty-one people in the village, all Party members (two of them were women). In the chronicle, they are noted as sahaay (L: comrades). Again, the news received a mixed response, with some people in support and others against. On the morning of September 28, Wiphat received a letter from the province offering a specific plot of land in Thateeng District, a few days’ walk down into the Sekong valley. Two days later he gathered the heads of the village households and announced the offer, which also included twenty sheets of iron roofing per household, a rice allowance for six months in the first year and for three months in the second, and transport to the new village for the elderly, the very young, and the pregnant. Wiphat and another village official collected the information requested by the district about both Kandon sites. They estimated that at this stage about 85 percent of the villagers consented to the move. A delegation of Kandon men traveled to the provincial offices on October 12, 1995. They were welcomed there “like relatives,” according to Wiphat’s narrative, including being feted at the provincial governor’s home. The men returned to report to the rest of Kandon that they had confidence in the proposal from the province. On November 26, the Kandon Party Cell and National Front members set out on foot, arriving three days later at the rural development office of Sekong Province. The next day they inspected the parcel of land that had been offered to them: Tok Lok. Some had worked there before the

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war as seasonal laborers or had traded there for raw cotton. During the war, Tok Lok had been the site of significant fighting. By 1992, only fifty people remained in the village. These people were relocated that year to join with a large settlement by the road that leads from Thateeng to Sekong, the capital. According to Wiphat, the dissenters in Kandon who did not want to move were a selfish minority. Wiphat claims that this minority took part in the resettlement in the end because, being of such small numbers, they feared living in the old site would be unsustainable once the majority of people left. Also, the district made clear that the offer of land and building supplies was only valid for those who volunteered to move in the first wave: those who wanted to hang back to see how the resettlement transpired understood that they would in that case not be eligible for land or other forms of relocation assistance. In December 1995, the youth of the village, along with four leaders, walked to the Tok Lok site to clear the sixty hectares on which temporary swidden fields would be established and the temporary housing constructed. The following February, they walked back to Old Kandon. On March 5, 1996, the final village festival was held in the old sites. The buffalo sacrifices at that event informed the local territory spirits of the impending move of the entire village. In that first year, the settlers cultivated one hundred hectares of swidden (mainly corn) in private family groups at Tok Lok while they worked on establishing wet rice fields through collective labor. They lived in the three temporary houses while building the separate family homes that were required under the settlement scheme and supported with allowances of corrugated iron.17 By April, each family had its own house and fields. The village chronicle goes on to record that a Japanese anthropologist, Futoshi Nishimoto, arrived on November 28, 2000; a Japanese aid agency delivered water pumps and built some latrines; an educational nongovernmental organization gave school equipment to the children; a primary school was built in 1999–2000, and was then extended, and followed by a complete middle school; a large dam and irrigation were installed; electricity was provided by the rubber company; and, during the course of my own fieldwork, piped water was installed and a health-care center approved. New Kandon (the official name of Tok Lok) is a village on display, and the dirt road that leads there from the highway is plied by officials, researchers, study groups, and even the occasional tourist. After resettlement, Wiphat was given a free operation to cure his cleft lip by an international aid project. Wiphat spoke eagerly of how the village had benefited from various projects and of his plans to convince the province to provide yet more assistance, such as an all-weather road. He said,

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People say I must have idthiphon [L: influence or power of some kind]. But it is not so! It is just that I sanoe [L: make a suggestion] and I am able to get a good response: not because of influence, but because I conform to the requests made by san thoeng [L: the level above]. These other villages, when the government sang [L: orders] them to do something, they don’t do it. But then they sanoe [L: suggest] the government do something for them! It is like a parent: if a parent orders you to do something, you do it. If my children don’t do what I tell them to, won’t I get angry?18

So where was this story leading? I asked Wiphat what he wanted for the future of New Kandon, and he replied, “I want to make this a small mueang [L: township] with everything—a market, a health clinic, sealed roads.” As I was finalizing my fieldwork in 2018, it looked like there was a good chance of this eventuating: the national “Three Builds” project had identified Kandon as a potential “small town,” and town planning was underway for a hospital, a high school, a market, banks, and sealed roads to surrounding villages.

Shadow History I heard from other villagers that New Kandon was initially haunted by Lao and Vietnamese soldiers killed there during the war. When the Kandon settlers first moved to Tok Lok the ghosts “ate” them, causing many deaths in the early years of the resettlement. There was also a phii ahak (L: local guardian spirit) in Tok Lok, but the new settlers had not continued its cult. It was only after several years and dozens of deaths, when neighboring villages suggested that the phii ahak was either causing the deaths or failing to prevent them from happening, that the cult was revived. When I double-checked this with Wiphat, he told me that fourteen people had died from such attacks. He called it a “tax” for starting a new village in their area: “For sure if you start a new village they will ‘eat’ you. When they have eaten their fill, it is finished.” Other people gave figures of sixty to eighty causalities. This amounted to 10 percent of the population. The symptoms were fever and sudden death, and the victims were people of all ages. In response, village leaders organized an exorcism to clear the village grounds.19 The names of key actors, dates, and document numbers for this exorcism are recorded in detail in Wiphat’s village history book, although the epidemics and details of the deaths are omitted. I found these out from other people. The first time I asked Wiphat about deaths during and after the reloca-

Who Are the Katu? : 49

tion, he replied enthusiastically, “Yes! There was death on the road.” By chance, at that moment he was sitting with the younger brother of a boy who had died of measles while hiking to Tok Lok during the resettlement. Wiphat explained that the boy and two other children had died of measles on the road to Tok Lok, and that the measles had been introduced to the old site by some residents after a trading trip to Vietnam. Wiphat bristled at the implication that resettlement itself was the cause of these deaths: Contagious measles! If we had not moved to Tok Lok then many more would have died of it. It was a contagion from Vietnam. You want to hear about dying? How about in the year 1953, when in a village of six hundred, eighty people died in a cholera epidemic. In 1955, it came again and killed fifty. This happened every few years up there in the mountains. And every few months someone would die of malaria. There were only about six hundred people in the village at its largest.20 Now here in Tok Lok there are over one thousand. I had nineteen children but ten died of things like malaria and diarrhea. Since the relocation, none have died. My other children would not have died if we had been living here.

I had read a publication by Futoshi Nishimoto (2010b) that noted that cholera had plagued the village in the first years in Tok Lok. When I asked Wiphat about it, he explained that, indeed, the water supply had been contaminated. However, in conceding this he quickly turned it into a success story: “We were used to drinking pure mountain water! So, we got sick. But I tried and tried, in 1999 we got the water pumps drilled down.” In his representations to me, at least in these early days, it seemed he could acknowledge the setbacks and sufferings that the relocation had entailed only as a foil for subsequent successes, or as a separate issue that stood outside the flow of village history as he told it. By contrast, these deaths, epidemics, and sufferings were the focus of Canphon’s version of events. It was Canphon who led the group of eighty-seven Kandon residents out of Tok Lok on January 5, 2001, to return to the old site. They pooled money to hire a truck to take them to the district capital of Kaleum and hiked from there. Canphon pointed to a variety of problems in Tok Lok: poverty, sickness, and the young people were troublesome. He said, “We can’t do caloen [L: modernity].” A younger man whom I interviewed in Old Kandon also pointed to the poverty of Tok Lok: “There were problems with ploughing the field. There was no equipment. I can’t live with phoen [L: them; colloquially, the ­Party-state].

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We gave it five years and we were still poor! Now it is quite comfortable over there in Tok Lok, but it is poor here. Back then we were poor in Tok Lok. I couldn’t stand it! All we had to eat was unripe bananas. We were so poor!” But poverty was not the cause of their problems—it was a symptom. This man and others I spoke to in Old Kandon immediately raised the name of kinuh when explaining why things went so badly for them in Tok Lok. The food shortages, social decay, epidemics, and deaths were caused by kinuh. I was able to visit the kinuh stone when I was in Old Kandon in 2011. The stone is only a few yards from the village fence. Kinuh manifests in thousands of thin red termite-like creatures that emerge from the stone to consume the horns of a white buffalo. This offering used to take place once a year, but it has not been resumed by the returnees, who say they are too poor. The termites are considered vile. A young woman shivered visibly when she spoke of them. Kinuh is also able to take the form of people and animals (usually a dog or tiger). Offences to the kinuh include adultery and children conceived out of wedlock, moving away from the area, changing one’s way of life, not showing respect in the vicinity of the stone, and “moving to Tok Lok.” When the spirit is offended, multicolored flashing fireballs emerge from the stone and—if the problem is not addressed—Kandon people will fall ill one after another, with colds, coughs, or diarrhea. It is clear that kinuh has caused these when the village as a group is affected, not merely individuals. Eventually, people will die unless the problem is resolved. Now that the eighty-seven returnees have moved back to the old site by kinuh’s stone, they and the ones who remain in Tok Lok no longer suffer these epidemics. Kinuh protects Kandon villagers, such as during the dangerous work of opening up a new swidden field. It resists physical and supernatural attacks from other villages. One man said with pride that anyone planning to attack the Old Kandon would be deterred or killed by kinuh on their way and simply never arrive to bother them—perhaps kinuh would emerge as a tiger on their path or cause an avalanche on the steep slopes. He also reported that if soil from this village were to be dumped in another, everyone in the other area would die. Another gave the example of the American bombing, attributing the miraculous lack of damage in the area to kinuh: “Kinuh did not give permission for the bombs to destroy this village.” Kinuh, he said, had never been defeated. Another resident pointed out that this village is a great producer of children and pigs. Crops do not thrive here, but kinuh tends to the fertility of people and animals. Old Kandon is a sort of seed village, sprouting the popu-

Who Are the Katu? : 51

lations that move to establish new villages. Just a few months before we had this conversation, thirty people had left Old Kandon to establish another village called Small Kandon (see chapter 4 for an account of this split). When the returnees departed Tok Lok in 2001 they were just eighty-seven. Now there are 150 living in Old Kandon, even after the recent split with Small Kandon. Kinuh was responsible for this fertility. When I visited in 2011, news had arrived in Old Kandon that there was a renewed plan by the district to resettle them to a Focal Village. Residents had inauspicious dreams, and the fireballs started spitting from the rock again, a warning of kinuh’s displeasure at the plan. Canphon said, They say our village is too small: we need to go to the Focal Site Village to get development. But if we all go we will die. Kinuh will kill us. I want development here. Or, failing that, no development, but staying here. If the government says we have to move again then we will. But I am afraid. Eighty people died when we moved to Tok Lok. If we move again, we are afraid kinuh will attack us. The government assured us that that was not the reason so many fell ill and died. But kinuh wants us to stay to live together with it. It does not want to be left behind.

These are the kinds of comments Canphon would make in convivial moments during my visit to his mountain home. In the noise and smoke of the great party he hosted when I visited in 2012, he said he would tell me the history of the village the next morning, indicating he had interesting things to say. However, when the appointed time came he refused. He said that I had already collected data from the village chief about events since the return, and Wiphat had already told me the story of what happened before that. Not insignificantly, Wiphat was present at this moment. Wiphat reminded me of the hours we had spent going over his handwritten village chronicle in Tok Lok covering the period “from the time of Grandmother Mek and Grandfather Dog up to now, so what more is there to tell?” Canphon assured me that Wiphat’s history was accurate and therefore there was nothing else to say. Wiphat’s constant reminder to me as he taught me village history was that “no one else would be able to tell you village history like this. No one else would remember.” His narration not only placed Kandon as a uniquely successful village but also himself as the unique agent of these achievements and uniquely able to speak about them. By contrast, Canphon did not place his faith in a glorious future but rather

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hoped to restore something of the past. He did not present himself as an agent creating a new future but as a subject following the dictates of more powerful entities, kinuh chief among them, but also the state. Canphon by no means considered himself an outlaw, and while I was there he displayed his many symbols of state loyalty. He said that he requested permission from the district chief to return to the old site and claimed that this was granted on the proviso that Canphon establish a full administrative body with roles such as village chief, Women’s Union, and so on. I was later able to speak to the civil servant who oversaw the first three years of the resettlement to the new site from 1996 to 1999 and who is now the deputy district chief. He strongly denied that any permission was granted to Canphon to return. Wiphat was with me at the time and laughed dismissively, saying, “Who would grant permission for that?” He then turned to the deputy district chief and said, “They still observe the old taboos.” He told him how, when we were at the old site, we had been tabooed from leaving the village one day because the paths had just been cleared for the rice harvest that was to follow in a couple of days: if we walked on the path the spirit of the rice would take fright and “even if the harvest is large it won’t be enough to eat.” A further taboo would be imposed after we left for the first three days of the rice harvest. Wiphat reported this to the deputy district chief, saying, “They follow the old taboos and they are short of rice. Me, though, I no longer follow the taboos and I have plenty of rice!” Wiphat portrayed his way of life in his resettlement village as a model of how “eradicating” the old ways while participating in state-backed projects can achieve the widely shared Lao goal of economic development. The story he told to me in those early days, and to so many of the people that visited New Kandon, was a stirring one in which a heroic people lifted themselves out of backwardness by fighting off foreign oppressors, forging solidarity with lowland comrades, and taking up Lao Party-state guidance, including the selective “eradication” of “superstitions.” I saw Wiphat’s story generate a kind of joy in outsiders, fellow Lao citizens, and I wondered if this was because they were eager to hear about success in a context in which success is constantly promised but tacitly considered unlikely. But Wiphat’s story lost its coherence the longer I stayed in Kandon. I was at Wiphat’s house on the first day of his rice harvest and saw firsthand that some taboos were observed, albeit not on a village but on a household level. Also, it is not inconsequential that Wiphat has—in contravention of the national law—three wives, two of whom were obtained as debt payments by his father, and he has obtained wives for two of his sons by the same illegal method.

Who Are the Katu? : 53

He is vocal in defense of saadsanaa phii (L: spirit religion), vigorously dismissing Party-line claims that it is merely the “younger brother” to Buddhism. He notes—correctly—that many Buddhists also venerate spirits and that the Lao language is scattered with references to phii in a way that is not so for references to phud (L: the Buddha), which surely indicated that spirit religion was “elder brother.” That said, though, he described Canphon’s appeals to the power of kinuh as overblown: kinuh would leave the people alone if the people left kinuh alone. Another Kandon man in Tok Lok dismissed Canphon’s statements about kinuh as “lies” constructed as a convenient cover for Canphon’s own poor economic decision making: times were tough in the first years of resettlement, he explained, and Canphon had given up too easily and was now trying to justify this mistake by an appeal to the spirit world. There was a struggle going on in Kandon, then, over the telling of history. People cared what I heard, and it was the subject of some forthright manipulation. Was resettlement a success or a tragic failure? Were the deaths caused by resettlement itself? Or ghosts? Or kinuh? At the time of my research, this struggle was being dominated by Wiphat’s version. These competing stories did have some common elements. First, all of them were stories told to outsiders. There was a self-conscious performative element about all of them that revealed the care taken to manage how Kandon appeared. Second, they coalesced on emphasizing the wondrous nature of Kandon. They carried on the story, which long preceded resettlement, of Kandon as a place and people of exceptional power and capability. Third, they were phrased largely in the metalanguage provided by Lao socialism.

3

Welcome to Kandon, Culture Village

Wiphat had been talking for days about a group he was expecting from suun kaang (L: the center), a crew from the National Television Station who were making a documentary to promote domestic tourism to the three southern provinces. New Kandon had been suggested to the crew by the tourism office. Soon after arriving, the crew asked Wiphat if he could wear traditional clothing for the camera. Wiphat agreed, although he explained that he could not give a tour of the village in costume, because it is taboo to leave one’s house at this time of year in those clothes; the outfit is reserved for festivals. He was, however, able to be interviewed upstairs in his house while in costume. Somewhat abashed at this restriction of his ability to yield to his guests’ request, Wiphat explained that he and his covillagers had discarded 80 percent of their traditions, but 20 percent remained, and this 20 percent had to be taken seriously because “the traditions we could not throw away are the ones that make us sick.” He jokingly said that he could wear traditional costume out of the house if the documentary crew would be willing to pay for the sacrifice of a buffalo to appease the spirits afterward. This raised some good-natured laughs and an assurance that a tour of the village in normal clothes would be absolutely fine. Wiphat rummaged in the wardrobe where he kept cloth and heirlooms. Joining us on the front porch, he wrapped a cloth around his head, saying it was “from my father’s time, not mine.” He wrapped around his chest a blanket woven for him by his favorite wife, and around his waist a loincloth she had beaded for him. While this was taking place, the filmmakers asked to interview me about my research. I agreed but found myself tongue-tied, camera-shy, and embarrassed when they began to film. Wiphat, by contrast, gave a formidable performance. Confirming first that the camera was rolling, he gave a respectful Lao greeting, “Sabaay dii,” and launched into his polished version of village history: the poverty the village

54

Welcome to Kandon, Culture Village : 55

had faced in the mountains, the decision to resettle, and the commendable changes that had come about as a result, including food security, schooling, and health care. He delivered this speech entirely in Lao. When he had finished, the man interviewing him said, “You should do that for a living—you were very professional [he used the English word]. I was not brave enough to ask any questions.” Indeed, the entire interview had unfolded as one long, uninterrupted monologue. The only question posed had been from Wiphat himself, when he asked at the start if the cameras were rolling. We ate a meal that had been prepared by the group of houses that were rostered on to cater for guests that day. The camera kept rolling, although information about how the meal was organized was not a focus. The focus instead was on the women whose turn it was to serve the meal, specifically how they washed our hands and offered us bamboo toothpicks: this was a beautiful tradition, the crew commented. Over lunch, Wiphat told us that it had been his idea to establish Kandon as a Culture Village. He had heard on the radio about a Kantu village in Salavan Province that had achieved the title, so he went there by public bus and found out from locals how to do the same. In 2008, Kandon became the first certified Culture Village in Sekong Province. We walked to the cinaar (ceremonial hall). Wiphat drew attention to the carvings of Grandmother Mek and Grandfather Dog, giving a rough outline for the camera of the story of the flood. A carving of a young man, Wiphat explained, was an eligible young bachelor. The chickens underneath him represented the two-footed animals that are the gift from a woman’s relatives to those of her husband. A buffalo carving represented the gift given by a husband’s relatives to those of his wife. There was also a carving of a pig, and Wiphat explained that the revolutionary party discouraged extravagant ritual, so it became acceptable to offer only a pig instead of a buffalo as a four-footed animal wedding gift. Near the exit, he drew attention to the carvings of wild animals. He said that these are animals that used to be hunted but now the Kantu people protect them so that the children will have a chance to see them. He pointed out a carving of a monkey holding a coconut and explained that a monkey can hold a coconut all day but not figure out how to open it. This carving reminded the Kantu that they must use knowledge if they are to be able to make the most of what they have.1 The remaining highlights of the village tour were a waterfall on the outskirts and some carved coffins that had been prepared for eminent elderly men in the village. The film crew seemed delighted as they departed. Television segments about New Kandon are made almost annually. New Kandon is also featured in museum displays, magazines, and guided tours.

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This degree of recognition sets New Kandon apart from regular villages in Laos. Wiphat proudly described his village as “a little bit famous.” New Kandon could hardly be described as a bustling hub of tourism, but it did attract regular attention in the form of accolades, official visits, and media reports. Kandon village is my second field site in Laos. My first was an ordinary wet rice-farming village in Champassak (High 2014). Although the people at my first field site were native Lao speakers and part of the ethnic majority, my fieldwork with them felt more adventurous than working in New Kandon. At my first field site, I was a novelty. In New Kandon, I was just one of a series of researchers. New Kandon residents had already worked with two anthropologists (one for three years, another for only fleeting visits), one linguist, a master’s degree student studying nutrition, as well as a host of whistle-stop study tours. Wiphat in particular was familiar with talking to these and other visitors, and seemed to be in his element when answering questions about “history” or “meaning” and the other peculiar things researchers tend to ask about. By contrast, at my first field site, such questions had only raised confused smiles. Wiphat had firmly positioned himself as the mediator between outsiders like me and Kandon village, even in those periods when he was not serving as village chief. All of the cars that arrived carrying visitors pulled up first at his house. He had unusually good skills at spoken Lao, and furthermore, his version of village history seemed to leave his audience joyous. Part of my focus in this chapter is on what Elizabeth Povinelli has called the “affective, and not simply discursive and institutional dimensions” (2002, 25) of cultural politics and political culture. I consider the sentiments of cultural policy in Laos and also Wiphat’s attempts to gain recognition as successful within its peculiar terms. In subsequent chapters I will describe the cracks and fissures in this display that became apparent as my fieldwork went on, but to understand these cracks it is important first to understand the façade. It is also important to understand the prominence that is given to façades in Lao politics. In the English-speaking world, façades are often held in a kind of contempt because deliberate displays seem inauthentic, and authenticity is a key legitimizing strategy in attaining recognition under liberalism’s multiculturalism. However, authenticity is not such a central concern in Lao cultural politics. Instead, struggle and self-improvement are central to ideas of culture, so there is less of a tendency to view thoughtful effort on the part of ethnicities as contrivance or loss of culture, and more room to praise it as a model to be emulated. Wiphat was well informed about the Lao political field. He understood his fluency in Lao socialist concepts—what I have termed its metalanguage— as setting him apart from the majority of his covillagers. He commented to me

Welcome to Kandon, Culture Village : 57

ruefully when I was researching the topic that even though Kandon was now a certified Culture Village, most people there did not know what culture was because they had not studied the government policies. He explained that there was no Kantu word that translated easily for the Lao word wadthanatham.2 He said that the best way to say “Culture Village” in the Kantu language would be “wiil wii wan arr nok,” meaning, roughly, a village that has useful things, that is, perhaps, a prosperous village. But Wiphat was dissatisfied with this rendering, and his conclusion was that there was no Kantu concept of culture. For Wiphat, culture was a Lao concept that he had learned through the study of Lao policy. Wiphat’s knowledge of culture was part of the way he presented himself as no ordinary villager, just as he presented New Kandon itself as no ordinary village. Kandon village had collected a number of titles attesting to its outstanding achievements. Not only was it a certified Culture Village, it was also a certified Peaceful Village, Developed Village, Model Healthy Village, and—as I will discuss in the next chapter—Open Defecation Free Village. I asked Wiphat what was the point of all of these titles. Surely being peaceful, cultured, healthy, developed, and free of open defecation are benefits in themselves. What extra benefit is entailed in attaining certification?3 He explained immediately that the benefit lay in being seen to follow the policies of the suun kaang (L: center), the province and the district. To get their help, it paid to be certified as following policy. Wiphat explained excitedly, They give certificates! See, my cupboard is full of them. If you want a water supply, they won’t give it to you. You want a school? They won’t give it to you. But if you follow their policies, collect their titles and certificates, then they will give you what you ask for. I have had study groups from seven provinces come and ask me how I do it. The National University of Laos too. I tell them, “We can do a lot ourselves, but for what we can’t do, we need the government. To get them to help us, we follow the plans of the district and the [central] government.”

Wiphat freely confirmed here that decisions about state service provision in Laos are made not on the basis of need or a principle of equal access but on the basis of political evaluation as part of a quid pro quo deal: political obedience is rendered in return for services. This echoes the concerns raised by many development workers, who often report that they sense that they are introduced only to villages favored by district and provincial staff, not those that are the neediest. In one anecdote I heard, some nongovernmental organization

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workers offering to build a health clinic were taken only to a series of villages that already had such clinics. Mine is not a study of such development dilemmas, and I am unable to either confirm or refute this anecdote. For my purposes, it is sufficient to note that obedience in return for state services is at least thought to be effective and is part of the political culture, at least in Kandon. The results of this are visible in the physical structure of New Kandon, which shows the results of conforming to and benefiting from policy-based conceptions of development. Houses are raised on stilts and organized in rows along a road, just as is required in policy (where this style of house is called “permanent”), and unlike traditional Kantu villages, which are circles of longhouses closed off by a fence. A loudspeaker system was wired up throughout the village and made regular announcements in the morning and afternoon. A hall (the “palace of culture”) had been built to display heirloom pieces.4 The village was wired for electricity and had several water hand pumps, and while I was there piped water was installed. New Kandon housed a primary and a middle school. These are remarkable achievements in rural Laos, where even basic service provision is patchy. When the documentary team arrived to film “culture” in this village, they did not find nor were they seeking pristine exotic specimens, something they might imagine as untouched by modernity. Quite the opposite: what the camera wanted was a kind of forward-looking optimism where there were no regrets at what had been left behind and where a careful attention was being paid to the best path into the future. This implied not a wholesale destruction of Kantu heritage but rather a judicious selection in which only the best was kept and the rest was discarded. For instance, the cameras dwelt on the “beautiful tradition” of washing guests’ hands and offering them toothpicks precisely because this was not an authentic Kantu tradition. In prerevolutionary Kantu villages, taboos meant that guests were not welcomed inside homes. They were directed to a separate shelter built outside the village perimeter where they could make their own meals and had a place to sleep. When the socialist cadre started to infiltrate highlands villages, this restriction on hospitality was one of the first targets for change. Cadres relied on the hospitality of the highlanders. Thus, when the cameras dwelt on contemporary Kandon women washing guests’ hands, it was a way of dwelling on their exemplary change and receptivity rather than on an enduring cultural alterity. It is such receptivity to the new ways of thinking in the modern era that is understood as “culture” in contemporary Lao policies. I will draw out this particular understanding of culture now by looking more closely at the policies that guide the certification of people, households, and villages as cultured in contemporary Laos.

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The Definition of “Culture” in Culture Village Policy Under the 1991 constitution, the principle of “unity and equality among all ethnic groups” and “the right to protect, preserve and promote the fine customs and cultures of their own tribes and of the nation” is enshrined (article 8). The state appoints itself as the protector and promoter of “fine” national and ethnic traditions and heritage but also commits to “accepting selected progressive cultures from around the world” (article 23). The Culture Village policy was initiated in 1994 under a directive emerging from the Central Party titled “Directive 9: The Ideas and Work Tasks of the Modern Times.” This directive gave instructions to the Ministry of Information and Culture, and particularly the Department of Culture within that ministry, to develop a cultural policy. This department prepared detailed instructions on how to “build people, families and villages of culture” for provincial and district authorities. The first “Culture Village” was announced in 1996: an ethnic Lao village in Bokeo Province. Another followed in 1998. At the time of my research there were over two thousand villages in Laos, both urban and rural, that had attained the title. The Culture Village policy documents understand culture in two forms: sing thii dii ngaam (L: fine or desirable things) and sing thii bo dii ngaam (L: undesirable things). Desirable culture is to be preserved, revived, and celebrated as the foundation for national identity and economic development. There is an oft-quoted saying in this regard: sia wadthanatham sia saat (L: to lose culture is to lose the nation). Sing thii bo dii ngaam (L: undesirable things) include things like superstitions, backwardness, or ignorance that are to be discarded because they are harmful to development. Grant Evans and Vatthana Pholsena, in different ways, both argue that the tension between preservation and development in the Lao definition of culture is a “paradox” (Evans 1985, 143) or a “contradiction” (Pholsena 2006a, 64). Culture policies seem to have the aim of both dissolving distinctive practices and preserving them. This apparent contradiction seems less paradoxical when the current English-language tendency to associate culture with difference and authenticity is relinquished. The Lao association of culture instead is with improvement, eclecticism, and the struggle to cultivate the very best, both old and new. In this way, it is more similar to the way culture is sometimes used as verb in English to mean the act of growing, nurturing, and tending to the life of something.

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A pamphlet on Culture Villages held in Wiphat’s private collection explains that cultured individuals “love the nation, love the new system, love the village of their birth . . . [and] firmly believe in the guidance of the Party.” They are virtuous, diligent, and active in the community, particularly in the field of preserving culture. They are observant of the law; display solidarity; enjoy learning, knowledge, and self-improvement; and are good citizens. The pamphlet explained that to be cultured a household must have a “permanent” house (that is, a house in the Lao style); a reasonable, legal form of livelihood; democracy, solidarity, and mutual respect within the home; children who are clean, respectful, and who attend to their studies; desirable traditions, having discontinued undesirable ones and discarded superstition; and solidarity within the family and with the wider village and district. Cultured families must also possess radios, television sets, and other forms of entertainment. When 70 percent of households in a village have been certified as cultured, then the village can consider applying for certification as a Culture Village. In addition to a cultured population, cultured villages must have infrastructure such as a community hall, a library, a place to keep and display heirlooms, a newsroom, a loudspeaker system for announcements, an arts troupe, and interest groups such as sports and literary circles. The village must actively preserve and promote its desirable heritage while eradicating superstitions “completely.” The village must have a reasonable and improving standard of living, falling illiteracy, increasing cleanliness, and environmental protections. Finally, the village must have strong mass organizations, such as a Party cell and a Women’s Union. The village will also ideally have obtained other certifications, such as a safe village, clean village, and so on. The distinction between desirable and undesirable things is taken as selfevident in policy documents and statements made by decision makers in Vientiane: quite literally, it was explained to me that to be cultured was to have good things, and to have good things was to be cultured, while bad things were to be eradicated. I interviewed Dr. Sipheng of the Ministry of Information, Culture, and Tourism, a key architect of the Culture Village policy discussed. He was pictured on the cover of Sekong Today among the dignitaries assembled for the announcement of New Kandon as Culture Village. He was pictured on the far left: tall, slim, and impeccably dressed in a white shirt and a pencil moustache. In his Vientiane office, he told me that a cultured person was, quite simply, a good person. It was imperative to create good people because “you can only build a wealthy economy if you have good people. What is a good person? A good person is a person who has culture.” The Culture Village policies, he said, were not only preserving what was good domestically but also

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“adopting the best of culture in the world, from the international communities, of all the countries, adopting the parts that are good, the ones that are correct, and we are mixing them with Lao culture in order to achieve an advanced culture.” When I pressed Sipheng to define what he meant by “goodness” or “desirable things,” he spoke of being polite, having a good heart, having qualities, and of improvement. When I asked him to articulate the benefits of the culture policy, he spoke of promoting harmony, peace, safety, hygiene, unity, and toen ton (L: awareness), and of promoting love among people for one another and for their traditions and the nation. He also spoke of encouraging people to take charge of their own self-improvement. When I asked Dr. Sipheng about undesirable things, he was much more specific. He said, They believe in ghosts and spirits, they hold those ceremonies which are related to treating sick people, they kill a buffalo to sacrifice it to the spirits, for instance . . . . Some people are very poor, but they still have to do it, so they borrow other people’s buffalo. I am not sure whether the sick people will be cured this way, and some people even die. So, this is not working. Therefore, this problem is considered to be one that affects the economy. We have been dealing with this problem for a long time by trying to eliminate beliefs that are not good, that is, the ones that would affect the economy.

Indeed, many of the old ways have been abandoned in New Kandon. According to Wiphat, the socialist cadre began pressuring the village to abandon what they called “superstition” from the earliest days of Kandon’s involvement with the movement. “With the rituals, they asked us to reduce it. They did not let it be high. If you were going to ritually kill a buffalo, kill a pig or a goat instead. If you were going to ritually kill a pig or goat, kill a chicken. They did not tell us to abandon our beliefs in spirits altogether, but they restricted them. They did not permit big celebrations. Before, the rituals were really a heavy burden on us. Since 1996, we have thim [L: thrown out] 80 percent of the rituals.” On one level, obviously, everyone agrees that desirable things should be pursued and undesirable things reduced, but it is equally obvious that people diverge precisely on the question of what is desirable and what is not. This allows a perhaps unintentional measure of flexibility in the Culture Village policies. For instance, while Dr. Sipheng spoke to me explicitly of buffalo sacrifice as an undesirable superstition, this selfsame practice was described by Wiphat as unusually effective and necessary. Buffalo sacrifice was part of the 20 percent

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of traditions that he spoke of to the film crew that the people of Kandon are not free to throw away because if they did they would be sick. Wiphat spoke to me with pride about how illnesses that befuddled staff at the Sekong hospital, rendering doctors unable to offer even a diagnosis let alone treatment, were treated effectively after a medium named both the cause and the correct sacrifice to affect a cure. Kandon knowledge about the efficacy of ritual killing for healing was a source of pride for Wiphat. There are other examples of this kind of deliberate misrecognition between Vientiane and the village. For instance, I saw a Kantu politician from Kaleum give a stirring speech in Kandon just before the annual village festival. He was energetically trying to educate the residents on what it meant to be a Culture Village. Culture, he said, was things that were thuek tong (L: correct), and among the examples he gave were the way that people in Kandon spoke their own language, smoked pipes, and made marriages. But all of these have been subject to pressure for change, or at least to repugnance by Lao authorities. For instance, while children regularly smoke the sweetened tobacco pipes and speak Kandon language at home, they are forbidden to do these things at school. The Lao schoolteachers stationed in the village made a point of showing their repugnance at the rooms thick with smoke that characterize Kantu gettogethers and would cough delicately at the fumes. Furthermore, marriage has been a key area for reform, with polygyny, debt marriages, arranged (nonconsensual) marriages, and child marriages all now illegal in Laos, although still practiced in Kandon. The removal of girls from school, which happens routinely after marriage, is also the subject of official discouragement and disapproval. Nevertheless, with the toehold of ambiguity introduced by the eversubjective distinction of desirable from undesirable things, Kandon residents were able to continue with much that was found repugnant by Lao authorities while still being held up as a model village. Misrecognition has a functional role in Lao cultural politics, allowing people with very divergent views to demonstrate at least a façade of solidarity that is itself highly valued. Dr. Sipheng’s statements, and the policy documents that he was so instrumental in creating, as well as Wiphat’s inventive use of these on the ground in Kandon, are suggestive of a very specific concept of culture: as the conscious cultivation of the self and society in the name of ongoing improvement. Grant Evans (2005) has noted that this concept of culture has more in common with the evolutionary anthropology of the nineteenth century than the romantic, relativist understanding of culture that ultimately became dominant in European and North American thought. Edward Burnett Tylor, writing in 1871, understood culture as “that complex whole” comprised

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of all the “capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” as part of the “psychic unity of mankind” (Tylor 1958, 1). While everybody was thought to have culture, some groups were more advanced than others. Tylor thought that the study of culture would impress upon readers what he called “the doctrine of development,” that is, the immutable law that saw humans progress from one stage to the next (Tambiah 1990, 44). He felt that ethnography could contribute to the exposure of old beliefs that had degenerated into superstition, thereby aiding their destruction. This evolutionary approach informed the anthropology of Lewis Henry Morgan, whose understanding of the development of the family in turn had a strong influence on Engels and Marx. Evans noted that the foundational text for Vietnamese ethnographers and their Lao apprentices was Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1942), and that some might have also read Morgan (Evans 2005, 46). As a result, Vietnamese and Lao anthropology often uses a notion of stages through which social formations passed on their way to progress. For instance, during a speech given on June 15, 1981, Kaysone Phomvihane stated that people of the same blood originally lived together as clans, and as these multiplied they became joined together as a tribe. When this led to sufficient productivity, classes emerged, and as relationships became more complex, the group evolved into an ethnicity. Ethnicities first emerged during slavery, persisted into the feudal era, and were the basis of progress into a nation. Socialism was a continuation of the nationalist potentials of ethnicity, but rather than dividing the ethnicities in order to subjugate some peoples, as with feudalism and capitalism, socialism would proceed on the basis of equality and solidarity between the ethnicities (cited in Evans 1999, 168–171).5 Wadthana­ tham (L: culture) in Lao culture policies is best understood in these terms, as a part of the politics of culture under Lao socialism.

The Culture Village Policy, Compared So far, I have been using the term “Culture Village” as a direct translation of the Lao term baan wadthanatham. This rendering in English, however, may be cause for some confusion, because there are currently a large number of culture villages around the world. It is worth pausing a moment, then, to compare Lao Culture Villages with other forms found elsewhere. Even though the thread that connects them is tenuous (that is, the English term “culture village”), the way the meanings of “culture” shift between these various

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c­ ontexts is instructive for understanding the concept in Laos and the very particular politics of recognition that it entails. The first culture villages are those that I will refer to as “ethnic culture villages.” These have sprung up in nations such as Malaysia, China, and Indonesia where there is an interest in generating a sense of national unity out of multiple ethnicities. These culture villages are usually purpose-built open-air museums. Often, as in the case of the Shenzhen Chinese Folk Culture Villages (Stanley and Chung 1995), Taman Mini in Indonesia (Hitchcock 1995, 1998), and Mini Malaysia, the aim is to display a good part of the ethnic diversity of the nation in one location. Typical houses from a selection of minority groups are constructed, often by traditional craftsmen, in a purpose-built facility that is called a “village.” However, these kinds of culture villages have more in common with museums and theme parks than with everyday run-of-the-mill villages (see Dellios 2002; Hitchcock, Stanley, and Chung 2004; Hoffstaedter 2008).6 The focus is on displaying variations in architecture, dress, dance, handicrafts, and food under the umbrella of national unity. These provide a sanitized and curated display of the past, now nostalgically remembered from the vantage of a shared national modernity. The audience for this message is overwhelmingly domestic tourists.7 In South Africa (Marschall 2003) and some other settler nations (such as Canada), by contrast, a culture village is understood as a purpose-built tourist facility showcasing the traditional lifestyle of one particular indigenous group. I will refer to these as “indigenous culture villages” because of the way they turn on the uncomfortable question of how indigenous populations can be recognized in settler societies. These facilities are typically a simulation of what an indigenous village would have looked like at some point in the past prior to the full effects of colonialism. Paid employees wear traditional dress and undertake daily activities that are thought to have occurred in the past. Most of these facilities are privately run. In the case of South Africa, where the phenomenon seems most prevalent, the owners and managers are overwhelmingly white locals, while the people who display “culture” in the form of dancing, handicraft production, or daily activities are black African, and those who watch are mostly international (Jansen van Veuren 2001, 2003). It is this second form of culture village that partly inspired John and Jean Comaroff ’s Ethnicity, Inc. (2009), in which they argue that these represent a neoliberal commodification of culture and identity. Recognition in this case, they argue, comes from the marketplace. This requires branding and playing up the exotic in a dynamic in which authenticity is a key concern.

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The Culture Villages of Laos are distinct from the minority and indigenous culture villages in many respects, not least because they are not purposebuilt facilities. They are real villages. Their link to culture comes from a reference not to a lost past but to a possible future. This bears some similarity to the Mongolian People’s Republic’s “cultural campaigns,” in which changes in behavior were sought to introduce hygiene, universalize literacy, fight infectious disease, and end feudalism (Stolpe 2008, 62).8 Culture was understood as an improvement that required an eclectic mix of the very best from at home and abroad. A similar eclecticism is lauded in Lao Cultural Villages through certification and celebration. I term the Lao variety of culture villages “exemplary culture villages.” These villages are cultural in the sense that they are models of how to live well. This term is inspired by Børge Bakken’s discussion of China as an “exemplary society” (2000, 176) in which what is valued is the manifestation of a virtuous behavior. The behavior does not need to be internalized and sincere because the parading of virtue is itself a virtue, as it spreads the example, even in cases where this is not followed through internally: “It is openly admitted that the exemplary display is ‘acted’ behaviour” (Bakken 2000, 176).

Authenticity I will return to the exemplary culture village form in a moment, but before I do, I want to say a word about a characteristic that ethnic and indigenous culture villages share and that is notably downplayed in exemplary culture villages, and this is a concern with authenticity. Ethnic and indigenous culture villages share characteristics with the open-air folk-life museums that were established in Europe when large-scale industrialization was bringing about a concern with the loss of village life. The first such museum, known as Skansen, was established in 1891 in Sweden and displayed original peasant buildings, costumes, and festivities. The ethnic and indigenous culture villages that have followed in this mode have continued to be preoccupied with the problem of how to represent a lost or threatened past authentically. The literature that surrounds them dwells on the attendant problems of accuracy, nostalgic projection, and the brittleness of contrived appearances. Gerhard Schutte, for instance, argues that even though South African cultural villages base their appeal on authenticity, they in fact carefully remove evidence of the actual lives of black Africans working there, so that “they represent fictional and idealized recreations of ‘tribal’ lifestyles and activities” (Schutte 2003, 473).

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Compromises constantly have to be made to cater for what tourists want, thus undermining any true authenticity (Jansen van Veuren 2003, 75). Other observers are cynical about the large ethnic culture villages in Asia and their gaudy displays: the sense is that this isn’t real culture, because real culture is lived, while these displays are only façades. One author writing of Malaysian culture villages sums this up with the observation that culture villages there have no chickens—they are sanitized of the very elements that make a village so typical to begin with (Dellios 2002, 39). This does not seem to be a concern to the architects of culture villages found in Malaysia and other parts of Asia, but it is the kind of concern raised by Western observers who seem prone to understanding appearances as deceptive and shallow, not deep like real culture. Firsthand accounts of cultural tourism in South Africa indicate that Western tourists typically experience a sense of embarrassment at the spectacle, suspiciousness of their guides, and confusion at the obvious contradiction in their own expectations and the reality of a commercialized relationship or a confrontation with poverty (Cowlishaw 2010; Enevoldsen 2003). These reactions and concerns are suggestive of the liberal multiculturalism that Povinelli, in her study of Australia, has summarized as offering “the cunning of recognition.” She writes that even though liberal subjects claim to celebrate and even demand an authentic experience of cultural others, they are also typically suspicious that they are being duped: “Before they have even purchased their ticket, every consumer of culture is already disappointed by what they know: what they are about to see is a commercial product. They . . . leave the scene of cultural performance frustrated. Why aren’t traditions wherever I am? Who is withholding them from me? I bet there are none here. Who is to blame for their disappearance?” (Povinelli 2002, 65). Charles Taylor understands “the modern [read, Western] preoccupation with identity and recognition” (1994, 26) as rooted in European romanticism. He sees in Johann Gottfried Herder and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for instance, the traces of that line of thought that has led people in the West to understand themselves as individuals of a particular kind: “There is a certain way of being human that is my way” (30). The point of life, in this schema, is to stay true to oneself. Taylor shows how thinkers like Herder extended this to include groups. A “volk” likewise should remain true to its own culture and avoid imitation of others. These romantic European notion of individualism backed a concern with authenticity and difference in cross-cultural encounters rather than the unilinear evolutionism that Friedrich Engels (1978) had proposed and that continues to influence Marxist-Leninist thought. Under individualism, questions

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of “correct” and “incorrect” culture, cultural progress, and eventual ­assimilation—strongly evident in Lao cultural policy—were sidelined in favor of questions of sincerity and authenticity: to thine own self be true. These ideas led eventually to the current politics of recognition found in liberal cultural politics in which misrecognition, that is, being seen as something that at heart you are not, is thought of as a grave injustice. In Povinelli’s formulation, the cunning of liberal recognition arises when authenticity is required if a group (such as an indigenous group) is to attain recognition, but at the same time that group is not able (for legal, historical, material or other reasons) to embody that alterity. But Laos is not a liberal context. Indeed, Pholsena has described interethnic relations in Laos as “illiberal” (2005). What are the politics of recognition in the Lao political field, and are they cunning?

The Politics of Recognition in Laos Laos’s exemplary culture villages, in contrast to the other two forms of culture villages I have identified, are not centrally concerned with authenticity. Part of the reason for this is a different temporal orientation. While the past is certainly acknowledged, this is in service of an evolutionary narrative that points always toward judicious change now and into the future. Indeed, when attempting to collect Kandon “village histories” outside of Wiphat’s narrative, I found that some people would offer me what was essentially a summary of Kaysone’s stages, although they did not describe it to me in these terms. They would state that there was an ancient era, then slavery, followed by feudalism (L: sakdinaa). In the present was the modern administration, while in the future would come socialism. At first, I would press for details: as the Katu in the past are generally thought to have been led by a council composed of the head of each household, and part of no larger political entity, a feudal past in these mountains would have been quite the discovery! No details were forthcoming, however, and I quickly realized that the reference to sakdinaa was the result of a formulaic response to the question of history, one based on Marxist-Leninist understandings of the stages of historical progress. Craig Reynolds explains that, in Thai, saktina (feudalism) is “semantic code” that came to mean “ ‘backwards agrarian order,’ ‘authoritarian rule,’ and ‘exploitative relations of production’ ” (1985, 146) for those with a utopian, liberating cast of mind. This orientation toward history is less concerned with continuing an authentic link to a past than with self-positioning in relation to a present

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and a future. The point of the “history” lesson I was given in these cases was that the speaker was knowledgeable about the Party-state doctrine. Another reason that authenticity is less of a concern in Lao cultural politics is that individualism has taken a different path there. If the individual in the Western tradition of thought outlined by Taylor is conceived of as a moreor-less stable inner self to which one must remain true, in Laos the self is understood as much more malleable. The individual is understood as the product of previous accumulated striving and effort, and appearances are taken to indicate signs of this effort and the individual’s current fortunes. In doctrinal Theravada Buddhism, one of the core teachings is impermanence, annica. Another core doctrinal position is that there is “no self,” anatta: what is perceived as a self is just an assemblage of components that will also eventually pass. In everyday Buddhism in Laos, the individual is understood as being reborn over many lifetimes. While this may seem to contradict the notion that there is “no self,” this is mitigated when it is understood that fortunes are explained by that carried-over karmic residue that is built up by the generation and transfer of merit: who you are today depends on what “you” did previously. This leans toward what one sympathetic Buddhologist has described as “an almost exaggerated degree of individual responsibility in ethics” (Collins 1982, 78). The self is understood as being constantly created in an ongoing process of accumulated actions and as being responsible for those actions, past and present. In this way of seeing the individual, effort at being one way or another is not understood as a contrived façade obscuring the true inner self but as an act of genuine self-creation. This understanding of the self finds resonance in Lao socialism with the notion of the “new people.” Evans opens his Lao Peasants under Socialism (1990) with a lengthy account given by prime minister Kaysone Phomvihane at the fourth congress of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP) in November 1986, where Kaysone announced to the delegates that “the new socialist man has emerged.” The task of the party was, he told them, to build a “new culture having socialist content which reflects a national and popular character, while building new people, first of all people filled with patriotism, love for socialism, and socialist internationalism, working in accordance with the principle ‘one for all and all for one’ ” (Evans 1990, 1). Evans notes this combined effort to change the economy with the effort to “change people’s heads” (1). The Culture Village policies have continued this legacy. As one pamphlet on Culture Village policies explained, “People are the spark and motor of society. They are the creators of society and are the ones who decide the good fortune and merit for the country and nation. If there are good people, society

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will be good, and with a good society the nation will begin to advance, progress and civilize. Therefore, we must endeavor to build people of culture” (MICDPC, n.d.; emphasis in source). People are not depicted as having a true internal being that requires external validation in order to flourish (as, for instance, in Axel Honneth’s insistence on “self-realization”; Fraser and Honneth 2004, 189) but as deliberate creations built from the outside in. And in building such individuals, society is likewise being built. Both individuals and societies are made, rather than revealed, through concerted efforts. The concern here is with deliberately creating the right kind of self to make the right kind of society. One result of the Lao understanding of the individual as malleable is that Lao policy efforts at cultural reform are not necessarily understood as a loss of an authentic self but rather as evidence of a genuine effort. And it is this effort that is given esteem in the Lao politics of recognition. Let us return, then, to the film crew’s visit to Kandon. What was it that the camera was looking for? I have noted that the crew seemed satisfied, and indeed at times elated, with the performance that Wiphat put on for them. Wiphat left his shirt and trousers on underneath his traditional outfit, but this raised no negative comment from the documentary makers: such compromises on tradition were expected and even admired. When he explained that he could not conform to their request to wear his traditional outfit out of the house at this time, he did so sheepishly, explaining that the only reason he could not buck this tradition, too, was his fear of becoming sick. He was apologetic that he could not be even more flexible in regard to his “traditions.” The idea that the crew might have to sacrifice a buffalo raised good-natured laughter: under different circumstances, it could be a serious and dramatic example of the cultural distinctiveness of the Kantu in contrast to their Lao neighbors. The very fact that Wiphat could joke about it rather than taking it all so seriously was itself a sign that he had come a long way on the path of cultural reform. When Wiphat took the cameramen to the ceremonial hall, he consistently gave interpretations that emphasized how far the Kantu had come, speaking of how sacrifices had been scaled down, how hunting ceased in favor of environmentalism, and how thoughts of preserving traditions had been replaced with thoughts of how to attain development. And it was this effort that was lapped up eagerly by the cameras. What the cameras wanted was a story about the struggle for improvement. This, to them, was culture. When Evans spoke of the similarity of the Lao culture concept to that of Tylor’s evolutionism, he said that interacting with Lao anthropologists felt like he’d “stepped into a time machine and travelled backwards . . . as if one was

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o­ bserving an early twentieth-century British social anthropologist in, say, colonial Africa” (2005, 46). Ironically enough, such a perspective itself risks putting concepts of culture on an evolutionary scale, where the echo of Tylor’s or Morgan’s concept of culture in current-day Laos is thought of as a survival of a way of thinking now defunct in Western scholarship, scholarship which is implied here to be more advanced. Such a move casts contemporary Lao thought into our collective past. What effort is required to instead see Lao notions of culture as contemporaneous with and even a plausible future for our own? While I have drawn a distinction between Lao socialist concepts of culture and those now dominant in Western liberal thought and shown that they are currently quite different, this is not meant to imply a kind of radical break between the two. Indeed, I hope I have shown that the two are related and mutually intelligible. Lao socialist politics of recognition are provocative from a Western perspective not because they are radically unalike so much as because they bear an “uncanny” family resemblance. Sigmund Freud’s uncanny “is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (1919, 220). Despite the all-too-apparent differences, there is something strangely recognizable in Lao cultural politics to a reader coming from a society dominated by a liberal cunning in the politics of recognition. Liberalism’s insistence on authenticity requires that Australian indigenes remain the same in order to be authentic but does not allow them room to actually do so (Povinelli 2002). There is a not-very-hidden illiberalism in liberalism. We might also say that there is a hidden liberalism in Lao illiberalism. Misrecognition allows a perhaps unintentional but functional room for people to maneuver. Lao cultural policies insisted that to be cultured was to be “good” and have “desirable” traditions, the best of old and new, but these are subjective judgments that in practice allowed significant deviation, so that Kandon could be a model village even while continuing practices that are repugnant to Lao cultural policy makers. I asked earlier if the politics of recognition in Laos could be thought of as cunning. The notion of cunning plays on that concern with authenticity that is so typical of Western responses to the question of culture. To be cunning is to be skillfully deceptive, using misleading appearance to enact an often-selfish outcome. This is apt for Povinelli’s analysis, because her argument is about liberalism’s concern with authenticity and its hollow promise of tolerance. Laos is not a liberal state, and tolerance is not a core legitimizing discourse there, so the idea of “cunning” is less appropriate. One key legitimizing discourse that does have currency in Laos is the struggle for improvement.9 Thus, I think it is more appropriate to speak of the struggle for recognition in Laos.

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I am aware that the phrase “the struggle for recognition” is already taken, and by a thinker no less than Hegel. However, I think the overlap is felicitous. Hegel described the struggle for recognition via an imaginative scene unfolding between two consciousnesses that each sought to gain recognition from the other as superior. What this leads to, he showed, is a relationship of domination and subordination, the master and the slave. But this was a hollow victory for the master, because although she could now rely on recognition from the slave, this recognition was by definition worthless, as she had reduced the slave to the status of a thing, subhuman, not a full consciousness. The master is left with an empty victory. Hegel’s point was that true recognition can be obtained only when there is room for reciprocal recognition between equal parties (1977, 111–119; see also Taylor 1994, 50). This sheds light on the dynamic seen in Laos. My first field site—the runof-the-mill, obscure village in Champassak—could be described in terms of the first stage of the subjugation between master and slave: an insurgency movement there had been relatively recently completely vanquished, and the remaining population accepted the ascendency of the LPRP regime with a grudging submission, uttering their disgruntlement and suspicion only offstage and receiving in return a kind of patronizing neglect from the Party-state (High 2014). In Kandon, however, one sees evidence of the hollowness of such victories, and how there is a yearning emanating from the ruling Party to be recognized by subjects as something more. There is a yearning, put to Wiphat and other residents of Kandon, to tell a story of voluntary and successful struggle in which the Party’s own promises to guide the populace toward upward progress are repeated back as accomplished facts. I saw Wiphat’s story of the village reliably generate elation as he repeated it for various Lao visitors, although I also saw the few Western tourists that arrived (mostly European) display unease and distaste at the village and his story. The few Western tourists who arrived during my fieldwork seemed to be preoccupied with a combination of horror at the poverty of the village, and skepticism about the authenticity of this so-called Culture Village. Wiphat’s story of success was not aimed at them. Rather, it was a response to a demand emanating from the Lao political field. He filled the slot of an ethnic minority leader, and the demand put to him in that position was “Tell us that it was worth it. Tell us that, even though you have given up so much, that it didn’t hurt too much. Tell us you did it by choice and you have no regrets. Tell us that the hard-fought struggle is actually being won.” The story Wiphat generated in response elicited elation in Lao audiences perhaps because it pushed back against everyday disillusionment in Laos.

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­ ovinelli notes, “In certain contexts the aim of public reason is not to underP stand, let alone agree, but rather to sequester some often inexpressible felt-thing from reflexive judgment” (2002, 14). Perhaps what is sequestered from reflexive judgment here is a final reckoning that compares what has been gained with what has been lost in the Lao state’s relentless struggle for progress. Wiphat described his positioning of the village as a “model” village as a tactic in attempting to create a more reciprocal and beneficial relationship between the village and the state. It was a deliberate strategy to gain recognition. He explained that the villagers presented themselves in the image of the ideal ethnic minority village adhering to current policies, and in return expected government support in service provision. Their act of conformity to current policies, and the way this was rewarded, thus was in itself a tacit acknowledgment of those severe problems that do, in fact, plague the LPRP’s revolution: the problems of politically charged and inadequate service provision, the sacrifices that continue to be demanded of the populace in the name of development, and the inequitable distribution of fast-paced growth. Wiphat’s performance of success, and the elation this caused, had the power to hold back the alarm of this felt-thing momentarily.

4

Open Defecation Free and Model Healthy Village

The trip from Thateng to New Kandon became familiar to me. The road winds down from the cool of the Bolaven Plateau onto the hot valley plains. In the last foothills, I’d look out for a small sign to the left stating (in English and Lao) “Open Defecation Free Village.” Following it off the main road would take me to the dirt road that passed terraced, irrigated rice fields, a cemetery, and sheds where silk worms hatched. After a few miles, the rooftops of New Kandon would come into view, behind a thicket of yet more signs. Among these, one sign repeated the message that this is an “Open Defecation Free Village and Model Healthy Village.”

Figure 4.1. A cluster of signs at the entrance to New Kandon, 2012.

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Inside the homes of New Kandon, it is common to find certificates issued by the authorities among the decorations on interior walls. Wiphat himself had been decorated with seven medals. “It is for all that work I do for the state, as village chief.” The village as a whole has received a Medal of Labor and a flag. These were presented by the former president of Laos, Choummaly Sayasone. This mania for certification is part of the manifestation of Lao socialism as a lived political culture. As I mentioned in the introduction, certification and the naming of model people and villages was implemented by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as early as 1948, inspired by Soviet emulation campaigns and Beijing’s fusion of this influence with Confucianism.1 One of New Kandon’s most striking successes in this style of grassroots political mobilization is that this village is Laos’ first “Open Defecation Free and Model Healthy Village.” This means that each household has a toilet or at least access to one, and that animal feces are contained, for instance by penning animals. (The people of New Kandon use the Lao phrase hong nam for toilet, which means “water room”; I will hereafter follow this usage when referring to the toilets of New Kandon.) The village is now used as a model to teach other villages how to achieve this status. This chapter specifically takes up the question of success. I have already discussed Kandon’s prominent role in the revolution in Sekong, its success as a Culture Village and the village’s modest fame. In this chapter, I ask, if New Kandon is a success, then what kind of success is it? What counts as success in Lao political culture more generally? I follow researcher David Mosse, who distanced himself from the role of an evaluator and took an ethnographic perspective on success in which “the question is not whether but how development projects work; not whether a project succeeds, but how success is produced” (Mosse 2004, 646). Specifically, Mosse argued that among the aid workers he observed, positioning the project as a “success” hinged not on actual outcomes (indeed, the participatory project in question often failed to implement participatory prescriptions) but on the way staff articulated the interpretation of the effort with higher policy. Success was an interpretive act of “matching events to theory” (Mosse 2006, 940). Similarly, in current Lao political culture, “success” is often measured according to how well events can be matched to socialist doctrine. That is, success is claimed in the metalanguage of Lao socialism. New Kandon attained certification as an Open Defecation Free (ODF) and Model Healthy Village after going through a process known as community-led total sanitation (CLTS). The handbooks for this method were translated into Lao in 2009 (World Education 2014, 9).2 On July 8 of that year, New

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Kandon became the first certified ODF Village in Laos, only six months after the project launched. New Kandon has since been a tua baep (model) village for this method, teaching busloads of bureaucrats and village leaders how to pursue the same status elsewhere. The notion of a tua baep itself indicates something of what counts as success in this setting: conforming to an ideal, generally one ideal for the whole population. As of November 2017, there are 5,989 ODF villages in Laos. There are only 8,470 villages in the whole of Laos. New Kandon’s district center, Thateng, was declared ODF some years after New Kandon. The next planned step is for the province of Sekong to be declared ODF. Entire nations are pursuing the status. In November 2017, there was a major conference in Cambodia in which the notion of an Open Defecation Free Southeast Asia was seriously discussed. New Kandon’s role in CLTS as a model is all the more striking given the common prejudices that circulate in Laos about the uplanders of the southeast as the nation’s most dangerous, wild, and primitive (Goudineau 2008) and the Party’s claim to have brought sanitation, among other civilizing influences, to those highlands when they were “secured” in the in late 1940s (as discussed in chapter 2). Now this order had been reversed and New Kandon was celebrated as the model of sanitation for the rest of the nation to catch up with. As one nongovernmental organization (NGO) worker commented when I interviewed her in Vientiane about this program, “Even Vientiane is not ODF. The city’s sewerage is out in the open.” To relate the story of the end of open defecation in New Kandon, I need to navigate a few unexpected swerves. The first takes us to Bangladesh, where CLTS was invented. The second takes us to New Kandon, where this global package was for the first time translated into the Lao political terrain. The third occurs when the project is understood as part of a national push to enhance the height of the population. And the final swerve takes us into the water rooms of New Kandon, where a very different version of success can be found, if that is what you want to see.

Shit calculation A decade before New Kandon’s ODF certification, a few thousand miles away in Bangladesh, a consultant named Kamal Kar was hired by the country program of the international NGO WaterAid. The organization wanted to know what kind of subsidy was the most effective for encouraging the construction and use of toilets. Kar’s plan was to visit remote villages and use

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Figure 4.2. A hong nam (L: toilet) in New Kandon, 2017.

p­ articipatory research methods to find out why people defecated in the open. On these visits, he could hardly contain his disgust. Remembering that evaluation study years later, he said, “I thought that every village we went [to], definitely some of us would have stepped on [feces]” (Kar quoted in Seiff 2017). He asked locals to show him to their defecation areas and with them created a village map showing all the soiled areas. His effort to collect impartial information, while at the same time feeling personally revolted, turned out to be the solution he was looking for. He says that when the village as a whole saw his results—the maps and calculations of shit—they shared his revulsion and spontaneously resolved to cease open defecation. They asked for his help. Kar responded, “Look, we came here just to learn from you. We aren’t able to give you anything” (quoted in Seiff 2017). Villages thought toilets would be too expensive to build, but Kar assured them there were cheap options. Weeks later, villagers had constructed their own toilets. Kar returned to WaterAid with his recommendation: no more subsidies. What was needed instead was emotional “triggering” so that people would deeply want toilets. This method was rolled out in village after village. “After

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six months, there was no looking back,” Kar said (quoted in Seiff 2017). Kar distilled his method into manuals, and these have been implemented in over forty countries. Part of this wide spread was due to the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals. Goal six was “to ensure water and sanitation for all.” It included the aim to “end open defecation” by 2030. The World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) has adopted Kar’s approach. Kar’s “no subsidies” message chimed with the WSP’s existing neoliberal agenda (Engel and Susilo 2014, 166). Kar’s handbooks instruct facilitators on how to recreate the triggering effect of his original evaluation fieldtrips. CLTS facilitators are instructed to arrive at a village claiming only to wish to collect information. They are to be factual, stay on the topic of defecation, and create maps with villagers showing where people defecate. The emotional “triggering” seems to rely on this conjuncture: an impartial observer claiming to be interested only in “the facts” yet talking about embarrassing things that become emotionally overwhelming for villagers when looked at from an outsider’s point of view. For instance, the CLTS manual explains that the objective of the “shit calculation” is to “illustrate the magnitude of the sanitation problem.” When the feces of all individuals, over all the days of a year, are considered collectively, “the quantities can add up to a matter of tonnes which may surprise the community” (MoH 2013, 27). The CLTS training manual used in Laos included the following calculation: Feces quantity X Number of defecators = Quantity of the feces per village. Shit calculation Village “A” has a population of 100 people and has only two households with 10 members that have latrines. • 1 person produces 250 g per day of feces • If 1 person defecates twice/day: 250 x 2 = 500 g/person/day • In 1 week: 500 g x 7 days = 3,500g/person • In 1 month: 500g x 30 days = 15,000g/person • In 1 year: 500g x 365 days = 182,500g/person • Village “A” defecates in 1 year: 100 people x 182,500g = 18,250,000g/year • People with open defecation in the village “A”: 100 people - 10 people = 90 people

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• Therefore: 500g x 90 people x 365 days = 16,425,000g/year or 16,425 kg/ year. (MoH 2013, 27)

The aim of this so-called calculation is not an accurate accounting of how much fecal matter is in the environment. Actually, it is clear that the calculation is totally inaccurate. I am not just talking about the leap between the first and second lines of the calculation, where one person goes from producing 250 to 500 g a day with no explanation. I am talking about the extreme unlikeliness that all the feces from an entire village over a year could somehow be preserved in the environment, fresh as they day they were laid, as it were. This contrasts with my observations that in Old Kandon, where there were no toilets, human feces were eaten by pigs. Rather than the generation of hard facts what is aimed at is the generation of sentiments like surprise and disgust. The same can be said of other triggering activities, such as mapping and the practice of putting out a tray of food and some human feces side by side and observing how flies move between them. These appear to be ways of accumulating evidence, but they are explicitly treated in CLTS manuals as emotional triggers. Maps and statistics are the tools of high modernist planning. What the CLTS approach knows well, and aims to exploit, is their affective power. And it is these affects that are the goal much more than any evidence they might yield. Actually, hard evidence has a very tenuous relationship with CLTS. An editorial in Science magazine noted that there is as yet no “hard evidence” that demonstrates any of the purported benefits of having a toilet (Coobes 2010, 583), such as lower rates of worm infestation (Belizario et al. 2015) or diarrhea (Pickering et al. 2015). Latrines built without planning can be a cause of pollution, particularly to groundwater: contamination is “frequently observed downstream from latrines” (Graham and Polizzotto 2013, 521). Even if it is taken for granted that the use of toilets is a good thing, studies have shown that CLTS is not better than a subsidy approach (that is, either giving toilets to people or subsidizing their costs) for achieving this end (Garn et al. 2017, 332). The rapid spread of CLTS around the world is not based on firm evidence of its effectiveness. It is based, critics contend, on the spread of neoliberalism. Once “ignited,” Kar believes that communities will provide their own sanitation with minimal or no external support. In effect, Kar has devised a plan for making self-regulating liberal subjects who don’t need government. Adam Smith, a perceptive commentator on liberal subjectivities, deliberated long on what it was that made people self-regulating in his Theory of Moral Sentiments

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(2002). Smith was a religious man, but he thought that God did not need to make detailed rules about morality because God had ingeniously installed an “impartial observer” “in the breast” of every person. Smith thought moral sentiments, including shame, repugnance, and pride, were generated by the constant imagination that one was being observed by this introjected observer. My analysis of the CLTS materials is that Kar has his facilitators act out the role of an impartial observer, providing a transferential object for people to imagine their own sanitation practices through the eyes of an outsider. This experience of seeing oneself through someone else’s eyes—as Smith noted—is an emotional one. It is not a rational experience, although it is important that the impartial observer be thought to be rational. The judgments of a mad, bad, or biased observer don’t carry the same emotional weight. Smith thought that all humans came preequipped with an impartial observer “in the breast.” But what CLTS knew well was that liberal subjects do not come ready-made: they must be created. And CLTS is one way of achieving this. Once the imagined impartial observer is integrated into one’s sense of self, through emotional experiences such as the triggering implemented by Kar, one becomes self-regulating. Critics have argued that the CLTS method amounts to a kind of sanctioned bullying.3 It involves no analysis of existing power hierarchies in communities. The poorest people in any given community are the least likely to have toilets. They are the most likely to be taunted, fined, and threatened in a CLTS triggering. As one set of critics wrote, the poor “are, in effect, punished for their poverty and local practices” (Engel and Susilo 2014, 173). Meanwhile, in CLTS methods local leaders are praised as “natural leaders.”

Model, Unity, Solidarity, and Guidance: Keywords for Success in Laos Kar’s manuals instruct facilitators to trigger pride and enthusiasm as well as shame and disgust. Early adopters are to be praised, and when the entire village is declared free of open defecation, Kar suggests a ceremony to erect a sign commemorating the achievement (Kar 2005). He recommends that the first villages to be declared ODF be model villages then share their experiences with others. This helps to explain the quirky sign that stood at the turnoff to New Kandon village. For a while, the village was a promoted proudly as a CLTS “learning laboratory” (the Lao documents referred to it as a tua baep, a model) where others could learn the method as it was rolled out across Laos.4

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For Wiphat, this experience was one of the highlights of his life. None of his other accolades—the medals or the certificates—made him smile with as much relish as when he was retelling the ODF story. No other achievement had extended his network so remarkably. None had raised the profile—his own and that of the village—so markedly. Wiphat’s calendar was filled with visits from study groups and with his own field trips to discuss CLTS in places as far away as Vietnam. When a Canadian man employed by WSP visited New Kandon when I was there, he recalled the heady days when New Kandon was moving toward ODF certification. He and others on the project had thought, “This village is special. This man is special.” Other villages had sent to training meetings young men who were apathetic and disengaged. But in the case of New Kandon, when Wiphat was asked to send a village representative, he sent himself. When he arrived at the meeting, he cut the babble short by asking, “Do you want people to buy latrines? Fine, I will arrange that.” When the facilitators asked how, Wiphat replied, “I will order people to buy them.” “It only took us six months,” Wiphat said with a smile to a busload of visitors from Savanakhet that included village chiefs, district and provincial level bureaucrats, and so on. “Other villages have still not achieved it all these years later.” Below, I describe this visit from the team ngaan (the English word for “team” and the Lao word for “work”) from Savanakhet. By listening closely to Wiphat’s presentation on that day, certain keywords emerged that indicated something of how neoliberal CLTS was translated into socialist Lao political culture by Wiphat, and how he framed it as a success in the terms appropriate in Lao politics. A cool wind was blowing, and the clouds had hidden the hot sun, delivering a welcome break from the usual heat. Wiphat and I had been waiting in the ceremonial hall since 9:30 in the morning. The hall had been swept clean and some mats laid out. Three women in traditional Kandon costume brought over an enormous plate of steamed bananas and some jugs of drinking water. These, they said, were for the team ngaan. After two hours, the team arrived in a minivan and a four-wheel drive. The women who had been waiting served the bananas and drinks. After some preliminaries from the team leaders, Wiphat was asked to give his speech. He read out some village statistics, then moved on to a freeform talk: “It is difficult. You need a strong village leadership. Health is so important. Prevention is better than cure. You need initiatives like this to stop people getting sick. At first only fourteen houses in our village had water rooms. We had to go slowly. The first step the village leadership took was education.” Wiphat very clearly

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saw his role in the CLTS project as both a leader and an educator. He was, in effect, the vanguard of CLTS at the village level. He went on, “If you explain the health benefits of water rooms, people will want them. Looking after your health is better than treating illness after you get sick. If you just draw up orders in the province and the district and deliver them, then people won’t do it. That is what they did in Champassak, and it did not work. You must ask people what they want. Most people want a water room! Only a few don’t. We made having a water room a local ordinance agreed upon by everyone in the village. All the heads of households signed it.” Here, Wiphat enthusiastically suggested that to be successful, initiatives must emerge from the desire of the people, a sentiment that chimes with the participatory ideology of CLTS. But he quickly qualified this with the assertion that these desires need to be ones already authorized by provincial and district officials. His next statement was, “Of course, the district and the province approved it first. But the important thing was that the heads of households came along and agreed among themselves they’d all have water rooms. There was no one who did not sign the local ordinance. Each of them saw the others sign it, so they signed it themselves, out of a sense of ekaphap [L: unity].” As with the pawat’s description of the “five works,” the first step was creating solidarity and unity of purpose. Those households that could afford it were encouraged to buy a ceramic latrine. Poorer houses could opt for a dry pit. After the local ordinance went into effect, the National Front and Youth Union conducted inspections to ensure that the water rooms were of adequate working standard. Results were announced on the village loudspeaker system, along with cases where people had toilets but were spotted defecating in the fields instead. He mentioned that Party members such as his own household had to be a tua baep (L: model): when one of his own wives was caught not using her water room, it was announced on the loudspeakers, and he paid the fine. After this round of inspections, eight households were found to still not have a water room. “Flies that feast on those feces go to everyone’s houses, not just the open defecators,’ ” Wiphat commented. “We gave them a week. After that, we conducted more inspections and imposed fines.” After these measures, there were still four houses without a water room. These people were given the choice to either comply or leave the village. Wiphat gave the example of one widow who said she didn’t have the manpower to dig a latrine. He sii nam (L: advised) her that she needed to ask her relatives for help. She didn’t grow rice alone, did she? Or build a house herself? He emphasized that the local ordinance had to be followed as a condition of residence. She could move, but other villages would likely have the same ordinance, so

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she would still need to build a water room there, but in those villages, she wouldn’t have her relatives to help her. Reaching the end of his presentation, Wiphat acknowledged that he was proud his village had been able to achieve the goal so quickly. He then modestly went on to say that there were still so many things the village had to improve: “I could still speak about all the things we don’t have. We came from the mountains near Vietnam and we had nothing at all to begin with. So we certainly lack many things. But this village has cit cay [L: an internal spirit] of improvement. And things are improving.” Wiphat then fielded a lively barrage of questions. Was life in the village better after this sanitation effort? Were the traditional beliefs of the Kantu an impediment? He answered enthusiastically, as if he could never tire of speaking about this topic, and he was full of encouragement for others to follow his lead. At the conclusion, one of the provincial bureaucrats commented, “This was a true story. The important thing is to extend samakkhii [L: solidarity] and ekaphap [L: unity]. You won’t be able to achieve your goal without these. Go back to your villages and talk about it and do the same thing.” The leader of the team said he was sorry he had nothing to give in return for Wiphat’s excellent lesson and the steamed bananas. He then produced from the minivan an elaborately wrapped gift that he presented to Wiphat. There were many photographs of this, of the women who served the bananas, and of the team assembled around Wiphat in front of the carvings of the ceremonial hall. One of the attendees asked for the phone number of one of the young women who had served bananas. Many of the criticisms that have been leveled at the CLTS approach in general could be leveled at this example. It was the poorest and most marginal households who were the last to build a water room and who received the most shaming and the most forceful treatment. Meanwhile, it was Wiphat, already an established leader, who accumulated to himself the pride of the achievement of the whole village. Yet, in the meeting I described, attendees evidently enjoyed hearing Wiphat’s story. The questions he fielded after his talk seemed motivated by an enthusiasm they had caught—at least in part—from Wiphat’s own enthusiasm. The photographs at the end, the shared bananas, and the gifts all recall the wider meaning of those keywords samakkhii (L: solidarity) and ekaphap (L: unity). In chapter 2, I discussed the importance of such keywords in an effort to integrate ethnic minorities into the nation and the socialist movement from the earliest days of the revolution. In this meeting, these were not just empty slogans but lived affects. Wiphat’s speech generated pleasure in his audience

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because it not only recounted a case showing the power of samakkhii and ekaphap to achieve a tangible end (the attainment of ODF) but also gave an opportunity for people to act out and participate in a moment of samakkhii and ekaphap. This explains the importance placed not only on the business of hearing the New Kandon story but also on the enjoyment of bananas, pretty women in exotic dresses, and posing for photographs as a team. Solidarity and unity are not only political ideals. They are pleasures. Another keyword in his story was cit cay (L: an internal spirit)—as when Wiphat commented that people sincerely did want development, and sincerely did want water rooms. This might seem to contrast with other parts of his story that referenced authoritarian leadership. Wiphat said he sii nam (L: advised) the widow. This term echoes government documents, which often describe the communication of superiors to subordinates as sii nam. There is the image here of the central authorities as wise leaders imparting advice, but everybody knows that such advice is actually an order that must be followed, as the story of the widow made clear. Wiphat depicted his role as just such a leader: advising, educating, and being a model for the people he led on a preordained path. He always maintained that whatever leadership he showed was deferential to that of the district and provincial authorities; as he dispensed “advice,” he in turn accepted the advice, education, and leadership of the level above. This combination of evoking the internal spirit of the people in the same breath as extolling the effectiveness of “democratic centralism” principles is part of the pleasure Wiphat’s story generated. Wiphat was telling us not only of how toilets came to be built but also how desires came to be educated in the correct way. Under “democratic centralism,” dissent is permitted, but the minority must follow the majority decision, and lower levels must accept the decisions made at the level above. In Wiphat’s story, these steps were made clear and presented as congruent with what people—after they had been educated with appropriate advice—actually wanted. Earlier, I suggested that Kar’s CLTS is a method of making the kind of self-regulating subjects that Adam Smith’s liberalism imagined. In New Kandon, CLTS was turned into a method for making a special sort of selfregulating subject: one that self-regulates in accordance with the guidance, leadership, and education of the vanguard.5 The triggering emotions of disgust and embarrassment—so characteristic of CLTS orthodoxy—were present in the New Kandon CLTS process but were significantly toned down, replaced by the emotions favored in Lao socialism: solidarity and unity. Wiphat’s story was a story of success told in the metalanguage of Lao

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s­ ocialist politics. It showed listeners how following advice, acting with unity and solidarity, and correctly educated desires led to successful results. The occasion of telling this story itself allowed listeners to momentarily take part in this emotional terrain. The generation of these emotions—much more than any hard evidence—is what marked CLTS in New Kandon as a success.

“The Stunting World” The story of New Kandon’s success, and the palpable warmth of the emotions it evoked, preceded me when I went to Vientiane. I was there investigating CLTS. Mentioning New Kandon opened doors for me. I found myself in a meeting of all the partners involved in CLTS and the Ministry of Health officials responsible for the initiative. The highest-ranking of these had been at the certification ceremony in New Kandon, and he now sat at the head of a wooden U-shaped table. Behind him, a red banner with the Lao national motto hung across the generous folds of a blue floor-to-ceiling curtain. When the official spoke, he pressed a button to activate a microphone (only he had one). The purpose of this meeting was to produce a new CLTS handbook for the project as it continued to be rolled out across the country. I took a seat along the wall, but the official asked me to sit at that grand table and, at the end of the morning session, even to contribute my ideas if I had any. During the coffee break, those who had been involved in New Kandon’s certification recounted the event fondly for me. As one NGO worker recalled, Wiphat had three lovely wives, and “served as a good model for other leaders from other places.” Later, I followed up with See, one of the NGO workers I had met there. In the cramped office of the NGO See heads, music from a passing funeral procession came through open windows. She had not been to New Kandon but knew of it. She pointed out that there had been no follow-up study to verify if people there still used water rooms. By this time, it was just over eight years since New Kandon had been certified. Time enough for latrines to fill or habits to slip. She noted that in general, all the focus in CLTS was on verification in the lead-up to certification, but once this had been achieved, no one returned to monitor the sanitation of the village. Again, it was emotions surrounding success, “becoming a believer” as See put it, not evidence of ongoing use of water rooms that seemed to be the surest outcome of CLTS.6 It was during my conversations in Vientiane that the story took another unexpected turn. The project materials I’d read emphasized that the presence of toilets in a community is linked to better-nourished and thus taller children,

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and furthermore linked the stature of children to their later cognitive skills (WSP 2014). This kind of talk was altogether absent from Wiphat’s discussion of the project. When I asked him if he thought children in New Kandon were taller after the project, he seemed truly baffled.7 But in Vientiane, when I asked about this I soon realized that stunting was a key part of the overarching rationale of the push to end open defecation. The story goes like this: open defecation throughout Laos means that infants are exposed to fecal matter in their diets. Their intestinal tracts are therefore unable to properly absorb nutrition. Malnourished, most Lao infants end up stunted in the earliest years of their lives.8 Stunted children are more likely to be cognitively impaired and less healthy, spelling economic marginalization as adults.9 This goes for their children and grandchildren too, because the effects of stunting are passed on through generations, perhaps through epigenetics. In this horrifying story, childhood underdevelopment bleeds into underdevelopment of the adult person, which bleeds into underdevelopment of the economy and the entire nation. The short stature of individuals becomes a sign and a cause of the low standing of the nation. Evidence for each step of this reasoning has been difficult to establish or has been disproven.10 But the story has taken hold, in part no doubt because it uses something that is very easy to measure (people’s height) to indicate something that is very difficult to measure, which is the well-being of the population. See commented to me that as far as she understood it, stunted people are not productive. They don’t study well or stay in school. “Slow people make a slow society,” she said. If individuals are stunted, the nation will be too. “Even me, I am stunted” she said. “I did not meet the measurements. They have measurements on a chart and you need to meet a certain height at each age. I did not meet those heights.” I told her I thought she was certainly not therefore cognitively impaired. She replied by telling me about her esteem for research such as mine and about her experience doing research for her master’s degree in Poland. It was an awkward way to end our meeting. The child growth charts used in Laos—to which See referred—reproduce exactly the standards developed by the World Health Organization.11 These are not charts based on Lao statistics, or an idea of the kind of growth that might be expected from the children or grandchildren of populations who were displaced by war or who lived through one of the greatest bombing campaigns ever witnessed. But this is true of child growth charts in general. They show only “how infants and children should grow rather than simply how they do grow” (CDC n.d.).12 The importance of this distinction is demonstrated by the ­decision to

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exclude the most recent measurements of children’s weight in the United States— taken in 1994—from US calculations of normal growth, because the obesity epidemic there was thought to skew the results (Davies 2007). Incidentally, Australia has only partially adopted the WHO standards that Laos has wholly adopted.13 Therefore, by age five, the normally developing Australian girl is expected to be only forty-eight inches tall, a full one and a half inches shorter than the height expected of the normally developing Lao girl. One of the reasons 63 percent of Lao children are considered stunted might be that the scales used to chart their growth are universalistic rather than particularistic. They measure ideal growth, not growth as it actually unfolds on average in Laos. However, my contention is that Laos needs to be understood as a postwar society (Pholsena 2006a). It is a nation emerging from a severe trauma. It would not be surprising if effects of this trauma were visible in child development today. In answer to my opening question of what constitutes success in Laos: staying on the charts is one answer. The charts used in Laos are aspirational. These charts set goals for Laos that would see it meet, and surpass, the achievements (in height) of other countries. They represent a best-case scenario for optimal development. Only the lucky or the privileged few in Laos are likely to stay on the ideal curve. But staying on the charts is nevertheless the image of success itself.

Growing up in Kandon In New Kandon, mothers were aware that their children were perceived as too short. This is just one of the criticisms that New Kandon families feel when they come into contact with Lao public health services. When I was in New Kandon in 2017, for instance, I had my toddler son with me. People often made the comment that he must be large because I ate luxurious food. Once when I was sitting with some women, a crowd swelled around us to watch my son’s attention-grabbing antics. A lanky young man crowed, “Our children grow up small because mothers eat meat just once a year.” The whole crowd broke out laughing. The laughter seemed to relieve some of the embarrassment about comparisons with and judgments from outsiders regarding their children. I am used to people referring to my son as tall, even in Australia, and he does measure as above average on Australian charts. But during one of the monthly child-measuring events carried out by district health staff in New Kandon, my son—then aged two years—came up on the Lao charts as only average.

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In another scene, I was at Sekong Provincial Hospital. I had asked to see the purpose-built house on the hospital grounds where remote ethnic women are supposed to be able to come to await the birth if they want to use the hospital birth facilities (Eckermann and Deodato 2008). An efficient nurse, who was herself pregnant, was assigned to show me around. The house was dusty, cobwebbed, and felt abandoned. When I asked why the water rooms were so dirty, I learned that no one maintained the building. Pregnant women and their families were expected to clean it themselves on arrival. When we walked up the stairs, I realized that the space was occupied by one woman and her family. I tried to be polite by asking a question that is normal in Lao chitchat: “How many children do you have?” The woman replied that this would be her third. The nurse interrupted us to say, “What will you do to prevent more births? You already have a lot of children. Don’t have so many. And put up your mosquito net. You should pack away your bedding in the daytime. It is dirty to leave it down.” The heavily pregnant woman immediately moved to gather up her bed, bending low and looking down. I was very sorry that I had caused such a scene. Mothers often preempt and avert these moments by dissimulating. For instance, as I was conducting interviews about birth in New Kandon, one young mother commented to me wryly, “Have you noticed that all first-time mothers in this village are twenty-two?” People know that the Lao government discourages teenage motherhood, yet most women in New Kandon are married in their teens, and teen mothers are far from rare. But first-time mothers know to reply that they are twenty-two to avoid the disapproval that so often accompanies trips to the health clinic. When I spoke to See in her Vientiane office about the lack of follow-up to verify if New Kandon was still truly free of open defecation, she briefly suggested that I be the one to do the follow-up study. I imagined myself walking around New Kandon counting buffalo droppings and visiting friends to ask if their latrine was full. Along with the comments made by the twenty-twoyear-old mother and the young man who had commented about Laotian mothers eating meat just once a year, this was yet another reminder of how often anthropological research is perceived as a form of government surveillance. This is not surprising in the context of Laos, where anthropology—that is, Lao anthropology—is almost entirely a government project. In chapter 3, I described the anthropology evident in Lao cultural policies. These understand many traditional practices as superstitious and backward, and as needing to be eradicated to make way for development. The kind of anthropologist I am—that I have been trained to be—is one that finds any inkling of such evolutionary thinking repugnant.

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In another scene, I was sitting in a Vientiane café with a friend who was very knowledgeable about maternal and infant health in Laos. She was introducing me to what she called “the stunting world” over a cup of coffee and salad while my son explored the indoor playground. She told me quite calmly that the aim was to make the Lao population taller; after all, there had been height explosions in Japan and Thailand. Why couldn’t Laos expect the same, if they made the right changes? When I tried to articulate why I found the narrative of stunting and the pursuit of tallness so repugnant, I realized that it was the similarities with nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropology that had triggered my alarm. The word “stunting” itself seemed to indicate the prejudices of an earlier era. Isn’t all this measuring of children just . . . ​ anthropometry? Well, yes, it is. Studies of stunting explicitly use the term “anthropometry.” For me this term evoked a dark corner of anthropology’s past, one most anthropologists like to think we have moved well beyond.14 Early studies of Native Americans, for instance, assumed that physical measurements would correlate with linguistic and cultural groupings (Darnell 2008, 37). Many anthropologists busied themselves measuring head circumference and other bodily features in an effort to define different races, often photographing their subjects alongside arcane measuring equipment. This has produced a corpus of visual images and statistics that, given what we now know about the trauma, violence, and starvation many of the subjects of these studies were suffering at the time, seems seeped in pathos and absurdity, and an indictment of the early days of the discipline. Furthermore, evolutionary ideas were used to justify all kinds of abuses, such as slavery and the dispossession of indigenous peoples. While arguments against evolutionary anthropology are usually framed in theoretical terms, the reaction to evolutionary anthropology for many anthropologists is often a gut reaction (Bloch 2012, 38). Many of us have been formed in a context where renouncing evolutionism and asserting space for some kind of relativism has been internalized as a felt-thing of self-righteous urgency. The discipline’s evolutionist past is the subject of repugnance. The similarities between “the stunting world” and evolutionary anthropology go well beyond anthropometry. Most nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropologists favored Lamarkian approaches to evolution: they were interested in how acquired characteristics could become hereditary over the course of just one or two generations.15 Some were interested in things like “degeneracy” and “hereditary taint”: the decline of people through generations. Likewise, “the stunting world” is concerned with how stunting creates hereditary “impairment.” A World Bank video released in Laos warns parents that their

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children will be “slow” at school and be “not good at sport” if they don’t receive adequate nutrition in the first two years. It warns that the effects of malnutrition are passed on for many generations. The nineteenth century evolutionists posited a single scale of advancement across which all societies and people could be arranged according to their level of progress: a universal standard of civilization.16 Similarly, the WHO child growth charts were adopted not because they were appropriate to local conditions in Laos but because they set a universal standard for a best possible outcome. For me, all this set off warning bells, and I found myself expressing a passionate opposition to the narrative of stunting, disturbing the quiet coffee I thought I’d enjoy with my friend. Norbert Elias ([1939] 1994) understood repugnance—and particularly the shifting thresholds of repugnance—as the driver of what he called “the civilizing process.” He noted that what was discussed with no shame in one period could in the next be too shameful to mention. So, for instance, readers of Erasmus in 1530 had to be told not to start a conversation with someone who was defecating. Later, it was simply assumed that one would not see a person defecating, much less wonder how one should greet them, and the issue was no longer mentioned in instructional manuals on civility. While rationalities could often be produced to support such changes in feeling, Elias argued that in fact it is the emotions—things such as disgust and repugnance—that come first. Elias’s “civilizing process” can best be imagined in terms of a courtly society. From a courtly center, civilized behavior emanated outward to be picked up by more and more marginal people. Elias contrasted this to the German concept of kultur. This word indicated expressions of unique ability and virtue, the results of being true to one’s self. Elias gives the image of flowers in a field as an image of kultur, each bloom an expression of something unique and innate (Elias [1939] 1994, 45). It was this romantic German notion of culture that was championed by Franz Boas. The mainstream message of twentieth-century anthropology, emanating from the courtly center of Boas and his disciples, trumpeted the value of culture as difference. Anthropologists were trained in methodological relativism. In the field they were to suspend judgment and to understand things in context, with an eye for the difference between self and other. This tolerance for and even pleasure in difference and diversity applied very widely, but implicitly this tolerance was not extended to anthropologists themselves. Anything that looks like evolutionary anthropology seems to carry a taint of racism and is itself not tolerated (Bloch 2012, 38). Coming from this disciplinary background, it seemed to me that the stunting narrative added insult to injury to the people of Kandon. It seemed

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part of a larger narrative of progress that viewed the Kantu only in terms of their lack. As Wiphat said in his story of CLTS, “We came from the mountains near Vietnam and we had nothing at all to begin with”—as if their life there, their traditions, their knowledge, their skills, and their land amounted to nothing. Today, the villagers’ ability to care for their own children is found wanting. Even their bodies are found lacking, missing those extra inches that would bring them up to the global ideal standard. On my return to New Kandon, however, it was clear to me that the singular path to development—although an entrenched part of the wider political culture—is not the only path taken by everyday people. In the toilets of New Kandon, unique flowers really are blooming. There are things happening in those water rooms that are “off the charts,” and to my mind, delightfully so. In the previous chapter, I described my interview with Dr. Sipheng, architect of the Culture Village policy. In that interview, he mentioned that one of the things that needed to change about ethnic minorities was the method of giving birth. He told me that highland women “give birth in the forest alone.” Birthing in the forest alone is part of the supposed backwardness of highlanders. Wiphat also included this in his village history, which he repeated for various visitors: “giving birth in the forest alone” was one of those things he said the people of New Kandon did in the past but no longer do thanks to the guidance of the Party-state. I attempted to get to the bottom of this birth narrative by asking older women. I was introduced to Huk, a woman of about seventy-five. She and others explained that the spirit of the rice despises the blood of childbirth, so care is taken not to birth anywhere associated with rice—not in rice fields, the granary, the kitchen, or, in the past, in the village during the rice growing season. This was to protect the mother and the child. As a result, many births took place in tiny shacks in a secluded part of the forest.17 The shack was supposed to be built by the husband, and a woman could count on him and/or other relatives to wait outside and hand up water or other things she might need. Huk was married in the 1960s. Her husband went to fight in the war the day after their wedding, and he was gone for three years. The people of Old Kandon at this time lived dispersed in the forest, hiding from the American bombers circling overhead. This was a hard time. The bombers would go after “anything that moved” (Turse 2014). If they could not find people to kill, they would bomb fields. When Huk gave birth to her first child, she did so entirely unassisted. Her support networks had been blown apart by the war. She was too afraid of the bombers to even light a fire to stay warm. She had only a small canteen of water because it was too dangerous to fetch any more. This is what

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she and other older women in Kandon thought I meant when I first asked them about the idea that women had “birthed in the forest alone” in the past. That was one of the hardships of the war. Huk gave birth this way four times. After the war, Huk’s husband continued with the military, and her next four births took place in what she called mueang Lao (L: Lao country) in Salavan, where the family moved for his career. She gave birth the Lao way, in the space under the stilted houses that the Lao call the kalang. Huk had to cut our conversation short there, as she had to go to bring in her harvest rice, and she leapt into the back of a pickup truck with her remaining sons, radiating strength. When New Kandon was first established, the authorities expected women to take on the Lao practice of birthing in the kalang because they expected the people of New Kandon to abandon the taboos of the rice spirit. And indeed, these taboos have been abandoned at the level of the village. However, they have continued at the level of the household, meaning birthing in the kalang was still dangerous for mother and child. More recently, women throughout Laos have been strongly encouraged to give birth in the district clinic or provincial Hospital instead of “in the forest alone” or under the house. In the booklet that is issued to all pregnant women, the booklet where mothers are supposed to track the growth of the child against standardized charts, the front cover states, “All pregnant women must go to a public facility to for checkups and to give birth.”18 I had hypothesized that the taboos regarding the rice spirit might make the Kantu of New Kandon enthusiastic users of the public birth facilities. In 2017, when I interviewed pregnant women about their birth plans, they at first rather meekly said that they planned to go to the hospital. But this story did not last long, and when they realized that I had no particular preference about where they should give birth, in almost every interview I soon heard the line that women would only go to the hospital if there was a problem. If there was no problem, they would stay in the village. The primary reason given was that they were shy of the doctors and staff at hospitals, a reference, I think, to the criticism and judgment that are routine there. They also said that the ­facilities—such as the maternity waiting house I toured—were dirty. There are other difficulties: few women have reliable access to a vehicle. Some who had tried getting to the hospital ended up birthing on the road. Even if they arrived in time, the birthing rooms at the clinics and hospitals were cramped and didn’t allow women to move as they usually would, and it was difficult for their support people to fit in, let alone for the support people to find food and accommodation near the hospital. When I asked if birthing at home instead was dangerous due to the rice

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spirit, women clarified that the actual birth would take place in the water rooms. While once the rice taboos meant birthing women were excluded from the village, and birthed in shacks outside the village, now rice taboos are observed at the level of the household, and women birth in shacks outside the house, that is, the water rooms. This confirms other observations I made about the continuance of rice taboos on the level of the household, not the village, in New Kandon. Only if the rice harvest is in and all rituals have ceased would anyone countenance the idea of giving birth in the house itself—one woman I spoke to had done this, because technically her house was in the short period of freedom from the rice taboos, but she recounted this with a laugh. It was evident that these days it is considered much more appropriate and normal to birth in the water rooms. Women described births that were fast—usually only a few hours or less— and supported by a multitude of female relatives. One woman, Bouy, had no children herself. She said that she had assisted with hundreds of births in Kandon. She gestured at one of the tangles of kids who always seemed to congregate around my interviews, and proudly said that she had seen every one of them born. Only if there was a problem would one of the local midwives be called. And only if she could not help would they go on to the local hospital. The story of birth in New Kandon is a story of extraordinary resilience. Older women in this village are survivors of a devastating decade in which they lived in constant fear of attack and material hardship. Huk described her births alone in the forest with a steady resolve. When I asked her if she had been afraid, and how she had comforted herself, she said, “I thought: I would either live or I would die, and both were good.” Since the war, the village has been in a full throttle pursuit of improvement. Often this has involved following the plans and advice of the government. But as the story of birthing shows, this advice is not always followed. The water rooms allowed women to birth assisted by the extensive support they have in this very cohesive village, a cohesion that has been won back after the devastation of the war. Watching Bouy gesture to the little children she had helped bring into the world, I was struck by her apparent joy in them. There is a resilience here not only of individuals but also of the group. The water room births confirm the rule of unintended consequences. The purpose of the CLTS project had been to end open defecation, with the ultimate aim of ending stunting and bringing Laos in line with a global measure of personal and national development. But in the process, this project opened up opportunities for New Kandon women to reconnect with their own idiosyncratic birthing preferences.

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What women are doing with birth also shows that—for all the directives and vanguardism—there are still multiple ways of being and flourishing in Laos. These alternatives to official development plans might not be exactly officially supported, but they are evident in how people are actually living their lives. If the civilizing process sometimes seems like an irresistible march along a single line of development determined by the center, from the perspective of actual lives lived there was a delightful deviance, and flowers blooming in the most unlikely places. I find this story delightful, but I wonder if many in New Kandon would share my relish. The women there seemed matter-of-fact in telling me about their births in water rooms. I got the distinct sense that they’d rather give birth in another venue, and one woman suggested that I sponsor the construction of a special birthing house in the village. My enjoyment of the birth story is rooted in an all-too-anthropological desire to see many flowers blooming. Wiphat, by contrast, delighted in the elements of progress that he and the village had accumulated. The signs clustered at the entry to the village and the medals, certificates, and accolades were all symbols of their advancement on a path imagined as unilinear, and he relished them. There are pleasures to measuring up, as well as stigmas. When I returned to New Kandon in 2017, the sign that used to be at the turnoff proudly declaring that the village was “Open Defecation Free” was gone. It had been replaced with a sign singing the praises of New Kandon as a tourism destination. The appearance and then disappearance of the open defecation sign indicates, I think, ongoing shifts in the threshold of repugnance. CLTS itself was explicitly a project aimed at creating change by “triggering” repugnance. The sign marked the pride that was felt at first, but over time the sign itself became embarrassing. When I showed people in Vientiane the photograph of the old sign so proudly declaring “Open Defecation Free,” some of them had laughed. It seemed absurd to these urbane Laotians that a village should introduce itself to the world by announcing first its toileting habits. As Elias noted, the courtly center never stops refining itself. Everyday people, once caught in the civilizing process, are constantly having to catch up to goalposts that keep moving. They betray their coarseness, embarrassingly, in their very attempts to emulate the center. What the story of the water rooms of New Kandon shows is how all of us—New Kandon families, their anthropologist, bureaucrats, and NGO workers—are caught in civilizing processes, by which I mean the creation and

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shifting of thresholds of repugnance. Norbert Elias’s notion of civilization is different from the connotations of that word in evolutionary anthropology. Elias understood civilization as a matter of shifting delicacies of feeling. This idea leaves open the possibility that there are multiple scales of civility. For instance, at the Sekong hospital the nurse appeared to assume I would share her repugnance for the Kantu woman who had left her mosquito net down. But in fact what I found repugnant was the nurse’s lack of support and respect for the woman. We both felt disgusted, but for very different reasons. I don’t believe we were at different stages of the same scale: we were on different scales. And we expressed it in very different ways. The nurse scolded, and I bit my tongue. I was acting out the methodological relativism that has become entrenched in the emotional terrain of English-language anthropology. I was observing, and trying not to judge, but inside I mourned those moments when diversity and difference were browbeaten into a singular track of what it was to be a civilized, cultured person. The moments I enjoyed were those where I found diversity blooming in resilient, unexpected, and idiosyncratic ways. Such emotions at times put me at odds with people like Wiphat. He wanted to tell his story using the socialist vanguard’s idiom of success. As he told the team from Savanakhet, “We came from the mountains near Vietnam and we had nothing at all to begin with. So we certainly lack many things. But this village has an internal spirit of improvement. And things are improving.” Could my relativism extend to celebrating with Wiphat his version of success, even when it was at odds with my own, disciplinary, set of values?

5 “Are We United?”

When I got to a hotel in Ubon Ratchathani in Thailand, I took a shower. My feet made muddy pools and were impossible to get clean. I got a haircut in a local mall, grabbing some Japanese takeaway as I went. When a machine cleaning the floor of the mall came past, I thought I heard the sound of Kandon’s gongs. When the pop music in the hairdressers was drowned out by hairdryers, I thought I could hear beyond them the beating of the Kandon village buffalo-skin drum. When I finished my meal, I thought for a moment that the pool of soy sauce at the bottom of the tray must be blood. Blood. So much blood these past days: blood, drums, and the slow, powerful movement of the buffalo. And dust was everywhere. I cleaned it off my laptop, cameras, and suitcase. The wipes came away orange-brown with Kandon soil. I tried to write field notes while it was all fresh in my mind but wrote instead about this mixture of exhaustion, disgust, and relief at being away. I put the hallucinations down to a lack of sleep. Construction work had been going on in Kandon through the 2013 dry season in a rush to finish before the day of the village festival. By day, the village was noisy with power tools and hammers. Each new construction or renovation required an eat buffalo event at its completion. As the dry season neared its end, such events were frequent. I spent evenings at the sponsoring houses, sleeping in my jacket among other guests who had come to pass the night, my head on my camera bag, pinsand-needles in my legs from the hard floor. The dancers, making their way around the central pole of the house, carefully stepped past the sleeping bodies in their dance. One of these nights, I rose to film the moon, which was glowing through a shroud of clouds. I filmed men parading the gongs around buffalo by the light of a single electric bulb. The senior woman of the sponsoring house talked into the ear of the buffalo for quite some time. Afterward, I sat next to that woman on a bench under a tree in her yard and watched a man circle around

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the buffalo. He walked up to it and made a sudden movement. The buffalo retreated. He did it again and I start filming, realizing this was it, the moment of “sacrifice” in my mind, although hardly anyone was watching. Two men pretended to point something at the buffalo. A blade? But their hands were empty. The trick caught the buffalo’s attention and the first man came in from behind to stab it again. It fell over, a big cloud of dust circling around it. That night a drunk man grabbed my arm and tried to drag me somewhere. A friend said, “Don’t go with him,” and I twisted free. The drunk toppled over. My wrist ached from his grip. The nights were like this, and cold. In the mornings, I would type field notes, hands high because the keyboard was so cold. The heat would start around 9 a.m. By 11 a.m. it would be too hot to do anything. Some people would sit under their houses in the shade, melting, perhaps trying to sleep, but often it was too hot even for that. There was a great uproar when a house caught fire: a lighter had been left upstairs in a cupboard and exploded in the heat. My cameras would overheat and fail if I tried to recharge them during the day. I looked forward to the sun dipping below the escarpment of the Bolaven Plateau that rose to our west. At least if I was sweating less, the dust would stick to me less. The dust got everywhere, into my eyes, my nose, my cameras. It, along with the smoke from innumerable pipes, burrowed into my sinuses, creating a dull headache that was present whenever I turned my head. Researching buffalo events started to feel like an endurance event. It was re-search: a repeated search. I repeatedly went to these events, repeated my questions, repeated my observations, until I was sick to my stomach. The descriptions I produced are detailed, comprehensive, and exhausted. During these weeks, I eventually found myself unable to eat buffalo. I began to react to the smell of carcasses being butchered and the distinct smell of their blood. My stomach revolted against the thought of eating it. I could watch, I could even film the deaths, but I could not embrace the blood as the people around me did. I had met my limits. Pointing to the bowls of bright red laab (L: a common dish in Laos, here made of raw buffalo meat, raw blood, and spices), a woman said, “It is a black buffalo, so I will eat it raw.” It would give her strength, she said with relish. She knew that I would want it cooked, though: it was common knowledge that many outsiders could not stomach what the Kantu found so invigorating about buffalo events. I wanted to prove her wrong, to enjoy a bowl of raw meat and blood with her, but my body rebelled. She and others seemed to understand and even expect this of me. They expected that their most important ritual act would disgust yet fascinate someone like me. The house I was staying at during these weeks was busy. There were lots of eat buffalo events for the man of the house to go to, lots of guests in town

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coming to visit. His wife tried to make me comfortable. She offered to wash my pillow when it was brown with dust. I bashed the dust out of my mattress, too, and swept the main living room, as it always seemed to have detritus around it from the various people her husband had been entertaining. As we worked, he slept heavily in his compartment nearby. The stench of a person who has drunk too much alcohol always reminds me of rotten oranges. During these weeks, he came home at odd hours, yelling or talking loudly in the night, disturbing what little sleep I could manage to find. This chapter begins my probing the limits of what I have described in the previous chapters: the limits to Kandon’s “success” and also the limits to the relativism that characterize my own, habitual ethnographic methods. The previous three chapters explored success as it is defined, claimed, and lived in the political culture of Lao socialism. Since the first “revolutionary missionaries” arrived in the southeastern highlands of Laos in the late 1940s, socialism has provided a metalanguage for self-reflection and evaluation, including concepts of what counts as success and how it can be measured. Wiphat prided himself on Kandon’s achievement of success in these terms, but even he admitted that there were limits to this. His adage was that the village has discarded 80 percent of its traditions, but that 20 percent remained, and that this 20 percent was cam pen (L: necessary). The ritual killing and eating of buffalo was one of the prime examples he gave of such necessities. This chapter examines eat buffalo events (a translation of the Kantu term for these events, caa karpiiw) as a starting point for unpacking “necessity” as a marker for such limits to engagement with socialist ideals. Additionally, this chapter shows that—as powerful as the Lao Partystate has been here in shaping lives and worldviews—it is not the only power that Kandon residents recognize and engage. This chapter describes the occult powers that play such an important part in Kandon lives. A third and final contribution this chapter makes is to begin an answer to the questions, posed in chapter 3 and 4, about the limits to relativism as ethnographic fieldwork method. As I investigated eat buffalo, I found that a powerful presence, noticed mostly for its absence (in ritual and public debate, but also in my first drafts of this chapter), was that of women. Women were profoundly important in terms of symbolic representation in buffalo ritual, but they were rarely rendered articulate themselves.

The Oath The culminating event of the dry season in 2013 was a village-wide eat buffalo involving three animals sponsored by the village as a whole, and dozens

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of animals slaughtered in household-based events immediately afterward. In Lao, this couple of days was referred to as the bun baan (L: village festival). Usually, the Kandon village festival takes place on March 5. But in 2013 the event was pushed back to coincide with International Women’s Day, March 8, a national holiday in Laos. This was because this year the event would begin with an oath, with each adult swearing off a number of harmful activities, and absolutely everyone claiming to be resident in the village needed to be there to participate as a condition of being a resident of Kandon. In the chill of the early morning, men gathered in the center of the schoolyard around three buckets. Women mostly waited near the papaya trees at the schoolyard fence. Santhii, a balding man with a crinkled forehead and prominent upper teeth, was the head of the naew hom (L: an association of the elder men of the village that is a local branch of the National Front). It was he who would eventually address the occult powers, calling on them to enforce this oath. In his hand was a plastic bag containing a few handfuls of rice. He took some of the dusty soil from where he stood and added it to the bag, rubbing it into the rice absent-mindedly as he chatted to the other men. One of the buckets was full of clean water. Malo positioned himself centrally among the men. Middle-aged, with a smooth, glowing complexion and impossibly white, straight teeth, his full hair looked washed and neatly combed, and he was wearing a bright orange-andwhite Unitel polo shirt. He had been a central figure in organizing the oath, and it was he who took charge of writing out and keeping the various handwritten versions that had been produced by the village meetings in the lead-up. Now, he held up a document handwritten in Lao and read it aloud: “Clause 1: Bad medicines and sorcery used for murder. Clause 2: Witchcraft used for murder. Clause 3: Giving payments to hire people [i.e., sorcerers and witches] to murder others. Clause 4: Stealing valuables from a value of 150,000 kiip upwards. Clause 5: Rape. [That is, sex] with no unity. That’s all. Five clauses. The water drunk here will curse whoever commits these acts.” Wihaan, smoking a large bamboo pipe and hugging a heavy khaki jacket against the morning chill, was the first to speak up. Apparently anticipating debate on the rape clause, he said, “It is not that a man can’t sleep with his wife. It is not that a wife can’t have sex with her husband. This clause is about one man forcing another man’s wife. The rapist will be punished by the oath . . . . If they like one another, then it does not matter [laughter]. But if a man climbs through the window . . . [laughter].” Wihaan explained that an earlier version of the oath had banned adultery, but this version of the oath was toned down and merely banned rape. He was mostly speaking in Kantu:

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there was apparently some difficulty in translating the Lao concept of rape into Kantu, as he and others frequently glossed it as trapiang (K: illegitimate sex) bo mii ekaphap (L: without unity). He again said that it was about “rapists breaking in through the door or the window!” a comment that was again met with laughter by the men. Malo held the oath in the air and asked if the knot surrounding him (all men) agreed with the clauses: “Ekaphap bo?” (L: Are we united?). The initial response from was resoundingly positive: “Yes, we are!” But then there was a dissenting voice. Canhuan pushed himself through the crowd toward Malo, talking as he came. The village already had procedures for a rape case, he said: a fine paid to the husband of the raped woman by the rapist. If there was also an oath calling on the spirits to kill the rapist, then would the curse of the oath also transfer to the husband that accepted the fine? Or would the village authorities who organized the fine be attacked by the curse of the oath? Or would it attack the woman herself? Perhaps it would attack everyone concerned. Responding to Canhuan’s concerns, Malo suggested that the oath be changed so that it pertained only to rapes that were secret, either because the rapist was unknown to the woman or because she was too afraid to speak up. But Canhuan rejected this compromise: “If she [a raped woman] does not tell everyone then it isn’t really a rape.” The men largely conceded that Canhuan had a point, minimally, that a clause in the oath punishing rape with a deadly curse stood in a confused relationship to the existing system of fines. Wiphat watched the argument in silence for some time with a grim look on his face. Finally, he spoke: “If there is a lot of disagreement, then take that clause out.” Although some voices continued to object (“What if there was a rape in the house and you didn’t know who did it? At night and you don’t see their face—what about in that case?”), the majority of people participating in the debate followed Wiphat’s position. Malo conceded, “If we leave the rape clause in, lots of people won’t drink the water [of the oath, so the oath will not be effective].” In the interests of securing the unity needed for the oath ceremony to take place at all, the clause was removed. There were some other, minor, changes, and then the final version was burned.1 The ashes were mixed into the bucket of water, along with the rice and dirt in Santhii’s plastic bag. Stirring the mixture, Santhii called out to spirits, asking them to witness and enforce the oath. The mixture was divided between the three buckets. Each bucket was taken to a table in a different part of the schoolyard. People clustered around the tables according to the administrative section

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of the village in which they were enrolled. Men and women came forward one by one as the section leader called their names. An assistant dipped a glass into the bucket and poured water into each mouth. There was concern to get it right. Men peered over the section leader’s shoulder, making sure he checked off the right names. The assistant asked some people to open their mouths before they left, to show they had really swallowed the water. But there was good humor, too. After all, this was the first act of the village festival and was supposed to be a jolly time. One man leaned back as if doing the limbo when taking his mouthful. A woman made a show of swallowing theatrically, inviting laughter. The sunlight grew intense as the morning wore on. Jackets came off, some slung over heads to keep off the hot sun. By the time the last person drank, it was past 11 a.m. Eight hundred meters away, by the ceremonial hall, a white buffalo was tied to a stake. Flexible and incredibly long lengths of giant bamboo were bound upright to each of the three buffalo stakes, decorated with tufts of white grass that rustled in the wind. Hangings made of bamboo pipes and woven grass dangled from the downward-curving tips, catching the breeze and chiming. The white buffalo killed here would feed the dangerous spirits Santhii had called on to enforce the oath. The next day, two black buffalo would be killed for the village spirit, and another couple of dozen cows and buffalo would be slaughtered at family homes. A cultured village, according to the Culture Village policies, ought to hold an annual village festival. In the case of Kandon, this requirement had been met through a creation inspired by elements of preexisting eat buffalo rituals. Outside of the village festival, eat buffalo events are usually held to consecrate a new building or renovations (of a cinaar or a private house), to mark arrivals or departures from a household (marriage, a young couple moving out, funerals), or to feed ancestor ghosts who have taken offense and thus caused illnesses in the family. Annual eat buffalo events were also sponsored in the past by the village as a whole. In the past, only one specific village was invited to such events, and the date varied with each event. It was the only occasion on which guests could stay in the village. Guests would be challenged to a mock battle on arrival, and then fed lavishly. These days, the date for the village festival is more or less set on the international calendar, and the event is publicized through the tourism office. And, as with any other day of the year, anyone can attend. When I interviewed Dr. Sipheng—the architect of the Culture Village policies—he mentioned “killing buffalo” for health-related reasons as among those superstitions that needed to end. Oscar Salemink (2000), writing of the

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central highlands of Vietnam, reports that buffalo sacrifice there has completely disappeared due to pressure from the state. Some observers have assumed that buffalo sacrifice is effectively banned in Laos as well.2 But the reality is more complex.3 Ritually killing and eating buffalo has a legitimized place in contemporary Lao cultural politics, albeit a circumscribed one. When a group of provincial health office workers visited Kandon one day on ODFrelated work, one of them took it upon himself to explain to me cultural change in the village. He said, “When they lived in the mountains, they would kill ten buffalo, now they kill just one. Before, they would kill one animal per household. Now, it is one per village. They used to eat it raw, now they cook it. This is better for dysentery.” These rituals are officially acceptable today, so long as they are scaled down and cleaned up.4 This man’s comments are best understood as an expression of doctrine rather than an observation of actual ritual in Kandon. His comments echo those made in official documents and by other civil servants. In particular, the notion of substituting fewer or smaller animals at previously large events is a recurring theme of official descriptions of cultural change. For instance, an earlier history of Sekong mentions that early cadre reduced the burden of ritual by substituting pigs for buffalo or cutting back on the amount of buffalo killed in one event (Engelbert 2004). Pierre Petit mentions a similar story emerging in an interview with a Lao state ethnographer (2013, 474). However, in reality, the ritual killing of buffalo is not currently in decline in Kandon. Indeed, as I will show in this chapter, a renaissance of buffalo ritual is currently underway, with eat buffalo events sometimes increasing in response to rising incomes and new problems, such as concerns about unity that have emerged in this large, recently reunified, and recently resettled village.

Occult powers Eat buffalo events are a technique for mediating relations between humans and certain occult powers. I borrow the term “occult powers” from Valerio Valeri (2000, 23–26). Dissatisfied with the common translation of “spirits” because of its Judeo-Christian implication of immateriality, Valeri notes that to the contrary, many of these entities are crucially material among the Huaulu (and, I would add, the Kantu). They have bodies, and part of the danger is that it is rarely possible to know which body is normal and which is malevolently powerful. Valeri settles on the term “occult powers”: “powers” because this is what defines them (they are known by the effects they cause); “occult” because

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the nature of this power is often unknown. All that is known are the effects. When speaking of such beings, for instance, people in Kandon say, “They can see us, but we can’t see them.” I part ways with Valeri in that I continue to use the word “spirit” at times, so as to avoid cumbersome phrasing. I confine my use of it to the translation of the Kantu word jaaŋ or sangkhom:5 jaaŋ wiil is the village spirit, jaaŋ daŋ is a household spirit, and jaaŋ cinaar is the spirit of the ceremonial hall. There are jaaŋ of trees, stones, rice, mountains, instruments, and so on. The most powerful is the sun, matinyay (K: the eye of the day). The sun, while classified as a jaaŋ, has qualities that suggest it is best thought of as a deity or supreme being. While a small number of jaaŋ such as the sun are named and have an established relationship with people, in most cases, spirits are only vaguely known and exist for people mainly through a sense that potentially any material object or place might have a jaaŋ. They are addressed in ritual in second person plural, an encompassing but somewhat vague “you-all.” When one collects water, opens a new rice field, takes a walk in a forest, works in the garden, attends a meeting in the hall, or interacts with family in the house, one is in the domain of a jaaŋ, and additionally one is always observed by the sun. Jaaŋ can cause children to lose their way, untimely deaths, bodily pains, festering wounds, motorcycle accidents, and seizures and madness, to name just a few adverse events I saw attributed to various jaaŋ. Not all illnesses are caused by jaaŋ: biomedicine is recognized as effective in curing purely physical ailments. The distinction between spiritual and nonspiritual illness is determined by divination.6 There are broadly two sorts of jaaŋ: jaaŋ caa panos (K: spirits that eat people) and jaaŋ nprangahay (K: protective spirits). Protective jaaŋ can intercede to stop other jaaŋ from eating people. However, there was no consensus among the Kantu regarding which jaaŋ fell into which category. Santhii told me that he called on the jaaŋ of the earth and the forest to listen to the oath being read out and to enforce its terms: he emphatically told me that these jaaŋ protect people. However, on the same day, others proffered the example of these same spirits as the paradigm of jaaŋ that eat people. That is why the buffalo was white, they said. Black buffalo are reserved for feeding good powers. The white buffalo was to feed bad things that are to be driven away, including the spirits that eat people that had been called on to enforce the oath. Although village spirits are usually fed by dedicated eat buffalo events as well as offerings from other eat buffalo and are supposed to protect village inhabitants, they remained dangerous.7 Arguably, all spirits have this dual potential: to either eat people or protect people. The household spirits, for instance, are

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said to be the spirits of the trees that were cut down to make the house or the corpses in the soil used to make bricks, but if these spirits are treated correctly, they can also protect the household inhabitants. The oath sought to ban the practice and hire of sorcery. My use of this term follows E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who defined “sorcery” as harmful medicines and arts that can be learned as opposed to “witchcraft,” which is a physical substance in the bodies of certain persons that may be inheritable (1937, 9–10). This closely maps on to the Lao terms used in the oath, in which waan yaa indicates harmful “medicines,” and mon moo are the “doctors” who have learned these recipes. According to Kandon understandings, sorcery substances can kill on contact—a sorcerer might put a little in their target’s shoe, clothing, or body, or dip some in food or water that the victim will consume. The medicine would then “eat” the victim. One case of sorcery occurred in Old Kandon in 2012. A husband and wife were healers. The man knew herbal medicine and magical words. The woman was a spirit medium. In 2012, two of the people the woman attempted to cure died. The couple denied that they were responsible, claiming that it was merely that the illnesses were beyond their capacity to heal. To address suspicion and restore unity in the village, an oath was taken on May 2, 2012. But the pair refused to drink. They left the village, taking with them twenty-eight of their relatives (from a village that contained, at that time, only 183 people). The group of thirty established a new village called Small Kandon in an abandoned village site in traditional Kandon territory. I wanted to hear their side of the story, but no one was willing to show me the way to Small Kandon. For the villagers I spoke to, the event was a saddening confirmation that sorcerers do indeed exist even among their closest kin, but also an affirmation of the power of oath taking to drive out or deter them.8 What is particularly important to note in this story is that, through the concept of sorcery, healers can come under suspicion of being harmers. Just as the wild spirits can become protective, and protective spirits can become predatory, so too can healers’ gifts change direction. Likewise, close kin and family can become one’s worst enemy: it is the people closest to you, with whom you share food on a day-today basis, or those who act as healers, who have the best opportunity to harm you if they are secretly sorcerers. The poob pong (L) mentioned in the oath are called dammɑk in Kantu. These closely conform to E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s definition of witches. People in Kandon say dammɑk have “a body we don’t see” that feeds on the “body we don’t see” of others. Dammɑk sometimes deliberately scare people, aiming to jolt a victim’s soul from the body. One man described the following encounter.

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He had seen a giant bird with the head of a monkey and the ears of a human on a forested slope a few times. He knew that it wanted to scare him, but he refused to be scared. But one time it flapped slowly in front of his face. He used his mobile phone to call his friend in Pakse, because he was starting to feel afraid. Then it swooped. He thought it would tear his face off. He raised one arm to protect his face and struck out at the bird with his phone. His arm struck nothing—it passed straight through the bird, and he hit himself with the phone. Now the bird was in a tree above him. He ran to the next village and told people what had happened. People there confirmed that this monster had been on the outskirts of the village for some time. It must be a resident of that village, they said, because dammɑk can’t travel far from their human bodies. As with sorcerers, the people suspected of being witches were mainly people close by, because the “body we don’t see” that hunts and appears to victims can’t roam far from the visible body. A key trait of witchcraft is that it is activated by jealousy.9 A jealous person’s “body we don’t see” might eat others without the perpetrator’s knowledge. One cure is to present food and valuables—whatever the witch might want— on a tray in one’s own house, exactly as is done when “feeding” household and ancestor spirits. Something like a new watch might be offered this way for an hour or two to defray potential jealousy, then taken back and worn normally. If food is offered this way to a witch, the offering must be large.10 Unlike ancestors, witches eat copiously: another sign of their dangerously unmoderated desire. The final clause of the oath addressed theft. Petty theft of money, food, mobile phone credit, and household items is routine in Kandon and causes a great deal of frustration, but the most important theft in recent living memory was the theft of the village valuables. This occurred in two incidents. In 1997, some gold items, a statue, and a bell that could be heard for miles disappeared. In 2004, two bronze drums, called the lakam, were stolen. Although the police launched an investigation, no one was charged. These thefts left a permanent mark on the ritual life of the village. “We had laksamii [L: luck, fortune, prosperity, charm, grace, beauty]. We were protected,” Buoy said. “But after we moved here we lost our laksamii. People could see the drums, then, so thieves took them.” At the village festival in 2013, when I photographed the remaining village valuables, a man eagerly asked if the photograph was clear. When I showed him the image on the digital screen, he was visibly deflated: in the past, he said, the valuables had been so powerful that previous anthropologists had not been able to capture them on film. According to Buoy, it was because of a loss of power that the lakam drums became visible and thus open to theft in

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the first place. She and others pointed out that the thieves must have been locals, or at least had local accomplices, in order to know where the valuables had been hidden. Santhii, the man who mixed the oath concoction and called the spirits to witness and enforce it, explained to me that an oath taking had never taken place before in Kandon. He said that in the mountains, even though they knew how to take an oath, “we didn’t have to! It is only since moving here that people started lying and cheating.”11 He understood this ritual as a novel one that was designed to address new problems arising after resettlement. Theft, witches, and sorcerers were all elements of a lack of unity in the village. In each case, it was neighbors, relatives, and friends who were under suspicion.

Occult powers and state powers Despite the contrast between the secularism of Lao socialism and the concern with witches, sorcerers, and spirits evident in the oath, people in Kandon acted as though the oath was continuous with state power. As the oath was revised on the day the water was to be drunk, Malo repeatedly asked “Ekaphap”? (L: Are we united?), a Lao word with strong resonance in socialist doctrine. Most of the details of the final revisions to the oath were hammered out in Kantu, but the oath itself was phrased in officious-sounding Lao. The national motto, “Lao People’s Democratic Republic: Peace, Independence, Democracy, Unity, and Prosperity,” was laboriously handwritten across the top of every version of the oath, mimicking official Lao documents. Copies of the oath were lodged with the village chief and all the mass organizations in the village.12 People who drank the oath had their names checked off by the local administrators for their section of the village. The oath took place on the school grounds. Government officials from outside the village were invited to eat the choicest cuts of the white buffalo that was killed to seal the oath. In these and other ways, the oath drew on and extended the aesthetics and apparatus of state power even as it wielded spiritual power. What are the links between the Lao secular socialist state and the ritual that made this possible? One answer is historical: the French colonialists used rituals they called palabre du serment—or oath ceremonies—in their direct rule of the highlands. In 1926, local Montagnard chieftains in Darlac made an oath of loyalty directly to the French resident (Salemink 1991, 252). And oaths had been used in Sekong since the 1950s in efforts by cadre to abolish “retrograde customs and traditions” (Engelbert 2004, 261). These were “inventions

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of traditions” (Salemink 1991, 253), purposeful modifications of existing traditions for new political goals. In the past in this region, suspected witches and sorcerers were killed or enslaved.13 In the 1940s Georges Condominas recorded the massacre and enslavement of an entire clan in one village suspected of sorcery in the central highlands of Vietnam (1977, 208). Oral accounts in Kandon suggest that witches were killed as recently as forty years ago. Pressure from the Lao state has not so much eradicated “superstitious beliefs” in witches and sorcerers as suggested an alternative means of dealing with them: an oath. The state has replaced traditions not with an austere secularism but rather with different traditions. Despite the apparent influence of state policy on the oath, and its apparently “invented” nature, the passionate debate over the rape clause showed that the ritual was nonetheless sincerely felt: one of the reasons most frequently reported to me about why the rape clause was removed was “too many people would have died [if the clause had been retained].” This suggests that the spiritual enforcement of the oath was taken very seriously. The oath was an invitation to the wild spirits to extend their intervention into village life. Given that occult intervention in people’s health and well-being is already a heavy burden, this was not undertaken lightly. Furthermore, occult powers were invited into realms where existing state power was failing. Malo pointed out that there is no law that currently forbids murder by witchcraft or sorcery, or forbids people to hire such services. The fourth clause forbade thefts. Thefts are currently illegal under Lao law, but police investigations into major recent thefts had not resulted in prosecutions. The rape clause was removed in part because opponents argued that there was already a legal procedure for such a crime, in addition to the local system of fines. High modernist states often use techniques of “rendering legible”; what can be seen by the state can be controlled (Scott 1998). The oath went a step further; it was a means of extending state power to the unseen. Ancestor ghosts and spirits “can see us but we can’t see them.” A witch may not be aware of her own witchcraft and the harm it is causing. Sorcerers make and deposit their poisonous medicines secretly. The real story and identities behind the theft of lakam were never brought to light. The proponents of the rape clause were primarily concerned with unseen rapes by unknown perpetrators. If high modernist state power is often the power of the seeing and being seen, the oath called on occult powers to extend power in the opposite direction: to those powers that operate in secrecy, darkness, and invisibility. In the oath, this was treated not as antithetical to state power but as complementary to it, filling gaps that the state had not been able to address.

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But there was one gap that remained when the final oath was burnt and drunk. The rape clause—debated but removed—hung heavily as a present absence over my attempts to analyze and describe the events of that day, which (ironically or not) had taken place on International Women’s Day. If the occult and the state found a mutual extension and enhancement of power through the oath taking, there was evidently also something as yet unresolved in this mutuality. This something pointed to the present absence of women. I will return to the question of women when discussing the value of buffalo below. First, however, a few words are necessary supporting my contention that eat buffalo is undergoing a renaissance.

The Eat Buffalo Renaissance Seven men came out of the cinaar banging gongs. They walked around the white buffalo three times, beating in time and calling out ooh ew. The steps up to the cinaar were lined with children, some holding bright balloons. The men passed them and put the gongs away in the rafters, ready for the next performance. Wihaan came out with a traditional dagger. He approached the white buffalo casually from its left rear, out of its line of vision. One stab pierced the thick hide near the heart. The buffalo flinched and moved away. Wihaan backed off, concealing the dagger along his arm. The buffalo was quiet at the post, stoic. Wihaan approached again from the left rear. A motorcycle with three cases of Beer Lao stacked on the back drove past. The buffalo was wary of Wihaan now and kept circling its injured side away. Wiphat walked forward, and the buffalo watched him. Wihaan came again while the buffalo was distracted. He drove the dagger into the same wound. Blood spurted. He had hit an artery, or perhaps the heart. The buffalo pulled backward hard on the vine and rope holding it to the stake. But the effort only seemed to make the blood gush out faster. Still without a cry, the buffalo collapsed on its right side, eyes closed, its wound upward. A man dealt two blows to the skull with an axe, just under the plate where the horns are fused. A final twitch of the tail, and it was dead. Some mats made of woven grass were placed under the carcass and the buffalo was butchered there at the stake. First a foreleg was removed, then a rear, and then the intestinal cavity was opened. Buckets were used to collect the blood and viscera. Another bucket was used for the contents of the intestines. Within twenty minutes, the remaining flank of the buffalo, still attached to the spine, two legs and the head, was carried up the stairs into the cinaar by

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five men. There, along with the other meat, it was cut up into small portions. Each family had paid a contribution for the purchase of this buffalo, and now they were assigned a pile that included prime meat, bones, and innards. These piles took up a full third of the floor space of the cinaar. One of the remaining village valuables, a carving of an ancestor, watched the proceedings with hands over ears. On the raised sitting platform, a circle of men and women congregated around a pipe. One of the men butchering the buffalo brought them the liver. He was concerned. He asked what the others thought of the abnormal white patch on the liver. The circle agreed with him. This imperfection confirmed the suspicions that had motivated the oath in the first place: there really were thieves, witches, and sorcerers in Kandon. Their faces were grim. During the oath, unity was at once that which was sought, the means of attaining it, and also that which was in question. Unity is undoubtedly one of the keywords of Lao socialism. But the oath showed that it is more than that. The oath indicated a more-than-socialist concern with the occult power of unity, and the potentially deadly dangers of division. People came with basins or buckets to collect their share of meat. Again, their names were checked off on the village rolls. For many, the meat would be used in meals for the guests expected as the village festival gathered pace. All over Kandon, stakes and streamers were raised signaling the ritual killing of cows and buffalo. It seemed that every time I turned a corner I caught sight of another beast at the stake. In some of the alleyways, each house had an animal staked out front, ready for slaughter, so that they formed a line reaching as far as one could see into the dust and haze of the midday sun. The shady areas underneath the houses fronting the cinaar were crowded with guests. Stalls sold snacks and drinks. A Lao-style lam wong (L: dance in a circle) dance ground had been set up. Television cameras were there from Sekong. A group of Japanese tourists stood in the ceremonial hall around some men playing the buffalo-skin drum and the gongs. But then most of the locals went elsewhere, and I sat in the empty ceremonial hall, enjoying a moment of quiet. The sun was casting a golden sideways light over the two black buffalo tied to their stakes. The villagers came in a procession toward the cinaar from the direction of the main entry to the village. A long line of men: clanging gongs or carrying smoking pipes. The older ones wore long sarongs on the bottom and khaki jackets on top, pinned with medals if they had them. Others wore loincloths and blankets, or headdresses. A woman was paired opposite each man. The long parade of pairs snaked around the cinaar three times. Sometimes they

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took a break, yelling out “ew!” First the men and then the women slapped the buffalo, asking for good things for the coming year. In the final act of the procession, the younger people rushed inside the ceremonial hall. They whizzed around and around in an anticlockwise direction, jumping and calling out. I was inside the hall, filming. The atmosphere was exhilarating! I found myself laughing and cheering. After that, everyone went back home to wash. The jumping had stirred up the dust. Before I left, Wiphat made sure I was clear that I had to come back to dance the lam wong: “If you want to do your research here, you have to dance at the festival—otherwise people won’t want to talk to you.” When I arrived back at the cinaar, the dance floor was full. The shuffling feet kicked up a great cloud of dust over the village. They aimed to dance until dawn. The lam wong, another invented tradition promulgated by the Lao state, is a further prominent example of the unity, solidarity, and conviviality that is propagated in the affective terrain of Lao socialism. As the sun rose, the buffalos and cows staked outside private homes were killed. Some households were sponsoring an eat buffalo event simply to ensure strength and protection for the family in the coming year by preemptively feeding the ancestors and protective spirits. “Prevention is better than cure,” Wiphat observed wryly. Others needed to fulfill promises made throughout the year in response to illnesses caused by the ancestors, to consecrate construction or renovation work on a house, or to mark departures or reunions in the household. During the war years, eat buffalo events declined dramatically. People describe marriages that involved only the slaughter of a pig or nothing at all, and the suspension of the village festival altogether. Since the end of the war, however, eat buffalo has been on the rise. Goudineau visited Old Kandon village in 1995, just before their resettlement to New Kandon. He recorded that at that time thirteen buffalo were slaughtered at the annual village festival, although it is not clear how many were sponsored by the village as a whole and how many were for specific households. He noted that this was an extraordinarily occasion because it consecrated the reunified village (Goudineau 2000, 556). Futoshi Nishimoto records that in 2008 in New Kandon, a total of twenty-three large animals (buffalo and cows) were ritually killed during the entire year, including two for the village festival (2011, 109). In 2013, I saw three killed for the village as whole and dozens killed on the day of the village festival. During my fieldwork, eat buffalo events were a spectacular and frequent part of life in New Kandon. The reasons for any given household to hold such

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a ritual are usually multiple. For instance, one eat buffalo that I observed was when a diviner determined that a series of household misfortunes and illnesses, as well as bad behavior on the part of the children, were caused by kimoc (K: ancestor ghosts) who were angry that a buffalo had not been offered earlier to inform them when a young couple moved out of the house. The ghosts were now hungry. Through divination, the kimoc communicated that the household should build a much-needed new kitchen. The family would need to consecrate the kitchen with a buffalo anyway. A single buffalo could feed the hungry ancestor ghosts, cure any illnesses and misfortunes, belatedly inform the ghosts of the departure of the young couple, and consecrate the new kitchen. After all, I was told, “the ancestor ghosts don’t like to see waste.” In some ways, the renovation of the kitchen took place because of the need to kill a buffalo, rather than the other way around. One of the reasons behind the renaissance of eat buffalo in Kandon is that kimoc are now perhaps the most important occult powers in Kandon. Nishimoto speculates that the prominence of kimoc is a relatively recent phenomenon that has arisen as a result of the desecration of the jaaŋ daŋ shrines by cadre from the 1950s onward, and the cessation of second burial. With second burial, he speculates, the recently dead had been moved on into distant ancestors, and the household spirit cult included regular rituals to feed them. With pressure from the Party, these shrines lost their importance, and second burial was abandoned. Now “kimoc had nowhere to go” (Nishimoto 2010a, 49). They remain with their families as distinct personalities. Nishimoto notes, and my own research confirmed, that there is no memory of second burial in Kandon today, and Nishimoto’s suggestion remains, on current evidence, a conjecture. What is certain is that today, kimoc are very interested in domestic dramas, such as who lives with whom, romances, flirtations, gossip, marriages, divorces, and debts between relatives related by marriage. Khamphat, whose eat buffalo event is detailed below, described the surveillance of the kimoc as “heavy.” The best—often only—cure for the illnesses caused by ancestors is to feed them a black, male buffalo. In most household eat buffalo events, the killing is done quickly and with little fanfare. There is rarely a crowd to witness the moment of death. Except in the special case of the village festival, the killing takes place in the small hours of the morning, so that the butchering can be done in the cool and a meal made ready for guests before they go to work. It is the dancing and hosting the night before, and the meal the next morning, that draws a crowd. Eating— not killing—a buffalo is the main event, as the local term for these events, eat buffalo, suggests.

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Eat buffalo events are feasts in which the affects of solidarity and unity can be experienced, and in this way they are very consonant with the current political climate of Laos. The night before the event, people are invited to come for a meal while the buffalo waits tied to the stake. Household valuables are arranged around the central pillar—jars, cauldrons, and gong—and these are smeared with a raw egg. Played by hosts and guests alike, percussive instruments provide a slow beat all through the night, punctuated by occasional vocals.14 Ideally, the party will last until dawn. Twice in the evening and once just before sunrise, a group of men will circulate around the buffalo stake three times anticlockwise, playing on gongs and calling out rhythmically.15 On the first two occasions, the men will attempt to carry as much of the wealth of the household as possible, especially cloth. This means that the men will don women’s skirts over the top of their regular clothes. They also put on men’s loincloths and blankets. Meanwhile, the hosts of the event (both men and women) approach the buffalo and “hit” it (actually just give it a light slap). The hosts mutter words to the buffalo meant for the jaaŋ and kimoc. Specific dead relatives are addressed first, then the general household spirits ( jaaŋ daŋ), and finally the jaaŋ of the village and the forest. One common phrase used is “Eat this buffalo, don’t eat us!”16 Just before dawn, the buffalo is killed. As butchering begins, a piece of prime meat is prepared by men in the standard dishes: diced raw meat mixed with raw blood, herbs, and spices. A small tray of this dish, as well as rice, alcohol, and perhaps some other treats, such as tobacco, is placed on a shelf designed for the purpose (that is, an altar), or, if there is no shelf, at the central post in the main room of the house. Usually a man will say a few simple words calling the attention of the kimoc to come and eat.17 Meanwhile, the hosts make vast quantities of raw buffalo blood laab and buffalo bone soup for their guests. Young men visit each household in the cool of the morning to invite representatives for the meal. The standard invitation is simple: “We have nothing, come and eat.” People relish eating the raw buffalo flesh and blood. They say it gives them strength. The blood of a black, male buffalo is the most prized. The host may reserve some blood to anoint various items, such as the rice seed to be planted in the next season, fruit trees, the granary, the house, and the jars, cauldrons, and gongs. The blood may be smeared on household members. Ash is drawn down the left palm with words telling bad things to flee. (“Sin, inability, sickness, misfortune, and poverty— flee!”). Blood is then drawn up the right hand, with words spoken urging all things good to enter: success, potency, money, beautiful fields, and, of course,

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buffalo. In some of the more prosperous houses, eat buffalo events visually resemble ethnic Lao phuuk khaen (L: wrist tying events): they are marked by long lines of neatly set tables and chairs, a large sound system, and a Lao lam wong dance ground. The renaissance of eat buffalo events is tied to the power these feasts have in resonating with both the imperatives of Kandon occult powers and also some of the most powerful sentiments promoted under Lao socialism.

Khamphat’s Eat Buffalo The imperatives presented by Kandon occult powers can be illustrated by attention to Khamphat’s eat buffalo event, which I attended in 2013. Khamphat lived in a relatively poor household with his wife, Pheng, and three boys, the eldest of whom (age seven) appeared to me to have cerebral palsy. Jum, Khamphat’s mother, also lived with him. She had been married twice. With her first husband she had two children. The eldest was a woman called Phet, who was one of the returnees to Old Kandon. Phet married Bunson there. The second was Khamphat. When Jum’s first husband died, she married again. Although this marriage was childless, her second husband had a daughter, Phetsamon. After two years this husband also died, but Phetsamon remained living with Jum and Khamphat. Khamphat eventually married Pheng. Unconventionally, Phetsamon then married and her husband moved in. There was no bride-price, and no buffalo was killed to mark the occasion. After three years, Phetsamon’s knees swelled and divination determined that it was the kimoc: a sister and brother should not live together when they are both married. So she and her husband moved out, although no bride-price was paid at this point either. It was after this that Khamphat’s eldest child was born after only seven months’ gestation. The infant did not eat anything for the first twelve days of life. “Even an adult cannot stand that,” he commented. The family tried many cures, and finally it was a Kandon medium who announced that the child was troubled because Phetsamon needed to provide at least a pig for the kimoc of her two fathers (the two husbands of Jum) as an apology for her inappropriate lack of ceremony in her marriage. Then, seven years later, in January 2013, Khamphat’s eldest lay paralyzed for seven nights. His muscles were clenched, and he was immobile. Khamphat felt that it was obvious that the two father ancestor ghosts were again expressing their wishes through the child. This time he knew that the cause was a gift

“Are We United?” : 113

Figure 5.1. Khamphat’s family.

from Bunson of Old Kandon to the male relatives of Bunson’s wife, Phet. Bunson had given a buffalo to them in the twelfth month, as is the tradition for a husband in recognition of his ongoing obligations to the relatives of his wife (this tradition is still current in Old Kandon but has fallen into abeyance in New Kandon). In this case, the buffalo went to Siinuan of New Kandon, who is the son of Phet’s father’s brother, although it could easily have gone to Khamphat. Khamphat was in the throes of building a new kitchen and knew that he would need to kill a buffalo to consecrate it. He had no idea how he would obtain a buffalo. He was poor and had no stock. He was too shy to ask Siinuan for the buffalo that had come from Bunson. When his son was taken seriously ill, he knew his fathers felt sorry for him and had acted on his behalf. ­K hamphat tied a string around the child’s wrist, promising that particular buffalo for the fathers to eat. The child’s condition immediately improved. On hearing this, Siinuan gave Khamphat the buffalo.

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After recording this story, I closed my notebook and let the conversation drift. It had been so hot during the day, but now spots of rain beat on the low corrugated iron roof. Some water crept through, prompting Khamphat to comment that his was a poor household: “We have nothing.” The darkness and rain seemed to close us within the small house together, and Khamphat began to reflect more broadly on why the ancestor ghosts thuang (L: argue, quarrel, object, remonstrate) with the living. He described how closely the kimoc watched them: “The kimoc can see us but we can’t see them. They want everything to be done properly, and they watch closely. They know every little detail about us. Even if I just want to go away from home for a week, I have to tell the kimoc. It is heavy.” He went on to describe one of the most dangerous scenarios; when a kimoc intervenes because they want someone (usually someone other than the ill person) to marry. These are deadly situations. “Lao people can go to the hospital to be cured. But not us. My neighbor went to the hospital and the doctors gave up on him. He came home and did a ritual for the kimoc and he was cured.” I asked why the Lao don’t suffer like this, and he replied that the Lao look after their ancestors continuously: they have regular rituals at the Buddhist temple. When something goes wrong, they only need a small ritual (such as a pig). Among the Kantu, they do nothing for the ancestors until there is a major problem, and then they need a buffalo. “This land is haunted from the war,” he continued. He told me, as I had heard before (see chapter 2), how when the people first moved here from Old Kandon they didn’t know the malevolent spirits in the land. These included ghosts of those who had died inauspicious deaths during the war. These ghosts and sprits “ate” the people of Old Kandon when they first arrived, and that is why some people returned to the mountains, including Bunson. The image Khamphat gave me was of a dark world where eat buffalo events make sense because the choice is either eat or be eaten. The kimoc are supposed to be the ones who “care for us.” But kimoc regularly caused deadly illness among their descendants. Phetsamon’s marriage of her own free will and with no ceremony or bride-price was only retrospectively understood as bringing on this avalanche of misfortune for herself and her loved ones. Khamphat’s desire to obtain a buffalo to consecrate his new kitchen (itself a desire to fulfill the desires of the kimoc) sparked a kimoc-caused illness in his son. The message seemed to be that desires are dangerous not only for oneself but for one’s loved ones as well. And the love of the kimoc for the living is expressed—­counterintuitively—in life-threatening afflictions. Again, one’s deadliest relationships are one’s closest. These deadly situations can be reversed, or at least mitigated, by eat buffalo events. But why is it buffalo, specifically, that hold this power?

“Are We United?” : 115

The Value of Buffalo Buffalo symbolically stand in opposition to truly wild animals (Nishimoto 2011). A wild animal is never offered as food to a spirit or a ghost (they are offered as gifts to other humans, though) because wild animals already belong to the wild jaaŋ.18 Buffalo, by contrast, are owned by humans, under their care and protection. The ʔarwaaj (K: souls) of buffalo are similar to human ʔarwaaj and can replace human ʔarwaaj. At an eat buffalo event, the spirits are enjoined specifically to “eat this animal, don’t eat us.”19 Nishimoto concludes, “Both humans and water buffalos were seen as the same food by the jaaŋ” (2010a, 42). Buffalo are not used as draft animals in Kandon. Unlike neighboring groups, who cultivated wet rice using buffalo to plough and harrow, the Kantu of Kandon never farmed with buffalo power. On resettling to the new site, the people of New Kandon have taken up wet rice cultivation, and they plough with tractors. In Old Kandon, once buffalo are obtained, they are set free in the forest. Jean Le Pichon noted in the 1930s that the Katu seemed to have a horror of keeping buffalo tied up, and only did so on the occasion of sacrifice or some other disposal of the animal. This was confirmed during my fieldwork; people told me that one of the major tasks of eat buffalo events used to be rounding up the buffalo. The buffalo were said to come willingly if offered salt, and they bred well in the mountains, but nonetheless finding them could take days or weeks and was a source of great uncertainty.20 Large fences were built around the swidden fields to keep the buffalo out. For the village festival, a point was made of obtaining buffalo through long-distance trade.21 Kantu people themselves in the past would not sell buffalo or other livestock willingly, because spirits and ghosts understood these animals as kept for giving to one’s wife’s family, feeding to the spirits and ancestors, and hosting guests exclusively (Nishimoto 2011, 105). Livestock should certainly not be traded among relatives or neighbors. I experienced this myself when residing in Kandon: once I was considered a resident of the village, some people would not accept money from me for pigs, chickens, or even a cat. Instead, these people would give. Ideally, buying a buffalo involves travel and parley with outsiders. In the past, this meant men appropriating women’s creativity (­specifically, the cloth they wove) to offer in exchanges with outsiders. Rather than representing the fertility of rural production, then, as buffalo arguably do in the lowlands of Laos, buffalo embody the potency of trade for the Kantu. In Old Kandon, where even the most vigorous agricultural efforts were not adequate for subsistence, trade was particularly important for sustaining life in the mountains. Like the other household wealth items obtained exclusively through long-distance trade

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(such as gongs, cauldrons, and jars), access to buffalo signaled adeptness at the crucial skill of managing relationships with outsiders. Gongs, cauldrons, and jars are valued in terms of how many buffalo they are worth. For instance, most jars are only worth one or two buffalo, but I saw one said to be worth fifteen buffalo. Calculating the monetary value of a jar requires first ascertaining the current price of a black, male buffalo at the market (when I did my research, about six hundred dollars). Gongs, drums, and jars, along with buffalo and their substitutes (pigs and other four-footed animals), are the gifts made by a man to his wife’s family. Another of the values of buffalo, then, is as the measure for all the things that a man might present to his wife’s family. The wife’s family for their part give cloth and two-footed animals (chickens, primarily, but also ducks and turkeys) to her husband’s family. Unlike buffalo, chickens are unambiguously domestic animals. They live close to their human owners. Their eggs are ready symbols of reproduction and fertility. Cloth, too, represents the productivity of the household, as women typically weave in the family home. Table 5.1 summarizes how buffalo stand in relation to these other nodes of value. The core value is in the bottom right pane: women’s fertility. The buffalo does not stand for the core value of women’s fertility but rather is what is exchanged to gain access to it. To give a buffalo to the kimoc or jaaŋ is to suggest that they bestow something like fertility—life enhancement—in return.22 At eat buffalo events, men take on women’s roles in cooking and wear women’s clothes as they parade around the buffalo. Benedict Anderson notes that this kind of transvestitism in the region is typically not an inversion of gender roles but an incorporation of women’s power into men: a powerful person can contain within themselves opposite and even opposed elements, and this is both a sign and a source of power (1990, 29). At eat buffalo events, men encompassed women’s power. Men also exchanged women’s potency in trade (where they took women’s weavings) and in marriage (where they exchanged women for a bride-price). Part of the symbolic power of a male, black buffalo is men’s encompassment of women’s potency. Again, women seemed to be present here as an absence. Their life-giving potency motivates the symbolic power buffalo, and yet they seemed rather absent from the major events of the buffalo rituals described here. At a typical household-sponsored eat buffalo event, the parading, playing the gongs, and killing are all done by men. Even the cooking of the first cut of meat was carried out by men. As with the debate that deleted the rape clause, concerns about

“Are We United?” : 117 Table 5.1. Values and Potency of Buffalo and Chickens Animal

Buffalo

Chicken

Possible substitutes

Other four-footed domesticates (pigs, cows)

Other two-footed domesticates (ducks, turkeys)

Other equivalencies and cogifts

Jars, gongs, cauldrons

Cloth, rice

Direction as a gift among humans

From husband’s family to wife’s family or from lower rank to higher rank

From wife’s family to husband’s family or from higher rank to lower rank

Fed by humans to

ancestor ghosts (kimoc) village spirit ( jaaŋ wiil) household spirits ( jaaŋ daŋ) wild spirits ( jaaŋ)

spirit of the rice ( jaaŋ alo)

Obtained through

long-distance trade free roaming in forest

domestic production

Spatial orientation

outside and foreign

inside and autochthonous

Type of power

men’s potency relationships with outsiders and foreigners

women’s potency autochthonous fertility

women seemed to have animated these public performances, but women themselves were included in a muted way, if at all. At eat buffalo feasts, male hosts were generally men that sat and ate convivially (demonstrating the unity and solidarity that I have argued is an important part of the acceptability of these rituals in today’s political climate) while women tended to be ferrying to and fro between the feast and the kitchen, tending the pipes and cleaning up the messes left behind. That said, the conventions of the now-popular lam wong (L: dance in a circle) require equal numbers of men and women: a gesture, perhaps, not only at unity and solidarity, but also at the gender equality aspired to in socialist ideals. As the dry season went on, the eat buffalo events grew more frequent and more raucous. The revelry culminated in the village festival itself. As this time, many of the most powerful men in the village drank daily at multiple feasts.

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Publicly, this looked like a celebratory time. But offstage, in some domestic spaces, a much darker side to the village festival unfolded. By the end of the buffalo season, I realized that I could no longer stay at my host’s house. The man’s violence to his own family, particularly his wife, his personal decrepitude, and his alcoholism had become impossible to ignore. I had to keep my possessions locked in a steel mesh bag because of the frequency of thefts by his son. But even then, the boy still managed to pull out little things, like the stock cubes, leaving me none. Pitying me, Buoy took me to the house of one of my host’s brothers where his wives and children sheltered when he was on one of his drinking binges. They suggested I stay there. But it was cramped, and there was no real place for me. The Japanese tourists who had come for the festival told me they were staying at Wihaan’s house as a “homestay.” When I enquired of Wihaan if I could stay with him when the tourists left, he seemed nervous about the possible resentment from my current host, but agreed on the premise that I be the one to negotiate my relocation. I was afraid to raise the issue with my host. I did anyway, and, to my relief, Wihaan’s house proved to be a haven of peace. This chapter has provided an introduction to the occult powers of Kandon through the prism of eat buffalo events. In the 2015 census, the second-largest religious category, after Buddhism (at 64.7 percent of the population) was “No religion, or belief in spirits or ancestors,” which was said to pertain to 31.4 percent of Laos’ population of 6.4 million. My study of the “No religion, or belief in spirits and ancestors” evident in Kandon left me with a sense of how “heavy” this religion could be. Eat buffalo seemed to make sense because the choice was stark: eat and feast, or be the one eaten. Repeatedly, I found evidence that the dangers people were most concerned about stemmed from the people closest to them. The ancestors harmed those they cared about. Even the powers called on to enforce the oath by observing everyone were themselves feared. Kantu spirituality as well as daily life seems to require one to know how to live with the enemy. This might be a clue as to why the people of New Kandon are also experts at living with the current Lao state. The Lao state, too, is fraught with fear, doubt, and rumor (High 2014). It too draws some of its power from what remains unseen, unknown, and suspected (Baird 2018). The involvement of the state in the oath was not a case of the bright light of the rational, modern state dispelling a backward traditional belief but rather a case in which one array of occult powers was extended and complemented another. In this situation, unity was valued and displayed pointedly but was also that which remained to be desired. The resettlement village consolidated a population that

“Are We United?” : 119

had scattered during the war. The carvings in the cinaar of the intertwined sprouts represented how, in the past, before the war and before involvement with the Party, people had never married out of the village and never left. Malo used the socialist keywords “unity” and “solidarity” to describe this imagined village endogamy. The oath was a deeply felt effort aimed at restoring a, perhaps chimerical, village unity. This chapter has also indicated a limit to my methodological relativism. It was during the village festival that, for the first time, I realized that the family hosting me were suffering domestic abuse. More broadly, my investigations into the oath and eat buffalo led me to realize that one real and pressing threat to village unity is the difficulty and reluctance around bringing women’s status and rights into genuine public debate. The decision to delete the rape clause without any meaningful input from women, on International Women’s Day to boot, was a dramatic example of this. On a symbolic level, I concluded that what was ultimately valued through the exchange of buffalo (including the eat buffalo ritual) was men’s encompassment of and trade in female potency. On a practical level, such exchange in women had significant impacts on women’s lives: marriage generally signaled the end of women’s schooling and careers, which was never the case for men. Unlike their husbands, women were fined steeply if they sought a divorce. Unlike their husbands, women were not tacitly expected to take a second or third spouse if they could. In fact, polyandry was prohibited, while polygyny remained the mostly preserve of wealthy and powerful men. Several women were subjected to violence from their husbands. This was the case even for women whose close kin lived nearby. In one case, I was told that a powerful man with three wives himself was too “shy” of his daughter’s husband’s father to do anything about the violence that he knew that his son-in-law inflicted on his daughter and her children. In a different case, I heard people discuss violence as a sign of a man’s love for a woman or, in yet another case, as a result of the woman’s behavior. Survivors of these situations confided their concerns in me with a sense of urgency, but there seemed no genuine forum within the village where these social problems could be discussed with an eye to bringing about genuine change. When I interviewed village-level police, they reported that their records showed no cases of ­domestic violence, ever, in the village. The prevalence of domestic violence was common knowledge in the village, but it was not treated as a public, collective concern. The rape debate was a rare, and perhaps commendable, moment in which an issue directly related to women’s status and well-being was publicly debated, but the fact that it was so readily scratched after receiving input only from men suggests a genuine absence.

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In researching this, I realized that, as much as I was fascinated and impressed by eat buffalo rituals, attention to these was yet another way in which the public stage, already dominated by men, came to dominate the ethnographic text, too. How easy it is to talk about flamboyant public rituals and their intersection with the state: it was all laid out on the school grounds for anyone to see. How much easier to talk about that, than the wives, sisters, daughters, and mothers who were there, too, spread out near the papaya trees that edge the school grounds, but whose dilemmas so often take place off the public stage. I take up the question of women’s experiences in the following two chapters.

6

“Women’s Preserve” Weaving and Women’s Value

By 2017, the Sekong Museum had been set up and was officially open. I arrived at 2 p.m. on a weekday to find the large front hall empty. A tall, lean, bespectacled man was at a laptop in a meeting room off the main hall, and he agreed to show me around. He turned on the lights, I looked at the display rooms one by one, and he turned the lights off after me. In the two hours I spent there, no one arrived other than the remaining staff coming back from their lunch breaks. The ground floor now showed the display I had seen under preparation in 2009. The large room with its heavy wooden doors, high ceilings, and tiled floors now provided an echoing space where wall-mounted photographs and panels explained the geography and history of the region up until the 1975 revolution. Upstairs, the Traditional Arts and Ethnology Center of Luang Prabang had donated a set of carvings where visitors could sit—as if inside a Katu cinaar—and watch videos. One video was a monologue by Wiphat explaining his culture (in Kantu with subtitles). In the video, Wiphat was pictured binding a traditional weaving (a “blanket”) around his chest and a heavily beaded loincloth around his waist. In the voiceover, Wiphat gave a very brief version of the Grandfather Dog and Grandmother Mek myth, a short account of the cinaar, and a description of eat buffalo events. In this three-minute video, weavings were visually very prominent but not discussed. A second room upstairs focused on ethnicities. It displayed the basketry, tools, and dress of each of the state-recognized ethnic groups of the province. Weavings were the most prominent parts of these displays. A third and final room of the museum focused on the achievements of the province since 1975, organized by administrative section (health, education, forestry, and so on). In the video, underneath the blanket and loincloth, Wiphat wore a red synthetic polo shirt and blue soccer shorts. It is the shirt and shorts, not the weavings, that are the reality of contemporary men’s dress in Kandon. The weavings

121

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he put on over his everyday clothes referenced something different: how things were before. When was this “before”? Before colonialism? Before the war? Before socialism? On the ground floor of the museum, the focus was on the historical changes in Sekong Province. There were striking photographs of the “torture” inflicted by the foreign aggressors, and the key players of the liberation war, including Ong Keew and Khamtai Siphandon. That room was arranged chronologically, clockwise from the main entrance. The third, too, was focused very much on change, in this case on the progress delivered since the revolution. The display on ethnicities in the second room, however, seemed to take a different, nonhistorical temporality: how these groups lived once upon a time—and in some ways still do. The idea that women made their own cloth in the past is common in the literature. Gerald Hickey, for instance, writes, “In addition to taking care of the house and children, women maintain the kitchen gardens and tend to the goats, pigs, chickens, and ducks while men look after the cattle and water buffalos. While an ever-increasing number of highlanders are purchasing cloth, village women continue to weave material for skirts, tops, shirts, loincloths, blankets, and slings for carrying infants. Generally, the colors are rich shades of red, blue, and yellow contrasted with black, white, and grey, worked into stripes or geometric motifs (Hickey 1982, 446).” Here, “before” is when women made their own cloth, and “after” is when women bought it from elsewhere. Georges Condominas writes, “Before their country was included in the political system of the French colonial regime, the social space of the Mnong Gar did not extend beyond the territorial limits of the village” (Condominas 1977, 210). Here, the “before” is a time when people had no relationships beyond the village. If they had any cloth at all, then it must have been because they made it themselves. “After” comes with colonialism. Condominas’s ethnography is framed around the livelihood activities and rituals of a single year. Condominas repeatedly mentions women’s work at weaving, but only in passing. He writes, “I might point out that while Gar men successfully raise poultry and pigs, it is thanks to the blankets woven by their wives that they are able to procure the buffaloes needed for important sacrifices from their ricegrowing neighbors” (1977, 13–14). But he does not go any further into weaving. He lingers on ritual events and work in the fields, but weaving quickly disappears from view. Yet it is the blankets woven by women that point to the connections “beyond the territorial limits” of the village that he ultimately felt did not exist. If he had focused on weaving, I suggest he would not have phrased village isolation so strongly.

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This disappearing act is typical in more recent works as well. For instance, Ian Baird and Bruce Shoemaker claim that the main aim of their volume People, Livelihoods, and Development in the Xekong River Basin, Laos is “to illustrate the importance of culture in relation to livelihood systems” (2008, 41). Agriculture, forests, and fishing each receive their own chapter, but weaving receives just one page (249–250). There, the authors report that in Dakcheung, all the ethnic groups “weave for their own use” and that “some near the district centre sell a few woven items,” as if weaving was primarily geared toward meeting household needs for clothing, and trade were an afterthought. Of Kaleum District, they report that “only a few villages” were “still predominantly making their own women’s and men’s clothes in 1999” (249). The chapter ends with a mention of recent attempts by the Women’s Union and development agencies to “set up marketing” for women’s weavings but concludes that “marketing remains a serious obstacle to expanding this livelihood activity (249).1 “Before” is when women wove on a small scale, for their own use and to clothe their family. The possible “after” lies in finding a way to bring these items to sale. Some scholars, such as Yves Goudineau, have produced more nuanced accounts, noting that the French colonists encountered ethnicities differentiated not only by their style of cloth but also by which ethnicities wove and which did not. These trade relationships were unequal and heated “relationships of dependence.”2 The French overlooked these inequalities, operating on a principle of interethnic egalitarianism in the highlands (Goudineau 2008, 646).3 Oscar Salemink argues that the French colonists attempted to prevent long-distance trade and monopolize the salt trade as a means of controlling the Central Highlands of Vietnam, thereby producing the isolation of the highlands that they later recorded as an ethnographic fact (1991, 251). The perception of the highlanders as traditionally self-sufficient took hold, despite its being produced in part through a deliberate attempt to force the highlanders to cede. In discussing the salt embargo, the pawat mentions (in just one line) that cloth was also included in the ban (HRCSP 2012, 78). That is, imports of cloth were restricted alongside imports of salt. Salemink and others have reinvigorated interest in histories of trade in the region. But even this literature makes little mention of the trade in cloth. Kaj Århem, for instance, notes the importance of Hoi An as a trade center for the Katu but makes no mention of textiles.4 Salemink describes the economy of the Central Highlands in the past as “mostly subsistence as far as staple and other everyday foodstuffs (except salt) were concerned” (2011, 45; see also 2008, 63). He says that some men gained prestige by trade, and the items they traded

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were things such as forest products, livestock, and sometimes slaves. No mention of cloth, and trade was just a patina of prestige over an underlying subsistence economy anyway. Based on this literature, when I started work in Kandon I was expecting a people who had or had recently had an agricultural orientation. I realized that this might not be the case in the earliest days of my fieldwork. In those days, I slept under a mosquito net on a mattress in Wiphat’s lounge room, and each morning when I emerged he would almost immediately ask me if I had any questions. He asked me so regularly that I started keeping a list titled “Questions for Wiphat” in my field notes that I wrote up each day. In the cold of the morning, I would make coffee, and he would make a sweetened tobacco pipe. Sometimes I would turn on my voice recorder. The sound of the pipe on the recordings evokes for me the whole scene of those early, earnest days: the blue floral lino on the floor that we sat on, my cold fingers typing, and Wiphat authoritative and verbose. One morning, I asked him to describe an eat buffalo event as it was “before” (using the Lao word tee koon—I now cringe at the vagueness of this word choice). He explained that when a ritual was planned, each family concerned usually contributed a certain amount of cloth woven by women, which was then used to buy buffalo “in Vietnam.” He explained that buffalo could be purchased much more cheaply in Vietnam than locally, and that furthermore the price fetched for Kandon weavings there was high. He emphasized two things: buffalo for rituals preferably came from trade, not domestic production. And secondly, Kandon exploited a difference in value: in Vietnam, buffalo were cheap and cloth was expensive, whereas in Kandon cloth was cheap and buffalo were expensive. He went on to say that when they lived in the mountains, the soil was so poor that people could not subsist on agriculture. The villagers had gardens, swidden fields, and livestock, yes, but these were not enough to live on. Perhaps occasionally the corn harvest would be sufficient for a given year, but the rice harvest, never. The soil was just too poor. As Wiphat said, “There was never enough rice for the village festival.” The way they obtained rice, and subsistence more generally, was through trade. The village next to Kandon had some wet rice fields and produced a rice surplus. People in Kandon traded with these neighbors, cloth for rice. But the trade network was much broader than this, including treks west to Laos and east to Vietnam. Explaining the extensiveness of his trade networks in the past, Wiphat said, “There are fifty thousand Katu in Vietnam, you know!” Even though they spoke slightly different languages from village to village, the Katu

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that lived in the highlands between Laos and Vietnam could understand each other and formed a trade network. The Kantu of Kandon held a special position in this network as producers of cloth. The annual trading itself made weaving possible. The soil in Kandon was too poor to grow cotton. Raw cotton was obtained through trade with ethnic Alak and Nge on the Lao side of the border. In the 1960s and 1970s, Alak and Nge could be found around present-day Thateng District township and the capital, Sekong, including the location where New Kandon is now (Tok Lok). After the harvest festival, the men and women from Old Kandon would carry trade items to these areas. The Nge and Alak did not want Kantu cloth; they could weave for themselves. They wanted Japanese watches and radios, and later cassette players, as well as trousers and shirts. The people of Kandon procured these via trade with the Katu in Vietnam. Wiphat boasted that he could carry enough raw cotton from this area back to Kandon to make about forty-four double sheets of cloth. Most men could only carry enough for about thirty-two. In the village, women would spin, dye, and weave raw cotton into cloth intended mostly for sale. The main markets for this cloth were the Ta Oi on the Lao side, and Katu and Vietnamese to the east. The Vietnamese, Wiphat remembered, wanted indigo-dyed cloth with two lines of red at the bottom, and one green and one red line at the top. The Ta Oi wanted a different kind of women’s skirt and blankets. The Kantu wanted the bold red and black skirts and blankets that are still associated with that ethnic group today. By providing these, the people of Kandon obtained buffalo, salt, money, gongs, jars, and, of course, rice. This story was electrifying to me at the time, not least because it seemed to fulfill my desire to find a woman’s story in this sea of male-oriented views. What if attention to a woman-centric economy could show that trade was not just a way of obtaining a patina of ritual items laid across a base of subsistence agriculture? What if women’s work in weaving, and men’s subsequent trade in their products, had been the key subsistence for this village? Even more exciting, the pattern of trade Wiphat described as a livelihood in the past mapped beautifully to the trade I saw happening in the current day between the families of a husband and a wife. Upon marriage, and then repeatedly throughout a married couple’s life, the family of the woman give cloth (and two-footed animals) to her husband’s family. In return, the husband and his family give buffalo (and other four-footed animals) as well as trade items such as jars, gongs, and cauldrons. None of these trade items is or ever was produced in the village. The jars were produced in China, and the gongs were produced in Burma (Salemink 2011, 47). In Kandon, an item’s value is discussed

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in terms of how many buffalo it is worth (see chapter 5). And, vice versa, buffalo are discussed in terms of how many bolts of handwoven cloth they are worth. Watches and other prestige items also made an appearance in bride-prices, again valued in terms of buffalo. In its most simplified form, then, the gifts between affines boiled down to cloth in one direction, buffalo in the other. This was a perfect summary of the trade that was described to me as the key livelihood of these people in the past. Among the village’s history, economy, and ritual exchanges I thought I could see glimpses of what might constitute a model of Kantu society based on contrast and complementarity between men’s and women’s worth. Women weave, which is to say, they make value. Men trade this value when they take cloth of trading expeditions, but also in marriage when they negotiate bride-price. Over the following days, I pressed Wiphat for details of the historic trade. I wanted to know more about when this “before” time was: how old was this trade, and when did it end? Wiphat said that the soil had been poor “since the time of Grandmother Mek and Grandfather dog.” He didn’t know when weaving started—in time out of mind. But he knew the price of cloth had declined in his own lifetime. In his father’s day, Wiphat said that the cost of a buffalo was about ten sheets of cloth (each could make two skirts), and a cow was about five sheets. Nowadays, one very high-quality sheet can earn 160,000 kiip, while a buffalo is six million: that is, about thirty-seven sheets are required to buy a buffalo today. Wiphat thought that factory-produced clothing was the cause of the decline in value of handwoven cloth. “Before that, cloth was rare, so it had a high price,” he explained.5 Often trades were complicated, involving many commodities: “Sometimes we would exchange weavings for beads first, and then exchange the beads for a cauldron plus some rice, and then the cauldron for a ceramic jar or a porcelain jar plus some rice, and then go to the border and trade again. If we didn’t do that we would not be lood [L: saved, rescued, out of danger, escape, free]. It is because of the weaving that we were saved. We could not live in the mountains if we had not done this, because the fields and gardens in our area were not beautiful.” Li Tana, in her influential account of the trade linking the highlands of Vietnam to the precolonial kingdoms in the neighboring lowlands, mentions cloth only as an export from the lowlands to the highlands (Tana 2006, 1998). Early accounts of Hoi An describe that city as so rich in textiles that “commoners, like officials, wore satin and silk, and regarded mere cotton tunics as something of which to be ashamed” (Woodside 1995, 166). It seems unlikely that in such a scenario, Kandon cotton weavings would have found an eager

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market. This places the Kandon export of, comparative advantage, and specialization in weavings more recently. It may be possible that the Kandon fervor for weaving was inspired in part by the blockade on cloth entering the highlands imposed only with the French, that highlands cloth production was a response to a colonial-era blockade that artificially isolated the highlands. This need persisted throughout the long war due to ongoing restrictions and difficulties in trade, but it was at its height in Wiphat’s father’s time. Weaving was later misrecognized as a deep and enduring tradition of the area. By the time Wiphat was born, this trade was a staple of the Kandon economy and perhaps carried elements of prestige in Communist Party– backed mobilization efforts. There was a clue to this in the way Wiphat enthusiastically lauded weaving as the means by which the village was lood (L: saved, rescued, out of danger, escape, free). Was the trade another element “taught” by the socialist cadre in their revolutionary missionizing? I found a clue that supported this interpretation when one woman in Kandon showed me a blanket that had these words woven into it, in Lao: “Government of Marx Lenin . . . . Work to weave cloth for beautiful results according to the livelihoods of the People. The woman who wove this blanket wove a blanket to completion on 11th or the 11th this one.” The owner had inherited the blanket from her mother and did not know what year it was produced, but she thought it was very old. If one supposes that the blanket was produced in her grandmother’s time, it may have been produced in the 1950s or 1960s. It is significant that an ethnic minority woman at such a time could have produced such an artistic feat: she displayed not only her literacy in Lao but also a touch of political theory, and the ability to weave political keywords into cloth. This blanket speaks to the reach of socialist transformations in the highlands, and also to the link between the socialist movement and weaving in Kandon.6 Trade continued as an important part of Wiphat’s life up until the resettlement. During the 1980s, Japanese watches were in demand in Laos. Wiphat remembered fondly that, in the heyday of this trade (during the 1980s), one quality Japanese watch or radio would earn one buffalo. Wiphat said, “Laos did not have these, and people did not want the Soviet ones,” so Wiphat carried them in from Vietnam. After that, the trend turned to Japanese tape players. In these recollections, Wiphat constantly counted the value of watches and radios in terms of buffalo and sheets of cloth rather than money. The currency was unstable due to out-of-control inflation interspersed with arbitrary changes to currency by the central government in attempts to control it (Evans 1990, 67; Stuart-Fox 1996). Wiphat recalled trading in US dollars, the “liberation” kiip, and Vietnamese currencies over the decades, but cloth was a constant.

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When we went to Luang Prabang together, Wiphat gleefully purchased from an antiques trader one of the early kiip (Lao currency) notes printed by the socialist government, which had been misspelt to say kerb (a meaningless word) instead. In those days, he commented, there was no confidence in currency, and people kept their wealth in tradable commodities.7 According to Wiphat, the Kantu maintained their role as traders in prestige items such as watches, radios, and tape players right up until 1996, just before the resettlement. In another conversation, Wiphat explained, “That is why I wanted three wives! Get rich! If you have only one wife and she is not very productive, how will you make money? But if you have several, and one sheet of cloth gets you a cauldron, two gets you a buffalo . . . well!”8 Wiphat estimated that he would sell about forty sheets of cloth a year during the peak of his family’s productivity, when his three wives and his mother all wove for him to trade. His wives’ memories were less fond. One of them, the best weaver, commented that when she lived in the mountains she wove “constantly, without rest” because it was “necessary” for their livelihoods. In the resettlement village she weaves less, and mainly as gifts for children and relatives, because selling them is now rarely profitable. Wiphat’s description painted a picture beguiling to an ethnographic eye: a model of society (in the sense used by Ardener 2006, 48) that linked together economy, livelihoods, ritual, kinship, and exchange. It seemed to carry significant explanatory power in terms of both historical change in this village and also enduring systems of meaning, thereby tying together many disparate details I had already observed about Kandon life. The sense of excitement I experienced when hearing this story from Wiphat shows that Edwin Ardener’s terse warning is as salient today as it was when he first put it forward in 1968: “The fact is that no one could come back from an ethnographic study of ‘the X’, having talked only to women, and about men, without professional comment and some self-doubt. The reverse can and does happen constantly.”9 If I truly wanted to understand weaving, I would need to see it from a woman’s point of view.

Border Traders I started interviewing everyone I could find about the weaving trade, both in Kandon and in the more remote Katu and Kantu villages that I visited in the highlands, including Old Kandon. Everyone said the same thing. In the living memory of the past, some villagers had a rice surplus, but most were short of

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basic food supplies and relied profoundly on trade to sustain their lives in the mountains. Weaving was a particular specialty of Kandon. Even the returnees who had rejected resettlement to New Kandon, and thus had a very different view of resettlement from Wiphat, agreed that the soil in Old Kandon was too poor to sustain a population on swiddens, livestock, and gardening alone. Canphon—who had led the returnees back to Old Kandon—confirmed without hesitation that “his fathers and mothers” depended on weaving to make up for the perpetual shortage of rice production. He said that cloth was made in the village and sold for money, or traded for other goods, and these were used to buy rice “every year.” Trade was not an exception, it was the norm. Weaving, not rice, was what Old Kandon produced. He said that even today, he still takes the one-day walk through the forest to Vietnam to sell cloth to the Katu there. One piece is sold for 100,000 kiip, much less than cloth used to earn in the past. His wife weaves it in the red-and-black design known to appeal to that market. I thought of the people of Kandon increasingly as specialists in arbitraging difference along the interethnic zone between Laos and Vietnam. In their trading trips, the men of Kandon would have had to negotiate variances in values, in all senses of that word. And these trades transformed values, too; the buffalo traded up into Kandon changed from beasts of burden in the lowlands into wild things and sacrificial animals in the highlands. Weavings coming down changed from a woman’s work for her husband, part of a woman’s potent fertility, into the symbols of difference between ethnic groups as a whole. And Kandon men were the mediators of this difference, negotiating it and finding opportunities to profit from it. In the weaving trade, difference was brokered in the interest of preserving life in the face of food shortages and the isolation caused by the French. If this is what they were “before,” could this help explain their “now” in the relationship to the Lao Party-state? New Kandon has positioned itself as an exemplary model of how to live with “the new” that is promoted by the Lao Party-state. These villagers were already experts in brokering difference long before they moved to the new site. Could this explain why it seemed that village leaders such as Wiphat saw no contradiction between embracing the Party-state line, including resettlement, with the village’s own identity and cohesiveness? Was this because his had always been a village “in-between”? Where brokering different outside forces had been the precondition of the village’s existence? When the anti-imperialist activists pushed into the highlands seeking to inform people about their movement, perhaps they found in Kandon a people who were experiencing new poverty directly related to the French attempts to

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control trade in the area. Jean Le Pichon, in his 2009 memoir Stories and Letters from Indochina and Vietnam, reveals that much of the violence (the “raids” or even “human sacrifice”) that he recorded in the 1930s was in fact related to the increasing incursions of cac lai traders into Katu territory. He records statements to the effect that the raids were retaliations against these monopoly traders and a defense against French corvée (Le Pichon 2009, 60; N. Århem 2014, 154). As Kandon residents readily explain, socialism appealed because it offered new economic solutions. A promise of prosperity and modernity is what attracted many to the anti-imperialist cause. Some of the best evidence for the importance of trade—apart from ample oral accounts—was in the continuing ritual importance that these trade items have today. Weavings hold ritual importance in the highlands even for people who don’t actually make them. According to Hùng, the Katu that he works with in Vietnam in general did no weaving of their own but depended on weavings from further west, including groups in Laos, for their ritual exchanges (Hùng 2007, 53, 126, 131). Hùng reports that, among the Katu of Vietnam, in the past they would pay one buffalo for just one skirt made in the Katu decorative style and that this was a fixed value (131). He notes that these cloths were made with Kantu/Katu patterns, motifs, and colors. All this supported what I had heard in New and Old Kandon. Ritual in New Kandon seemed to evidence the historic trade, too. In the most common form of buffalo sacrifice, one sponsored by a private household, the weavings of the household are displayed in the parades made by men around the buffalo at the stake. Weavings and the act of weaving are heavily gendered female, but during an eat buffalo event, men paraded around the buffalo wearing women’s skirts (along with all the other precious weavings owned by the sponsoring household). They also took over in the kitchen, preparing the meat for the spirits and ancestors. At these events, women’s potency is literally “put on” by the men. Was this a reflection of how men incorporated into themselves women’s creations when they took cloth to trade? In a woman’s first year of marriage she ideally completes one set of two skirts. She gives this to her husband as a gift that he will never sell: hidden away in the home, it becomes a permanent part of his possessions. From then on, she weaves and gives the weaving to him to do with as he wishes—to sell or trade or give to relatives. At the heart of gendered ideas of marital relations, then, was a miniature design of the wider trade in cloth that made life in the villagers’ mountain homes possible. And it was a possibility predicated on men’s appropriation of, and trade in, women’s productivity. In ritual, in marriage, and in trade, women’s potency was appropriated by men.

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But I knew that pointing to rituals was a shaky basis on which to build an argument about history. Traditions change, and rituals are regularly “invented” anew. The rituals seen today could easily have a very shallow history, even if they are presented as enduring. Was it just me drawing the dots together, too fast and too neatly? How beautifully these details seemed to fit together—but there were gaps.

Liliha’s Teachings No one had been able to tell me any taboos, myths, or spirits associated with weaving. If weaving was so important, why wasn’t it elaborated on in any of these more explicit ways? Many rice-growing communities have a spirit of the rice, for instance, so where was the spirit of the loom?10 Perhaps I would learn some women-only knowledge along these lines if I myself learned to weave. Liliha agreed to teach me. She was about my own age, slim, with a neat, feline face and thick dark hair that fell in a generous cascade to her waist. She had a quiet confidence and seemed to be on good terms with everyone, including both Sum and Wiphat. When she and I sat down to weave, at first it would

Figure 6.1. Weaving on a backstrap loom in New Kandon, 2011.

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attract a crowd. I was hoping to learn about the meaningfulness of weaving. Instead, what I was told repeatedly was what would hurt. Sore back, sore knees, sore stomach, I was told. When I murmured to the crowd that really, after all, it was not that bad, I was told that in that case I must be doing it wrong. I should hold the warp tauter between my back and feet until it hurt. Eventually the crowds would disperse, and weaving became a way for Liliha and I to spend long periods of time together. When I asked Liliha why she wove, she did not point to the necessity of gift exchanges between in-laws or to my idealized images of woman as the cosmological creator of value. She said that she wove to wear and to sell. She did not buy skirts: she wore only those that she had made herself. At that time she was weaving on commission: some relatives had offered her sixty thousand kiip to weave a set of two skirts with yarn that they had provided.11 She estimated that she made 200,000–300,000 kiip ($20–30) a year weaving. Other work opportunities for someone as young and able as she was could easily bring in that amount in a couple of weeks rather than a year. This was true of some of her best friends, who worked on nearby coffee plantations or in rubber or Vientiane factories.12 So I asked her again why she wove. This time she said, “Because I yaak day [L: want to]. I can do it. I am able to, so I do.” I stopped asking questions at this point, and focused on pulling the thread as she had taught me. But Liliha continued, My husband does not care about other people, he doesn’t think of them. He is selfish. Whatever money he earns he keeps for himself—he plays cards or drinks alcohol. He doesn’t give it to me. Lots of people say we should get divorced. One, we don’t love each other. Two, we have no children. If we were ethnic Lao people, we would divorce. But I can’t leave him because of the fine and repaying the bride-price [she would have needed to pay about $2,000 in today’s currency]. I am too poor to pay it back. His family say he should let me go and marry another woman and maybe he will have children with her. With me he won’t.

A man cannot take a second wife without the consent of his first wife, something Liliha would not consider because her aim, rather, was for him to grant her a divorce. If she initiated divorce proceedings, she would have to repay double the bride-price that was initially paid for her. The value of bride-price items is pegged to the current price of a male black buffalo, so it rises along with inflation. However, if her husband initiated the divorce proceedings as

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she hoped, she would have to pay nothing, and he would forfeit any claim on the bride-price his mother had originally paid. I asked, “If you divorced, where would you live?” She answered, “With my older brother. But he is poor, too. He does not have the money to pay back the bride-price. He feels sorry for me, but what can he do?” She seemed to think there was no authority she could appeal to that could help her escape her marriage. She pointed to the loom that she had lent to me, saying, I made this. You ask around in the village how many women make their own looms. Women don’t usually do it—they ask their husband or father or son to do it. This pounding beam must be smooth—I cut it myself from the forest. The foot beams must be bamboo, split carefully so they are even. That takes skill. I can’t ask my father, he is dead. My husband does not love me, he thinks only of himself and won’t do it for me. I have no children. So, who can I ask? I had to teach myself how to do it all. The man in the next house makes looms for his wife, his mother, and his three daughters. I have no one like that.

This was not the first time I had heard Liliha lament about her husband. Much of the story tumbled out in our first conversation, when she approached me to volunteer her story because she had heard that I had been asking around the village about marriage practices. She was married when she was thirteen years old. This was in 1996, the year that the people of Old Kandon would move to the new site. At that time, her mother was a widow with many children. Her deceased father’s older sister’s daughter (a widow) had only one son, who was also thirteen, and two daughters. The deceased father of these children had saved enough wealth items during his lifetime to accrue a fair bride-price for his only son’s marriage. The match had many advantages: it followed the ideal of marrying “in one’s own suea saay” (L: lineage); Liliha’s mother, with her many children, would benefit from the wealth items that would assist them after the resettlement; and the girl Liliha would have a relatively prosperous new family who could support her during the resettlement. Liliha’s new mother-in-law had relatives in Thateng, the closest township to the site of New Kandon. When the family moved to the resettlement site, the son stayed in Kandon to set up the new house and fields while Liliha and her mother-in-law lived in Thateng for several years. This was considered in the women’s best interests because of the often-chaotic circumstances of the early years of the resettlement, which included a contaminated water supply. At sixteen, Liliha fell in love with a man that she met in the township. He was ethnic Lao, a lowlands man who had come up to Thateng to work as

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a laborer. The romance blossomed in secrecy, and eventually Liliha became pregnant. She and her lover had plans to marry, but her mother-in-law refused the match. The bride-price, she reminded the pair, was ten million kiip. Until twice this was repaid Liliha was not free to remarry. Liliha could not turn to her own brothers, who had been the recipients of her bride-price; by then they had used it to fund their own marriages, or sold it to support their move to the resettlement site. Liliha was prepared to find it herself by working in the township. However, her mother-in-law would no longer permit Liliha to live there. She ordered her to return to the resettlement site to live with her husband. She was told to give birth there and raise the baby as if it were her husband’s child. The child was born on the day of the village harvest festival in 1999.13 Typically, in such a scenario, a husband would prepare a small shelter for his wife in a secluded part of the forest, and when her contractions started they would go there together, just the two of them. However, in this case, she had no shelter, and her husband did not go with her. She gave birth alone in the forest. Telling me this story fourteen years later, she said she birthed on the dirt, hungry, thirsty, alone, and afraid. She said she bled so much she thought she would die. One of her relatives came looking for her and took her to a hospital, where she was treated for hemorrhage. The child died twenty-seven days later. She thinks now it died because of the conditions in which it was born. At other times she said she believed the child died because it knew that its own father had fled, and that its new father did not love it, so it went back to where it came from (children are sent from the sun, and when they die young, people say that it is because the sun takes them back). Liliha often thought of that dead child. For instance, when she was busy transplanting the rice, she commented thoughtfully that if the child had survived it would be old enough by now to help her in the fields. Liliha has not had another pregnancy. She speculated that her difficulty in conceiving was linked to that first traumatic birth: the dirt might have introduced an illness. Also, she did not yuu kam (L: have a period of seclusion after parturition) the way the Lao do. This was because of the extreme poverty in the resettlement village at the time, she explained. She examined her dreams for clues about why she had not conceived again. She says that she and her husband recently consulted a diviner to inquire about the reason for their infertility, and he said that the blood between them was not right. He said that Liliha would never have a child from this man. She very strongly wants a child, and she is interested in other men, but she is afraid that the ghost of her own father and that of her husband’s father would cause sickness if she commits

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adultery again or leaves her current husband without first settling the question of the bride-price. The only solution is to convince her current husband to initiate divorce proceedings himself. But he won’t let her go. According to Liliha, he says he doesn’t want another wife: he only wants her. He, too, was thirteen when they were married, and now they are both twenty-nine. “It is only me who wants to find someone else,” she explained.

The Value of Women Liliha said that Kandon bride-price is an explicit recognition of the higher khaa (L: value) women have as opposed to men. In the past, she said, women did all of the most valuable work, such as weaving, raising children, housework, and the bulk of agricultural labor. Men did some occasional work like building houses, but men’s lives were understood as easy and light as compared to women’s. She said, “The women made cloth so that men could have watches and radios. At most the man could make a back-basket for a woman’s agricultural work [laughs]. Men could not even winnow rice. Men did some blacksmithing; they made some tools so that women could work! Women made things so that men could look beautiful and have fun. Men did not do that for women.” No bride-price was paid when a man came to live with a woman and her family, because men had “no value.” It was only when a woman left her family and lived with her new husband that a bride-price was paid as a compensation to her family and as a recognition of her value. Liliha recognized that the gendered division of work had changed significantly: now, men do significant amounts of childcare and work alongside women in the fields. Nevertheless, she noted, the village still followed the pattern of previous days of expecting a bride-price only for women, and this, she felt, reflected the sentiment that women have value and men do not. At times, she speculated that the true overarching “preserve” of Kandon village was in fact this heritage of weaving, a heritage that symbolizes women’s value: “Weaving is an anulak [L: preserve] of women kept from the old days. You see when guests come, we give them sin [L: a woman’s wrap skirt]). This is the anulak of the women of Kandon village. Our weavings are an anulak of the whole village, but really only women can make them. So, it is an anulak of women.” I once asked her to show me the heirloom weavings that she would not sell. The first item she showed me was a heavy and detailed blanket that she had made for her husband. She had carefully woven in a message spelt out in

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Lao. It said, “A thread of thought about life is the thread of suffering. It runs from the [old] village, always missed and in one’s thoughts, to the heart that is left bereft and wanting. This blanket was woven by the wife of Mr. Duang so that he can look upon the wealth of his wife. Weaving began on the August 19, 2009, and was finished on October 14, 2009. It is done.” Speaking about this blanket, she said twice, “If I die, he can take this out and look at the traditional item I have built for him. When he dies, he will be buried with it.” Seeing my notebook at the ready, she explained further, Blankets are made for husbands, sons, brothers—some women can weave lettering, others can’t. Women make blankets for people they love so that when you die the ones you love will have something to look at of you, the wealth you have made. But you only do this for people with whom you have a strong commitment. It is the very best of a woman’s love for a man. The wife that weaves you a blanket is the wife who truly loves. If he loves her he would buy her jewelry, gold necklaces. That is love. He might try to buy her a watch or a radio. That is his love for her.

Liliha lived in a boisterous house with several other families, comprising over twenty people overall. She, her husband, his mother, and his little sister made up one family in this household. The other families were made up of that mother-in-law’s younger brother and his children. When Liliha explained this living situation to me, she said, “My head and heart are sore thinking about it.” When I joined Liliha to weave there one evening I found the other members of the family were looking at the photographs I had taken when I went to Old Kandon, which I had printed out and given them. “I miss the old village,” Liliha said. I asked her what in particular she missed, and she said it was the trees, the nature. I commented that there were a lot of pine trees around the old village and that it was indeed beautiful. She replied that she was thinking of the enormous fig that grows at the top of the old village and its powerful spirit. She said she also thought of the old village because it was her place of birth and where her father died. A boy asked me where the vine and bamboo bridge in the photo was, and I told him that it was between Old Kandon and a neighboring village. I told them that the neighboring village had made me uncomfortable—the animal feces and the mining road, and the phid baan (L: wrong to the village; a curse inflicted by the village spirit) feeling with lots of sick people, and the rice fields destroyed by Typhoon Ketsana. Liliha said it didn’t used to be like that. It used to be flat, and the wet rice fields there were beautiful when she was a child.

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“Did you go there to swap cloth for rice?” I asked. “Yes,” she said. “Sometimes we would swap cloth for manioc. It was our village that was not beautiful—just steep slopes and rocks—but . . .” She made a round shape with her hands, “a big sack of rice in exchange for one cloth!” As I started to weave, I realized how difficult it was for her in the dim light of the house—I could hardly see where to put the wooden slat and had to squint to run the weft through the warp threads. When I dropped a thread, I didn’t see it at all. But Liliha could see. She was not only training my hands, she was training my eyes. She unfolded some of the cloth to show me the rows that I had woven before—she pointed out where the weave was looser and messierlooking, saying it was because I did not hold the loom taut enough. She took over from me for a while, measuring with her hand—three hand spans left, three days left of weaving. Her eyes looked bleary. I told her that if she was tired she should rest. But she did not stop. She let out a lament, a familiar one by now. She said, “Sore head, sore heart, thinking of how I have a bad husband.” She told me he was out drinking last night, a useless man. She talked again about her child that had died. She imagined what it would be like now. She spoke again about her desire for a child and reminded us both that she wanted to leave her husband but couldn’t as the bride-price remained. If he left her then she would be free, but he wouldn’t leave her. She seemed quite unashamed to speak of these matters in front of her young nephew, who was openly listening, and the other household members in the crowded living area who might overhear. This lament was familiar to me now. I had heard it over and over. When I came to say goodbye to Liliha during my final trip in 2013, she even let out this lament in front of her husband as he was watching TV with other household members nearby. Other people in the village gave their own explanations for her predicament. One couple said that Liliha couldn’t have children because she had offended a forest spirit when she was stumbling in the forest giving birth. Because she was alone, there is no way she could know the way back to make amends. But her husband would not leave her just because of this. Wiphat said that her husband loves her, cares about her, worries about where she is. He is jealous and asks what she is doing all the time. From Wiphat’s perspective, this jealousy and possessiveness were signs of love: Liliha’s husband was not a useless man viciously holding on to her against her will but rather a loving man doing his best to support her and care for her despite their troubled past and current problems.

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Weaving and Desire While Liliha said initially that she wove “because she wanted to,” her overall narrative suggested a much more complex relationship with her own desire. In her laments she presented herself not as someone who did just as she wanted but in fact as someone bound and tied up, limited in her choices. She disavowed her desires and spoke instead of externally imposed necessities, just as some protagonists in the previous chapters did. It was my observation that this was true of all the best weavers in Kandon. Each of them articulated a sense of binding, of limited or no choice, in relation to their weaving. Peni was widely recognized as the fastest and best weaver in the village. She told me she wove because she had no choice: some kind of occult power would attack her if she did any other work. Even one day spent working in the fields would result in days of bed-bound malaise. The village gossip held that she had become rich from her weaving, with an international clientele seeking her work. But Peni did not present herself as wealthy. She said, “I want to work like other people, but they [the occult powers] won’t let me. So, weaving for me is cam pen [L: necessary].” She had tried the usual sacrifices to placate the ancestor ghosts (and was herself a recognized diviner), but none of these strategies had alleviated the necessity that she weave. This sense of binding is in contrast to other women in the village who seemed to have cut loose much more decisively. Women like Sum (chapter 1) leave the village to take up seasonal labor in the coffee plantations, seek work in factories, set up local trading stores, marry for love even if it means no brideprice, or in other ways pursue their own wills (see also High 2016). These women who had cut loose, not coincidentally, were also women who tended not to weave. But this is not to say that Liliha was not acting on her desire, too. She spoke of those things she valued—love, a child, and so on—in terms of what prohibited her from them. And this prohibition was the desire of her husband—a man who she said wanted her and no other woman. Liliha presented herself as being in a bind with no way out: desiring something that was impossible because she herself was so desired. Jacques Lacan used weaving and cloth as a metaphor for how humans wrap themselves into binds in the symbolic sense. He wrote that a “textile is first of all a text” (Lacan 1992, 227).14 He argued that mankind alone makes coverings (cloth) that can be taken off the body and that can circulate in the world: cloth can be stored, hidden, shared, or exchanged. And in that context, in giving the

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example of cloth, he suggested that value for humans is not simply a matter of how we use our goods—that is, how we let ourselves enjoy those things we desire—but also how we prohibit ourselves from them. We put them away, like the blanket Liliha made for her husband, to be kept and stored until death. Rejecting the idea of utilitarianism found in Bentham, Lacan suggested that “there is from the beginning something other than use value . . . . The good is not at the level of the use of the cloth. The good is at the level where a subject may have it at his disposal” (1992, 229). Lacan’s insight is that there is a value not only in enjoying one’s good, or trading it, but also in prohibiting oneself from it through storage and concealment. He writes, “There is a fact observed in experience that one always has to remember in analysis, namely, what is meant by defending one’s goods is one and the same thing as forbidding oneself from enjoying them” (230). There are overlaps here with what Annette Weiner has described as the art of “keeping-while-giving” (1992). Writing against the tendency that she saw in anthropology to focus on the exchange of goods, especially gift exchanges, she turned her attention to those things that are held back from exchange: heirlooms, family treasures, and keepsakes. Keeping-while-giving is an important distinction in Kantu weaving. Some weavings are made for sale or as the gifts required at weddings and funerals— these enter exchange and often change hands several times, gifted at other events, binding relatives together. But other weavings are made to be kept by their original recipient and never given away. In particular, the skirts made in the first year of marriage and the blanket and loincloth that a skilled weaver makes for her husband, are to be kept forever, even beyond death. It was on a weaving of this style that Liliha had embedded the words that placed her as a wife to her husband and also as bereft and wanting, caught always in a memory of Old Kandon now left behind. And after marriage, a woman herself is held back from circulation. Marriage, especially of the kind practiced in Kandon, is often described by anthropologists as a form of exchange (see chapter 7), but it was experienced by Liliha as a form of keeping, or more specifically, being kept back. This was the bind Liliha lamented—she wanted to enter into love and fertility again, but understood herself as bound to her husband, kept back by him. Much has been said in Lacanian-inspired social analysis about the link between desire and the economy, particularly in relation to capitalism. In capitalist societies, we hear, people respond to their original prohibition, to castration and lack, by constantly generating new demands—a new husband, a new job, a new hairstyle—none of which is ultimately satisfying. This is what Lacan called the “discourse of capitalism,” where we are all masters, encouraged to

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pursue ever-new objects that we imagine will bring us satisfaction. Ultimately, the entire direction of our lives is a push toward enjoyment through consumption that is imagined as unlimited (Lacan 1972). This is a push always toward the future, as pleasure is imagined to be just on the horizon. Liliha seemed not particularly caught by this incitement—the forward orientation of many renewed attempts at satisfaction—as much as caught by memories of “before.” She spoke repeatedly of her lost mountain home, her lost love, her lost child, and the present prohibition on her replacing these with a new love and new child was a repeated, open lament. As analysts know, complaint brings its own pleasure. Her lament was a way of keeping these lost objects with her. It was also a way of reiterating that— after a fashion—she was loved, deeply and perhaps irrationally. According to Liliha, her husband desired her so deeply that he would not let her go. She spoke longingly of the kind of love where a man gives a woman a gold necklace, and consumer goods, or makes her a loom so that she can weave. This is the love that gives, that circulates. But what she had from him was a love that kept back, that kept her. The love he gave her was the love of a prohibition: you will not leave, it said, you will not enter exchange again, you will not enjoy that form of fertility again. Making heirloom cloth, too, is a way of keeping something back from the flow of circulation, change and decay. In the blanket she wove for her husband, the keepsake kept out of sight and out of use, she wove in memories of a place lost but not forgotten, preserved. With the socialist revolution, then the transition to a market economy and the arrival of influential international development discourse, the Kantu have received in various forms a modernist ideology of choice. The laws laid down in 1991 banned forced marriages, debt bondage, and slavery. Marriage ought now to be a “free choice.” This change has taken place alongside the emergence of a nascent consumerist society. Women who weave in Kandon are, I believe, offering a “yes but . . .” to the ideology of free choice in a post-1991 setting. Liliha told me, in many forms, that free choice has not been extended to her in reality. Instead, she spoke of the limits that she faced. Many women spoke of their weaving directly as a necessity imposed by the ancestor ghosts, and even those who spoke of weaving as what she “wanted to,” do as Liliha did, understood that desire in complicated terms: not as a limitless pursuit of evernew pleasures but in terms of repetition, return, and attempts at preserving lost loves and fading memories. Both Liliha and I had been weaving stories of “before.” I was picking up the threads of the weaving trade of the past and trying to pull together a story of what this village was like “before” at some time over the horizon in the past,

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as a way of understanding the uniqueness of this village today. I wanted to know about a past that tied up all the loose threads. But the story I was putting together kept unraveling. On the one hand, it was simple—the women of Kandon were once weavers—but on the other, the story was not as complete as I sometimes wanted it to be. I had oral accounts, but these could not be stretched too far, and while there were clues in the literature, there was nothing conclusive. What was reliably available to me was weaving as it is today. And what women told me was that weaving today was a necessity and quite literally a pain. When I stopped to listen to what Liliha said about and with her weavings, hers, too, told a story about “before.” But it was a story that resisted a linear narrative or a totalizing model. Her laments pulled again and again at the same threads, looking for a break where there was none. It was all bindings with no way out.

7

“My Children Have Eaten Only Tears” Family Dramas in Kandon

Liliha married her father’s sister’s daughter’s son. Before they were married, the pair referred to each other as em (K: little sibling) and aay (K: older sibling). Such marriages between “siblings” are common in Kandon. Liliha said that people preferred to marry in their own suea saay (L: lineage), saying it is just easier that way. But not all “siblings” are suitable spouses. In practice, matrilateral cross-cousin marriage is the preferred pattern, and parallel cousin marriages were associated with infertility. However, people did not express that as a rule. When I pressed Wiphat, he eventually produced the rule that a man should look for a wife through his mother’s relatives, and a woman among her father’s relatives, but this summary seemed unsatisfactory to him. Instead of a rule, matrilateral cross-cousin marriages appeared to be a result of the way two men—a woman’s husband and her brother—relate to one another. People were very clear on the point that these two should both help one another, but that the husband should help first and give more to his wife’s brother, and give the kind of things that are expected in a bride-price: buffalo, primarily, and also jars, gongs, cauldrons, and, more recently, watches and radios. The woman’s brother, for his part, is obliged to turn for help first to his sister’s husband. Or, as Wiphat summarized it, “If you need anything, you can ask your sister.” This rule is enforced by the ancestors. They cause illness if the appropriate help is not asked for and delivered. In one case of severe illness in Kandon, a diviner revealed that a man had needed help weeding his swidden but had not called on his sasaaw (K: sister’s husband). The wife’s brother should give gifts to her husband, too, but of a lesser value, and composed of cloth and chickens. Sometimes these unequal gifts over time amount to such an imbalance that the best way a brother could repay the generosity of his sister’s husband would be to send his own daughter to marry that man’s son, producing what anthropologists call matrilateral cross-cousin marriage.

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Matrilateral cross-cousin marriage holds a particularly important place in anthropological thought. It is a classic area of study in kinship, and “kinship is to anthropology what logic is to philosophy or the nude is to art; it is the basic discipline of the subject” (Fox 1967, 10). The case of cross-cousin marriage, precisely because it was so rare, became somewhat of a testing ground for rival approaches in kinship analysis (Lévi-Strauss 1969; Needham 1962). The practice of matrilateral cross-cousin marriage was first written about in the 1930s by Dutch scholars describing marriage in particular Indonesian societies, which they called “circulating connubium” (Needham 1957). Claude Lévi-Strauss built on these observations in his magisterial Les structures élémentaires de la parenté, first published in 1949, in which for the first time the structural consequences of various marriage patterns were explored. He termed matrilateral cross-cousin marriage “generalized exchange” (Lévi-Strauss 1969) because of the way it set up nonreciprocal marriages between lineages or clans. In this literature, kinship terminology emerged as a central concern. For instance, cross-cousin marriage was thought to imply a “class of potential spouses; and it is this class that we must seek out if we are to understand the system” (Fox 1967, 207). Attempts to understand cross-cousin marriage often included long lists of local kinship terms, with a particular focus on identifying the terms that referred to eligible marriage partners. But people in Kandon did not speak in this way. There is nothing in the lexicon to identify a man’s mother’s brother’s daughter as his ideal wife. She is referred to as his “sister,” just as his other cousins are. It is the unequal gifts between men who are joined by marriage that is “prescribed,” not matrilateral cross-cousin marriages themselves. The gifts between two men are said to have made “a path” between them. These gifts start at the negotiation of the brideprice, peak at the wedding itself, continue to death, and go beyond it in the form of sii kimoc (K: apologies to the ancestors). It is this path, once established, that makes a matrilateral cross-cousin marriage more likely in the next generation. People do marry those they are not related too, as well. But even in these cases, the marriage creates a relationship between a husband and a woman’s family of the kind I have described above. Huk, the energetic grandmother who described her births alone in the forest during wartime (chapter 4), married a man she was not related to; he was a complete outsider when he visited the village as a solider. He did not pay a bride-price. When the first two of Huk’s children died as infants, the two families (her own and that of her husband) carried out an exchange. It was small, because of the war conditions, and involved just a single gong and a pig from her husband’s side, and chickens and cloth from Huk’s side. It was enough, however, to restore fertility to the

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match, and Huk’s remaining children survived infancy. In this case, marriage created a debt that caused sickness when unpaid. Gift exchange restored health and fertility. If a woman goes to live with her husband after marriage, as is the norm, then usually a bride-price is paid. I call it a “price” because this is a direct translation of a Lao words often used to describe this payment, khaa (L: value, price), and it also conveys the local understanding that when a bride-price is paid, it gives the husband’s family rights over the woman. Often, she stops school and works for them. She is not free to leave the marriage unless she can return double the value of the bride-price. This often runs into thousands of dollars.1 A dowry, on the other hand, is understood as a gift from a woman’s family to her husband’s family, and there is no talk of repaying it at divorce. While a woman’s family does give cloth and chickens in a dowry, what they give most of all is the woman. The cloth and chickens are minor echoes of the ultimate value of the woman herself. Her movement to her husband’s family creates a permanent indebtedness of her husband to her brothers. This debt itself can be the cause of marriage. In one case from Wiphat’s own family (figure 7.1): Wiphat (1) was married to Seengthong (2). Her older brother was Kye (3). Kye wanted to take a second wife (4), so he borrowed from Wiphat (1) six of the items he needed as bride-price: a cow, a pig, a cauldron, a gong of one sort and a gong of another, and one porcelain jar. Kye died in a hunting accident with this debt still unpaid. Wiphat’s other wife (5) was taken ill, and divination suggested it was because of that debt; therefore, Wiphat’s

Figure 7.1. A matrilateral cross-cousin marriage repeats in a new generation because of debt between a woman’s husband and her brother.

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son by her (6) was betrothed to Kye’s daughter (7). The pair were aged nine and ten, respectively, at the time. The girl came to live at Wiphat’s house and married the boy some years later. With the movement of the girl from Kye’s house to Wiphat’s, the debt was repaid, the illness was cured, no bride-price was required, and the original movement of a woman from Kye’s household to Wiphat’s household was repeated in the new generation. In this case, a marriage created a debt that caused sickness, and the sickness created a new matrilateral cross-cousin marriage. Marriage in Kandon is changing. The hammering and sawing that took place that dusty dry season before the village festival in 2013 described in chapter 5 was a sign of changing domestic arrangements. Increasingly, young couples are moving out of their parents’ homes, and nuclear families are more and more common in Kandon, rather than the former longhouses. The Partystate has discouraged high bride-prices as wasteful and harmful to women’s rights. Before the war, people say that the standard bride-price was made up of items the equivalent of fifteen buffalos, and for the very rich could climb as high as twenty to thirty items. During the war this dropped to two or three items. Today, the expectation is eight items, although there is an increasing trend for the rich to display their wealth through large bride-prices. Debt marriages, forced marriages, and polygamy were outlawed in 1991. Although these still occur in Kandon, there is now an ideology of free choice in marriage. As Wiphat says, these days people are supposed to “do what they want” and marry for love. However, many of the marriages I witnessed in Kandon occurred between people who denied their own wish to be married. Wongphat, for instance, did not want another wife; he already had two. But people had noticed that he got along particularly well with a woman who was herself a widow, Sasilvia. Wongphat and Sasilvia seemed to find excuses to visit one another and often ended up in the same circle as they smoked a pipe. No one looking on knew if they were actually having an affair, but people began to gossip and joke about it. Eventually Wongphat became sick. A diviner in another village was consulted, and he revealed that Sasilvia’s dead father wanted her to marry Wongphat. The ghost was worried that his daughter had no husband, and he didn’t like to hear the gossip and jokes about her. In another example, a man experienced blurred vision and weakness. He went to the hospital, but the doctors told him there was nothing wrong and sent him home. Next his son became paralyzed. A diviner was consulted and revealed that the ghost of the son’s mother was the cause. The father had ­remarried, and the ghost was worried that her son was not being properly

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looked after in the new arrangements. The son was asked who in the village he liked. He named a girl about his age who was his friend but nothing romantic had happened between them. They were married within a few days. In another example, a woman trod on a nail while working in the garden. The wound swelled up and was still infected five months later. She went to the hospital, but it did not get better. A diviner suggested that the woman’s unmarried son—who had just turned thirty—had a wish to marry. The man was quizzed about whether he had any flirtations with women. It was revealed that some months previously he had obtained from a mutual friend the mobile phone number of a Kantu woman who lived in a neighboring village. He called her a few times (secretly), but the two had never actually met. Within hours of this revelation, the man’s father set out on a tractor, the cart at the back packed with his male relatives, to negotiate a bride-price with the woman’s family. He promised the price would be paid at a later date. The woman (age sixteen) came back with the men on the tractor that very day and set eyes on her new husband for the first time. Engagements to be married are not encouraged. In one case, two young people from Kandon worked together on a coffee plantation for a season. The man asked the woman if she liked him, and when she replied that she did, he gave her a mobile phone and a shirt that he said was “like a deposit” to keep her from going with other men; we might call it an engagement. The woman’s mother developed indigestion that worsened. A diviner revealed that the exchange had taken place and that if marriage didn’t follow immediately the woman’s mother would die. The couple are now married. Theirs could be described as a love marriage, but while love made marriage a possibility, it was illness that made it a necessity. As one woman concluded after discussing my review of recent marriages in the village, “I thought the traditions would change when we moved to the resettlement site, but the ghosts still make us sick, and if we do a ritual then we are cured. So, the traditions continue.” Love marriages can result in infertility if they join parallel cousins. These are understood in Kandon again in terms of the relationship between the generation above the married couple. The marriage of parallel cousins doubles back on the “path” established by a marriage in the generation before. Loe (1) and Keola (2) (figure 7.2) were married because they liked one another, but years later they had no children and Keola said that the match was infertile because she had been “sent” by her mother rather than her father. In fact, she was related to her husband through her father (3), but not directly. Her father’s brother’s (4) wife (5) was the sister of Loe’s father (6). It was this woman (5)

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Figure 7.2. Loe’s marriage to Keola.

who was Keola’s “mother” when it was said that Keola had been “sent” into marriage by her mother. When Loe married Keola, the path established in the generation before was repeated, but in the wrong direction. Keola was doubling back on the path her “mother” had made. Loe and Keola had no children, and the consensus was that this was because Loe’s father, now dead, was so outraged at the match. In the past, four rituals spaced throughout the year were occasions for routine gift giving between a man and his wife’s brothers. These days, however, such regular events are largely abandoned and what brings on ritual in the family is sickness. After marriage, the family of a woman and that of her husband can meet to sii kimoc (K: repair the ancestors). This involves exchanges of the kind made at marriage, but on a smaller scale, and is usually in response to illness. Figure 7.3 illustrates a sii kimoc. A man (1) had given a number of gifts over the years to the man (2) who had married his sister (3)—a watch, a radio, and so forth. These gifts were against the usual flow, which should be primarily and mostly from a husband to his wife’s brother. Eventually the sister in question (3) became sick and a diviner revealed that the ancestor ghosts (specifically, ghosts 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8) were unhappy with this flow of generosity. Reparation was quickly made by the man (1) who had made the gifts. He and his wives (9 and 10) prepared a smaller version of the items that a woman’s family prepares as dowry at a wedding: two chickens, rice, and a set of clothes each for his sister (3) and her husband (2). He (1) and his wives (9 and 10) took these in the early hours of the morning to the house of his sister (3) and her husband (2). There,

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Figure 7.3. The circumstances of a sii kimoc.

a short ritual informed the ancestor ghosts (4, 5, 6, 7, and 8) that the way was being cleared again between the two houses. The sister (3) and her husband (2) then returned a gift of cooked beef and a young buffalo, again a reproduction on a smaller scale of the bride-price given at marriage. The meat was distributed among the man’s (1) relatives. What these examples show is that matrilateral cross-cousin marriage is one result of a much larger rule about the debts that exist between families joined by marriage. Exchanges between affines are a necessity, not a choice. Getting these right ensures everyone’s health. Desires that have not yet been formalized through the right exchanges—such as flirtations—can disrupt this health and must be quickly formalized. In the following section, I will focus on the marriage events in one particular family to show how debt, desire, and illness created domestic arrangements and tensions in New Kandon.

Family Dramas The eldest generation of this family consisted of four people—one man, Phut, and his three wives. Phut’s first marriage was in 1966, when he and his wife were both about twelve years old. The girl’s father had borrowed cows and buffalo from Phut’s father to pay the bride-price for his own wife, and the girl was repayment for this old debt. Phut’s second marriage also took place because of an outstanding debt owed to Phut’s parents, this time by the parents of a fifteen-year-old girl called Wanali. The ancestor spirits were irritated at this debt and caused an illness in Phut’s sister; the cure was Phut’s marriage to Wanali, although in this case it was ineffective and Phut’s sister died a few days after the marriage. The third wife, Suk, was a woman Phut married after an

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Figure 7.4. Phut’s household in 2009.

illicit affair. The woman was already married but she had no children because her husband was only a little boy (that marriage had been contracted by her father to settle a debt). The marriage to Phut took place after she became pregnant and the affair was revealed. When I first came to know this family in 2009, Phut was living in a house with his three wives and the children from each of these marriages, as well as the wife and children of one of his sons by Suk.

Scene One: Marriage Strikes Like an Illness In February 2012, I had been away, and two things were different in Phut’s house when I returned. First, there was a new buffalo skull hanging in the lounge room—it was the result of a buffalo sacrifice that Phut excitedly explained had happened on the very day that I had left. Second, there was a new woman living in the house: a sixteen-year-old called Vatsana, who, I was told, was now married to Phut’s eldest son, Saysana. These were significant events: this household had performed neither an eat buffalo event nor a wedding for

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years, but now both had occurred within a matter of weeks, and both seemingly out of the blue. The eat buffalo, Phut told me, was the result of his second wife’s illness. Apparently, within hours of my departure, Wanali was lying prone, not responding to stimulation, barely breathing. The family rushed her to the hospital and—according to Phut—her heart stopped three times on the way. The doctors at the hospital quickly gave up on the woman. Perhaps the bigger hospital in the city would be able to help, they said, but this rural outpost could do no more for her. However, Phut knew better. He tied some white string around her wrist, making a promise to the ancestor ghosts and household spirits: if the cause of the illness was some offense to them, he promised to kill a buffalo to make amends. The woman immediately improved, indicating that his guess had been correct, although it was still not clear which occult power was the cause or why. This prompted a searching retrospection through the recent history of the family: Was it something a guest had done while staying at the house? Was there a hidden scandal within the family? Or some cause for resentment? The family consulted a diviner, who announced that in this case it was the jaaŋ daŋ (K: household spirits) that had been offended. Some months previously, the village had been wired for electricity. While erecting the power lines, the visiting workers had used what appeared to be a wooden pole outside this family’s home to rest some bamboo scaffolding on as they worked, unaware of its significance. The significance was that this pole was in fact a buffalo stake used for eat buffalo events. When I asked Wanali about the events, she didn’t mention the electricity workers. What she spoke about was the terrifying sensation of her body being taken over by another force. She was lying in bed when she felt something touch her arm. Everything went black. She could still hear, but she could not see or move. She heard her youngest daughter, Lani, call out in distress, “Mum, what’s wrong?” But she could do nothing in response. The daughter shook her body, trying to rouse her. Thinking quickly, the girl spilled some water from a tobacco pipe over her. This restored the woman’s ability to see and move, but she was still very weak. Since the killing of the buffalo, however, she has felt completely better. About this time, I was conducting a comparison of bride-prices. One of the first interviews I conducted was at Phut’s household, because of the new bride they had so recently welcomed into the household. The young woman, Vatsana, was now married to Phut’s eldest son, Saysana. Saysana did not live in Kandon on a regular basis; he worked for the army and was stationed in a

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district capital to the east. He rarely visited because his salary was not very substantial and the journey was long, dangerous, and expensive. According to Phut, however, the match between Vatsana and Saysana was a free choice born of love. In that interview, he informed me that the bride-price was the standard eight items, totaling about 14,500,000 kiip ($1,550). However, 6,500,000 kiip ($700) of this was held over as a debt while Phut’s family sought to raise the funds. Saysana had returned briefly to Kandon for the wedding ceremony, but by the time of the interview, he had already departed. Vatsana overheard my interview with Phut but stayed mostly silent. Not long afterward, though, I was able to hear her side of the story. Phut went to town because he had stepped on a nail and he needed a tetanus shot. His three wives were absent, harvesting rice. Vatsana had been left in the household to wind yarn into balls for weaving. She sat with me as I translated documents. Playfully, she asked me, “Why don’t you go and take photographs of the people at school? I miss everyone there and I want to see their faces!” The school was very close by, so I said, “Why don’t you go yourself to see them?” She replied, “I can’t go to school anymore. I have to stay in this house now that I am married.” The work she was doing seemed repetitive and inane. I commented on this and asked why women had to stop school when they married. She replied that people had to listen to their parents. Speaking faster now, she said she had heard Phut’s interview with me but that what he told me wasn’t right. “It wasn’t a love marriage! My husband does not love me. He has a girlfriend where he lives, a woman that he loves. She does not want to marry him, though, because she wants to keep going with her career.” The woman was apparently a schoolteacher. Vatsana said that she herself had had no interest in getting married either; she had been in high school at the time and wanted to keep studying. However, when Wanali became sick the situation was presented to both bride and groom as an imperative. One of the explanations for Wanali’s illness, I now learned, was that Saysana was still unmarried at the age of thirty-six. The speculation was that the ancestor ghosts felt that Saysana really must want to marry, particularly given that his younger brother had already been married for years. Out of pity, they intervened on his behalf by causing illness in the family. Vatsana was a predictable candidate for marriage because she was related to the family through Saysana’s mother, Suk. It is a particular twist to this story, however, that Suk was also the first wife of Vatsana’s father. It will be recalled that in Phut’s third marriage, he

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Figure 7.5. Vatsana’s marriage to Saysana in 2012.

seduced the wife of a small boy, resulting in her pregnancy. The child that was conceived out of wedlock was Saysana, the man who, thirty-six years later, was to marry Vatsana, the daughter of the first, jilted husband. Vatsana also revealed to me that Saysana had already been married once before. This first marriage took place when he was still a child and ended in divorce. The woman involved in that marriage, Tessani, had then married Saysana’s younger brother. Vatsana revealed this story to me knowing, I think, that Phut had concealed this past divorce from me, leaving it out of previous interviews. However, Vatsana told me now because it helped explain why the ancestor ghosts might have interceded on behalf of Saysana and made Wanali sick: although he insisted that he harbored no ill feelings toward his ex-wife and his little brother when they married, there was the chance that he still harbored unacknowledged or concealed resentment about the situation, especially given that he was still single all these years later. When I had a chance to speak to Saysana later, on one of his rare visits to the village, he explained that from his perspective he felt no resentment toward his ex-wife or brother, and no desire to remarry. Both times, he had married only at the command (L: bang khap) of his father. He said, “I didn’t want to marry. I was busy working and happy with that.” Later on, I asked Phut again about the marriage of his son Saysana to Vatsana—I suggested that this was not a love marriage, after all, but one

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brought on by illness. He told me then that Saysana’s marriage was precipitated by illness, yes, but not just one. There was Wanali’s illness, but in addition Saysana had been in a near-fatal car accident. Also, Phut’s first wife, Suk, Tessani’s daughter, and Phut’s second wife, Ang, had each fallen ill in quick succession from complaints such as fever and weakness. This series of misfortunes and illnesses indicated to the family that the ancestor ghosts were annoyed about something. The story about the electricity workers explained why the household spirit was angry and wanted to attack them, but it did not explain why the ancestor ghosts did not protect them. A diviner was consulted. He concluded that Saysana must marry. The marriage was arranged hastily soon afterward. However, even when providing these details, Phut still insisted that Saysana’s was a love marriage, because after being presented with the news that he must marry, Saysana was consulted about who it was he would like to marry, although he was not given a choice about timing. I also asked Phut about Saysana’s first marriage, the one to Tessani when Saysana was a boy. This marriage was also brought about by illness, and again it was Wanali who was ill. But in this case, it was divined that the cause of her illness was an outstanding debt owed by the bride’s father to the father of the groom. Phut’s first wife, Suk, has a brother, Somkhit. Somkhit wanted to take a second wife but needed to raise the bride-price first. He borrowed six items from his brother-in-law, Phut. Somkhit drowned soon afterward. When Phut’s second wife became ill after this, it was divined that the cause of her illness was this outstanding debt. Tessani was a daughter of the deceased Somkhit, and she was sent as repayment of the debt to Phut’s household. There, she married his eldest son. This was in 1991. Saysana was then fifteen years old, and Tessani was nine. Tessani left Saysana after the village relocated to the resettlement site and before they had any children. Controversially, she did so without repaying the bride-price. A few years later, one of Phut’s daughters fell ill with malaria. Although she sought medical treatment, the illness returned repeatedly over a number of years. One night, in 2002, her condition became critical. Phut called out to the ancestor spirits that he would feed them a buffalo if her life would be spared. She improved somewhat, and this sparked a conversation about what it could have been that had roused the ancestral spirits’ ire to let the girl suffer as she had. Phut learned that his second son, Phonkeo, had a secret lover. Phonkeo was at that time working on a coffee plantation. Phut contacted him to urgently request that he return. On his return, Phonkeo was quizzed about the identity of his secret lover. It was a surprise to many when it was revealed

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Figure 7.6. Tessani’s marriages, first to Saysana and then to Phonkeo.

that it was none other than Tessani, Saysana’s ex-wife. She had been working on the same coffee plantation. Within days of returning, Phonkeo and Tessani were married. This at once solved the problem of the illicit affair and that of the bride-price that had not been repaid by Tessani. As soon as the wedding was agreed upon, the younger sister made a full recovery from her malaria. Before I continue with this account, a couple of points are worth reflecting on. To begin with, the chapter so far has discussed the circumstances of twelve marriages. Of these, only one can be said to be a marriage of free choice, in the Western sense of boy meets girl, they fall in love, and choose to get married. This was Loe and Keola, and their marriage is now viewed widely as a dangerous and unfertile connection. Another marriage that comes close to one of free choice is the marriage of seduction, in which Phut got Suk pregnant while she was married to a boy. However, even in this case the emphasis in accounts I heard was placed on the necessity of the marriage once the pregnancy and affair were found out; one wonders if the marriage would have occurred at all if the affair had never been discovered. A third marriage that comes close to a love match is that between Phonkeo and Tessani. The couple are certainly very loving today and often say that they married for love. But even in this case, it took a serious illness (Phonkeo’s younger sister’s malaria) for their love to be brought into the open and result in a marriage. At the time, circumstances

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made their marriage a necessity, not a choice. The term “cam pen” (L: necessary) was often used to describe marriages. The concept of necessity is central in Kandon discussions about agency; it neutralizes the question of a subject’s own desire and points instead to how one’s own choices are bound by the will of others, particularly the will of the ancestor ghosts. Of the twelve marriages that have been considered so far, illness played a crucial part in eleven of them. The only exception, again, was the marriage between Phut and Suk, but even in this case it could be argued that illness played a role in the sense that, had the couple not married, their families would have been at risk of illness in the future. The link here between illness and desire makes clear the more general Kantu position that desires are dangerous. The deadly danger imposed by the constant surveillance of the ancestor ghosts lends an air of high drama and imperative to marriage events. When it has been determined that an illness is caused by occult powers (ancestral or otherwise) a process of interpretation and revelation is set in motion. Speculations are made about what could have caused offense, and this amounts to a review of the possible resentments, improprieties, secrecies, or unmet wishes among family members. These can be concealed or unacknowledged among the living, but they cannot be hidden from the ancestor ghosts. The imperative is to reveal what it is that the ancestors have perceived and how they have perceived it. In this way, illness is met with interpretive work. And the subject of this interpretation is desire—the desires of the ancestral spirits need to be divined, and these are often understood as muddled and excessive. In this way, desire is formulated not as motivating free choices but as generating a series of necessities. I will now return to the story of Phut’s family.

Scene Two: The Split The young bride Vatsana had not been married a year when another major change unsettled the household in which she was living. There was a conflict between Phut and his son Phonkeo, which resulted in Phonkeo moving out of the household with his beloved wife Tessani, their children, his mother Suk, his brother Saysana, and Saysana’s wife Vatsana, in tow. Again, I was away when the drama occurred. I arrived back to find Phut’s household depleted from fourteen residents to six. The following is a summary of the accounts given to me by various actors about what had happened. The first person to approach me to discuss the split was the disaffected

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son of Phut, Phonkeo. He asked me to visit him in the house he was renting while he built a new residence. According to him, it was not his choice to leave his father’s household. He was ordered out by his father, who was acting on the will of his father’s second wife, Wanali. Wanali had insisted that Phonkeo leave after a trivial-sounding conflict over some sesame seeds. Wanali had asked one of Phonkeo’s and Tessani’s children to pound some seeds into paste; the child didn’t do it. Wanali took this as a general sign of the children’s unwillingness to contribute to and share with the household, and this pointed to the unwillingness of their father, Phonkeo, as well. Wanali—Phonkeo claimed—had said that she could not live in these circumstances and would move out and build a house on a small plot of land that she owned behind a row of pigsties in the village. She planned to live there with the two of her children who were still school-aged. Phut then announced that if Wanali left, he would leave with her. At this point, the Village Committee stepped in to arbitrate the dispute. Phut holds a high office in the village. He often receives official visitors. The committee argued that he couldn’t be seen to host such visitors in a small hut behind the pigsties. They ruled that if the family was going to split, Phut should retain the main household and the others should leave. Wanali was asked to give her land by the pigsties to Phonkeo so he could build a new house. Wanali’s motivations seemed mystifying to me when Phonkeo was telling me his side of the story: the story about the sesame seeds did not seem to add up. But his interest was not in making Wanali’s position understandable. Instead, he was trying to explain his position. He portrayed himself as unreasonably wronged. This perception was shared by his brother and his mother. As a result, these two moved out with Phonkeo when he left. When I spoke to Phonkeo’s elder brother, Saysana, he, too, claimed that he had not wanted to leave his father’s house. He said he moved only out of pity for his younger brother. Likewise, Suk claimed that she left her husband Phut not out of some desire of her own but out of pity for her two sons. Saysana added that he in turn also felt sorry for his mother. The sons were disappointed because their father had for some time been promising that a patch of land in the village by the main road was reserved for them. However, when the split came, Phut refused to give this land to them. His said his own dead father appeared to him in a dream and forbade it. Saysana added resentfully that Wanali probably had a hand in this decision, too, because she was greedy. The way these sons described it to me, Phut was totally under the sway of his wife’s selfish preferences. Phut then told me his version. He started by saying that the reason for the split was the kind of unfettered desires caused by modernity: “These days,

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people want independence. While they lived with me, I was the head of the household. Now, Phonkeo gets to be the head of his own household. He is not subordinated to anyone. In the mountains we all lived with our fathers. Here we see the Lao people and we want to live like them—each couple with a house of their own. Some people are too lazy to build a house to live on their own, but every year more and more people are doing it. Phonkeo and Saysana are the fifth this past year.” Phut explained that illness was not the cause. It was simply Phonkeo and Saysana’s desire, what they wanted. Some of the motivation behind this was money. Phonkeo’s wife, Tessani, had a job on the rubber plantation, which made her the only household member to have a reasonably steady cash income. She always gave part of it to Phut. With this new income, Phut made a down payment on a tractor that would lessen the labor requirements made on the household as a whole during the rice season. In Phut’s account, it was Phonkeo who was not happy with this arrangement. Phonkeo wanted his wife to give less to the larger family and keep more for the couple. Phut was careful to acknowledge that Tessani herself caused no problems and had always wanted to be generous in the contributions she made. It was his own son, Phonkeo, who resented it. Phut told me that he said to his son, “If you live here, you are governed by me, you need to pay me. But if you live on your own you govern yourself. So, if that is what you want, you should live on your own.” At first, Phut explained, he offered to leave and live by the fishpond on the outskirts of the village, in a house that he had often said he wanted to build. But the village committee would not allow it, and he also claimed that the deputy district chief became involved. Both of these authorities said it was not appropriate for someone of Phut’s standing and activities to live in a small house under construction. Thus, it was they who decreed that it must be the younger people who moved. Phut says he gave his sons some productive land but that it was not a lot because he is old and can’t find money easily on his own. They are young and will be able to find a way. Saysana has his army salary. Tessani has her work in the rubber plantation. Phonkeo is still young. It would not be right for an old man to give away everything to his sons and leave nothing to care for himself in his old age, Phut said. They took the household motorcycle, but they didn’t want the tractor. The balance of the cost of the tractor is still owed by the household and will likely be repossessed. Phut knew that the split had worsened the economic situation of both groups. He said, “They only think of the comfortable times, they don’t think of the difficult times. The times when you are sick or injured and you need people to care for you. They only think of the

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times when you have plenty, but lots of people eat it and then it is gone quickly.” Phut’s explanation of the split, then, dwelt heavily on the selfish desires of Phonkeo. His sons, meanwhile, attributed the split to the selfish desires of Wanali and the way she was able to hold Phut in her thrall. I was able to hear Wanali’s side of the story soon afterward. I thought I had heard Phut calling her name in the night, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying or why. In the morning, Phut was out, so I visited Wanali. I asked her what the commotion had been the night before. She told me that Phut had come home drunk from an eat buffalo event. She said he often got angry when drunk. The night before he was yelling at her to go and sleep with their daughter Lani—he said he didn’t want such an ugly little thing next to him. She laughed. Then she went on, saying that he often got drunk like that and in the past had done much worse. He had bound her with rope, hand and foot, like a pig. He had used knives and machetes against her. He had punched her. Once she ran to the window in the kitchen to try to jump out, but he caught her and bound her then carried her around the village. She told me not to be scared— he never beat other people, only herself and her children. With other people, he just yelled. She said he had run up debts all over town for his drinking. He drank under the cover of being hospitable to guests, even if the guests didn’t drink with him. He always finished whatever alcohol there was in the house. “He takes the beer and alcohol on loan and the people who give it to him are not brave enough to say anything—they just speak to Ang and me, asking for money.” She herself was not brave enough to raise the issue with him. She said the debts must total many millions of kiip now. “He is not that old—he is only fifty or so years. You see other people his age and they don’t look that old. But he has aged already.” He was an alcoholic and an angry drunk. Not everyone is an angry drunk, she noted. Some just sleep, some are joyous, some get angry but not violent. But Phut was violent. Everyone in the village knew it was so, but no one was brave enough to say anything, because of his powerful position. Wanali was often forced to sleep in neighbor’s houses in order to avoid his violent, drunken attacks. I asked why, with all the violence, she did not leave him, perhaps to live with her younger brothers. She replied that her own daughter, Lani, had said to her, “Why don’t you go to live with your younger brother in Vientiane?” He had married a woman from Udomsay. But she said that she does not have the money to repay the bride-price. She doesn’t know how to escape. “My children have only eaten tears,” she said. She felt sorry for her five

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children, that they had grown up with a father like that. “When I was younger, I was not afraid—I just let it happen. But now I am afraid because I am old. When he hits me, when he ties me up, I am afraid I will be hurt and not recover.” She expressed anger, at this point, with her own parents for putting her in this position. They gave her in marriage to settle a debt. Her father owed Phut’s parents a pig. The debt had to be repaid suddenly because Phut’s relative was sick, and the diviner said it was because of this outstanding debt. Her parents were poor, so they gave her in marriage. She was fifteen. They thought the repayment marriage would make Phut’s relative recover, but the woman died ten days after the wedding. Wanali’s life was already altered forever. She said she cried all night when they told her that she would marry him. “He was so tall and beautiful, and everyone wanted to be close to him. But I was just short and horrible. I didn’t know anything. I was too young to be interested in men; I was only fifteen! I didn’t want to try. He got angry with me because I was small and ugly and could not do anything. He had to do all the household work himself because his wife was incapable.” I began, now, to see Wanali’s involvement in the dispute over the sesame seeds in a new light; perhaps she had said she would leave not because she could not live with Phonkeo and his wife and children but because she wanted to leave Phut and needed a viable excuse. When I asked her, Wanali agreed that this was the case and pointed out that as soon as she said she would leave to set up a house on her own with just her two children, Phut said he would go with her, and that was when the Village Committee stepped in to ask the young family to leave instead. When I suggested to Tessani and Vatsana that it was not selfishness that explained Wanali’s behavior but a desire to leave Phut, they said that it was true that he beat her. But their response surprised me because it still carried a sense of jealousy. They said that Phut was only interested in yelling at and beating Wanali “because he loves her and only her—he was not interested in his other wives.” Tessani went on to say that Phut only cuddled and gave sweets to his grandchildren through Wanali, and not to Tessani’s own children. I also asked Wongphat, the diviner who had been consulted about Wanali’s original sickness, about the departure of Saysana, Phonkeo, and their wives and mother from Phut’s house. He made it very clear that it was Phut who wanted Phonkeo to leave. Phut had lost his temper because he felt that Phonkeo did not sincerely want to share with the rest of the household. Phut then ordered Phonkeo to leave. That injustice made Saysana and Suk leave. Wongphat also emphasized that Suk had long felt that Phut was not really her

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husband anyway. “It was as if he had only one wife,” Wongphat said. And that wife was Wanali. It was only Wanali that Phut worried about, was jealous of, and harassed. I will pause here and offer a few remarks before continuing the story. For my purposes, one of the most striking aspects of these various accounts of the split was the way desire worked as an allegation. Phonkeo alleged that the split was the result of Wanali’s selfish desire, and the way Phut listened to her and only her. Phut, on the contrary, alleged that the split was the result of Phonkeo’s selfish desire for independence and autonomy. He denied that any of the key decisions in the affair had been his own: it was the village committee who interceded to make Phonkeo move out, and a dreamed command from his father that ordered him not to grant them the land he had promised. These two men consistently presented themselves not as agents acting on their desires but as bound by circumstantial necessities. To claim to be acting on necessity was a claim of innocence, while desire and agency were attributed to others as an accusation. There is a link here, then, between desire and guilt. To be the one caught desiring is to be the one at fault. Innocence was established by portraying oneself as doing only what was necessary and serving others, while subordinating or disavowing one’s own desire. There was also the question of how one’s desires were either controlled or uncontrolled. Wongphat understood that Phut himself had ordered his sons to leave; he put this down to Phut’s hot temper and the way he loved only one of his wives, both signs of an inability to moderate his desires. Wanali’s account depicted Phut’s relationship with her as dangerous and perhaps deadly. It was widely accepted in the village that this life-threatening violence toward Wanali was evidence of Phut’s love for her. This reinforces the notion that desire is dangerous—Phut improperly loved only Wanali, and his love and concern were expressed in bursts of rage and violence, in much the same way that the ancestors love the living but express it by causing illness and death. In both cases, desire is dangerous and perhaps deadly.

Scene Three: Ritual Reparation It is important to note that this split in the household was accompanied by a series of sii kimoc (K: repairs to the ancestors). These ritualized exchanges occur between in-laws in order to mollify the ancestral ghosts. There were also animals killed to apologize for any offence to ghosts and spirits. On the night that Phonkeo departed the household, he returned immediately with a pig

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that was killed to give blood to the jaaŋ daŋ (K: household spirit). A dish was made from its raw flesh and blood, and another from the boiled innards, which were used to feed the spirits. The village committee was invited to eat this dish as well. In the morning, the two separate households completed a sii kimoc. Phonkeo and Saysana gave cloth and two-footed animals to Phut, and Phut gave four-footed animals and wealth items to them. The ancestor ghosts were fed first in Phut’s house on chicken and rice brought by Phonkeo and Saysana, and then at Phonkeo and Saysana’s house on pig and rice brought by Phut’s household. However, months after the initial split, it seemed as if the ghosts were not placated by these initial gifts. Four months after his sons left, Phut began complaining of a sore back. As the days went by, his sore back became part of every conversation that we had. It was rice-transplanting season, so initially I thought the discomfort was easily explained by the extra work preparing the fields without his two eldest sons. Phut, meanwhile, tried a series of different biomedical and herbal medicines, searching for a cure. One night when I was visiting Phut’s house, I noticed Suk arrive and sit quietly with the other women. Until this point, the split had been almost total. Phut attended a couple of events at Phonkeo and Saysana’s house when their new place was being constructed and when it was completed, but I had never seen other household members visit one another. I learned then that a month previously, Wanali had consulted a diviner about Phut’s illness. The diviner had immediately said that Suk needed to return to her ex-husband’s house to conduct another sii kimoc (K: repair the ancestors). Later, when Phut had more time to talk to me about it, he said that the diviner had predicted that he would seek medical treatment and consume medicines, but that none of them would work until this ritual took place. “But I didn’t want to believe her! I ate medicine for a month!” When Suk came to the house the group made a sort of “show of intent” to the kimoc. They displayed a brass gong and some weavings as symbols of men’s and women’s wealth, respectively, promising to hold a ritual event later in the year after the rice harvest. At that point, Phut’s household would again give pig meat and wealth items to those who had left, and the others would give chicken and weavings in return. Phut reported that as soon as this promise was made, the pain in his back eased. The next morning it was completely healed. This was taken as a sign that his illness had indeed been caused by the ancestors, and so plans were out in place for a full ritual at a later, unspecified date. 2 However, it was still unclear which ancestor or precisely why. Phut ­commented, “I’m worried that it might be because my sons left the house—I

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don’t know why that was wrong or what we did wrong. I don’t know if it is Suk’s ancestors or mine. Wanali went to the diviner and she said that I would get better if Suk came here to do a ritual, but I was too shy to say anything to Suk. We just talked about it in our house. We honored the ghosts on our side, but I was too shy to ask her to come to honor the ones on her side.” But there were more illnesses to be dealt with. In Phonkeo and Saysana’s household, one of the children was ill—he was looking thin and unhealthy. In this case, the diviner saw that Tessani’s father—the man who had drowned—was upset at the treatment of his daughter in the split and was making this known by allowing her son to become sick. In the household where Vatsana had lived before she married Saysana, a woman had lost her voice. The diviner announced that part of the reason was that Vatsana’s grandparents were irritated that her brideprice had still not been paid in full. Saysana returned and took out a loan at the bank (ten million kiip) so that he could pay the remaining bride-price to Vatsana’s family. At this event, they took pig meat and the wealth items that they had received so recently from Phut’s family over to Vatsana’s parents’ household. In return, they received weavings and chickens. These ritual events were moments for knitting the family back together again, although not in the same form that it had taken beforehand. Suk never returned to live with Phut; the divorce was final in that sense. But after the sii kimoc exchanges, people that were estranged could begin to interact once again. These sii kimoc exchanges, in turn, were brought about by illness. As with the cases of illness examined in the previous section, illnesses are occasions of interpretive work. They are moments when grievances can be acknowledged and actions can be taken to repair them not in the name of desire but in the name of necessity. Phut did not say he desired a reconciliation with his wife or the parents of Vatsana, but sickness made this ritual form of rapprochement a necessity. Phut’s unresolved feelings about his divorce can be sensed in the quotation above, where he says he had been too “shy” to approach his ex-wife, for example. Illness makes possible—indeed necessary—action on issues that might otherwise not have been discussed or admitted. These events occurred in my last trip to Kandon before the birth of my first son. This family drama has continued in the ensuing years, for instance, with the marriage of Wanali’s eldest son. The events described above have been returned to in ongoing interpretation and worked over again and again. My intent in detailing a part of this ongoing and open-ended drama here is to show the model of desire that animates it. What we might think of as a “direct desire”—a straightforward desire for sexual or marital union in general

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or with a particular person, for instance, or for material gain—is understood in New Kandon as particularly dangerous. Desire is also thought of as something that can be potentially unknown to the subject, or concealed, but which is nonetheless transparent to others around them and particularly transparent to the ancestor ghosts. Diviners filled a key role in New Kandon as chief interpreters of the desires of people and ancestors, but interpretation was not limited to them alone. Gossip played an important role in the events described above, and onlookers to events were often more straightforward about the desires they saw at play than the protagonists were about themselves. Actors with different perspectives on the drama often had different takes on who desired what. Interpretation involved divining the desires not only of the living but also of the dead, and in particular of how the dead might be reading the desires of the living from a very different perspective. For instance, ancestor ghosts were often said to be acting out of pity or mercy for the living, perceiving and acting on a living descendant’s desire that the living had either not known about, or not expressed, themselves. This was the case, for instance, with Tessani’s deceased father, who caused illness in Tessani’s son in order to obtain more respectful treatment for her. Tessani, for her part, absolutely disavowed any resentment and certainly didn’t want her son to be sick. The understanding of desire here is that it can be opaque to those around you, or even to yourself, but it is always transparent to the ghosts: “They can see us, but we can’t see them.” Tessani’s father was thought to be acting out of love for her, and on what he assumed was her desire. Ancestor ghosts, then, are strongly desiring subjects themselves. Although people said that the ghosts acted out of love for the living, and upheld moral behavior among them, they were also treated as vile and revolting creatures capable of some of the most decried behaviors. When addressed in sii kimoc ceremonies, people plead for mercy from the ancestors but also direct the “ugly” and “detestable” ghosts to return to the graveyard (Nishimoto 2010a, 52). Acting wildly on desires, kimoc are a transgression of the very same moral order that they are said to uphold. They desire too much, and in ways that cause them to hurt the ones they love. The “love” the ancestors have for the living had parallels with the love Phut meted out in his family; it was characterized by erratic anger, commanding orders, and violence. This chapter concludes a series of three chapters on the concept of “necessity” in New Kandon. Necessity, I have argued, is an important element in people’s representations of themselves as good and moral persons. It functions as a claim to nonagentive innocence. This is in striking contrast to the ­valorizations of desire in more familiar concepts such as that of “the self-made

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man,” or the unfettered desires and endless choices incited by capitalism (according to observers such as Salecl 2010), or the promotion of the virtue “free choice” in marriage in Laos since the 1991 constitution. In contrast with models such as these that associate virtue with freedom, in New Kandon claims to virtue were framed in the language of necessity. These three chapters have discussed the ritual killing of buffalo, gender inequality, and arranged marriages. All three of these things have been either discouraged or made illegal by the Party-state. These are behaviors that are considered by Vientiane elites as the sort of thing that—regrettably—ethnic minorities are all too prone to, and the sort of thing that following Party-state guidance will overcome. New Kandon is held up as a model village of the kinds of transformations that are promoted by the Party-state (as I showed in chapters 2 to 4). As the previous three chapters have shown, however, New Kandon does not conform exactly to Party-state ideals. There are limits, and these three chapters have shown how these limits are discussed in Kandon as a matter of “necessities.” That is, deviation from the Party-state is not depicted as an agentive act of desire but as an agent-less and undesiring necessity. In a context in which the Party-state has occupied the legitimate forms of success and agency, “necessity” has emerged as an important way of framing oneself when one’s actions fall outside the range approved of in the metalanguage of the Party-state.

8 “You Will Reach the Katu”

As I pieced together the story of marriage, weaving, value, and power described in the foregoing chapters, I experienced intellectual pleasure. It was the pleasure of figuring things out. Figure 8.1 is one example. I originally drew it as I was thinking through the way marriage, gifts of cloth, and gifts of buffalo might neatly reproduce with matrilateral cross-cousin marriages in each generation. This diagram now seems to me to say more about my own pleasure in getting to know Kandon than about the people who actually live there. This grid of generations and exchanges supposedly representing “marriage” could hardly be further from the emotional family dramas as I saw them unfolding

Figure 8.1. Ideal matrilateral cross-cousin marriage across three lineages and five generations and the associated flow of gifts. 165

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in New Kandon, for instance, in Phut’s divorce or Liliha’s loveless marriage. Where in this diagram is the tug between necessity and choice, fear and attraction, desire and its dangers? Schematic understandings such as this one are, I believe, accurate in their own way but also present an outsider’s perspective. Figure 5.2, the neat table of corresponding values I made in thinking through the value of buffalo in chapter 5, and the kinship tables in chapter 7 are also byproducts of my attempts to understand the goings-on of New Kandon. These diagrams do not capture subjective, insider experience. Among the various emotions I had while researching the Kantu, I was often awestruck, always interested, and sometimes confused, but I was rarely afraid. And what Kantu people repeatedly told me, and what they demonstrated through their actions, was that they were afraid of the things I was so interested to learn about. Fear was the line I did not cross. And this was a lack that they perceived in me. As I went about my fieldwork, I made a point of visiting as many different households as I could. I stayed with people, shared meals, traveled to new places, and sought out a range of experiences in such places. I took my two- and four-year-old sons to live in New Kandon for several months. All standard behavior for an anthropologist. But all of this was perceived with a kind of puzzlement by my friends in Kandon. “Bo yaan,” (L: not afraid) they commented. Why wasn’t I afraid? I might cross the path of a dangerous spirit at any time in any place, or share a meal with a sorcerer. If the essence of anthropological fieldwork is, at heart, simply the disciplined and determined plunging of one’s own self into the lives of others, then this was interpreted by the Kantu as a recklessly dangerous pursuit. In this chapter, I discuss how it became apparent during a long hike in the mountains that my companions were afraid in this way, and in addition they had come up with their own explanation as to why I seemed more afraid of leeches than of poison. When I learned to admit that their theories might well be right, I was tutored in the dangers and fears that my companions perceived all around us; I recognized their subjective experience momentarily, even if I did not share it. My ultimate inability to share with them the substance they concluded I possessed, however, ruptured our relationships and confirmed that I was indeed an outsider (with all the potency, difference in perspective, and danger that implied).

Remembering, Repeating, and Impossible Returns Wiphat and I had been talking about a trip to the mountains virtually from the time we first met. In the early months of my fieldwork, we spent long

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hours talking about village history, the weaving trade that sustained them in the past, the resettlement from the mountains to the plateau in 1996, and how much had changed. “It will be easier to understand when you see the mountains for yourself,” he would say. At such times, he would often touch on the one and only other time he had returned to his birthplace since the resettlement. That was with Japanese anthropologist Futoshi Nishimoto (affectionately known in the Kandons as “Dosi”). Dosi had conducted fieldwork in New Kandon in the early 2000s. After the conclusion of his main fieldwork, he returned with a counterpart from the Ministry of Information and Culture to make a trip from New Kandon to Old Kandon. Wiphat often spoke about the trip by boat up the Sekong, how Dosi had set a fast and dogged pace up the mountain, the gifts of soap and medicine they’d delivered to Old Kandon, and the video CD Dosi has subsequently sent of his photographs of the trip. Wiphat cautioned me to expect hardships: even Dosi had almost given up. One of the everyday dangers of farming in this region, he reminded me, was falling off one’s field because the mountain slopes were almost sheer. When the news spread in New Kandon that I, too, might go to the mountains, some shook their heads and said “You won’t arrive” and “So difficult.” One young woman said she’d love to accompany me on one of my trips, but not this one: “I want to go with you when you go to the city or catch an airplane, but not there.” Born in Old Kandon, she had left as an infant, had never returned, and had no interest in doing so, either. Other people, though, expressed a desire to accompany me and longed for a return visit to their former place of residence. Our plans started to take shape when Canphon extended a formal invitation to me to visit him. Not long after this, Wiphat asked me to stop talking about the proposed trip to other people in the village. We couldn’t bring everyone with us, and each person we did invite would be our responsibility to care and pay for along the way. In addition, he preferred a small, lean party that could move quickly without attracting too much attention. I suggested that he settle on the final party himself. Partly this was because I thought he’d do a much better job than I would, but I was also interested in Wiphat’s vision of this trip. His urge toward repeating the Dosi experience was already strong, but what else was motivating him? This trip would, after all, take us back to the lands that he was so proud to have led the people of New Kandon away from. In the end, he decided on a party of four: himself, two teenage boys as porters, and me. The porters would carry the gifts that we purchased for distribution, largely medical supplies. These packs were especially heavy because we planned to visit not only Old Kandon, as Dosi had done, but also the surrounding villages, with gifts for each. Wiphat had worked as a medic as a teenager, walking from village to village with free vaccinations and medicines

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during the war. It was his idea to deliver medicines along this same route as the backbone of our trip. So our trip now took the form of two repetitions: returning with me, another anthropologist, and returning bearing medicines as a replay of his youth. Before I went, I consulted Kasun, a New Kandon fortune-teller. He was famous for predicting marriages—or, as I thought, actually causing them—by revealing the secret flirtations happening in the village. Kasun spread the fresh pack of playing cards I’d purchased on the ground, selected a few, then announced, “You will reach the Katu. Sabaay.” It struck me that he used the Lao exonym “Katu” instead of the local ethnonym “Kantu.” Liliha and I concluded his words meant I would reach Old Kandon. The Lao word at the end, sabaay, suggested we would have no problems. We set off in October 2012. We headed to some rapids on the Sekong River that were a popular landing place for boats navigating upstream. Or so I had heard. When we arrived, though, there were only a few longtails scattered about the shore, all in bad condition. Wiphat and the boys made some inquiries. Somewhat sheepishly, Wiphat told me that the boat trade that used to be so busy here had died away with the road improvements to the district capital. The bus was now cheaper than the boat, so the clientele had drifted away. We could not find a single boat operator willing to take us upstream. Already we were encountering something impossible about Wiphat’s urge for repetition. He made some calls and eventually found the number of the bus driver who made the trip. The driver was on the road already, but agreed to turn back to collect us at a nearby intersection. Soon we found ourselves the only passengers on the “bus.” We sat perched on wooden benches laid over sacks of rice. The road became progressively steeper and bumpier. We arrived in the capital at last as the sun was dipping below the horizon, weary and covered in dust. Our original plan had not involved coming to the district capital at all: a boat would have dropped us a few miles downstream, closer to Old Kandon. Our arrival caused a small flutter of interest in the Kantu population of this administrative center. We were hosted that night by Wiphat’s son, Akamu, who also invited a number of high-ranking civil servants with connections to Kandon. Our presence was no secret. In the morning, we were visited by two policemen asking for my papers. I had packed only my general letter of permission, signed and stamped by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They wanted to see the entire set, which I had not brought with me, as I was attempting to pack light and sleek for our anticipated rough hike. They demanded that I return to New Kandon and retrieve my full

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set of papers. We had no choice but to return to New Kandon by dreaded “bus” again, delaying our trip by two days. We grumbled about the fortune-teller: so far not sabaay at all! When we finally made it back to the capital, the local police ruled that even though my papers indicated full permission to proceed to Old Kandon, and were signed by the district chief, I was required to hire a policeman to accompany me on my tour through the district. Privately, my party balked at this extra expense, the arbitrariness of the police intervention, and the intrusion on our privacy. But outwardly we tried to be friendly to the man assigned as the fifth member of our party, Sonxay, an ethnic Nye policeman. The next day, the five of us set off for Old Kandon. As we were now departing from the district capital, we decided that the most direct route would be along a temporary road that was at that time used for shipping supplies to the location where a new district capital was being built further east. We were fortunate to hitch a ride with the oil tanker that plied the road every two days. After a long day driving along hair-raising slopes, this vehicle dropped us at Wak, a village at the foot of a large mountain. From there we planned to cut up by foot into the steep slopes toward Old Kandon the next day. Heavy rain drummed on the iron roof through the night. As we breakfasted the next morning, the rain became even heavier. The path to Kandon was steep, and rain would make it even more dangerous. There was talk of instead walking on to another village that was further along the temporary road we had taken the day before. The drawback was that that village was two days’ walk away, and we would need to sleep in the open overnight, whereas we could reach Old Kandon in only one day. I was puzzled by this plan: surely sleeping in the open in the rain was not a good idea? We had no tents or tarps. Wiphat said he was worried that walking on the forest track to Kandon would tear the rain sheets we had for our packs, whereas walking on the road would not risk this. I suggested that it would be best to sleep another night at Wak village and hope that the rain would stop. Our discussion became heated, with Wiphat speaking at me loud and fast. Distressed by this outburst and wanting to hide my distress so that the decision could be made on a more rational basis, I withdrew to write field notes. Perhaps my party interpreted this as sulking with disappointment at the thought of not reaching Old Kandon that day, because after some time they turned to me and said “Let’s go” and “Mii heeng” (L: have strength). The rain had stopped, and they had agreed among themselves to push on to Old Kandon despite the danger of the slippery slopes. It was close to 9 a.m.—a late start. Within minutes we were climbing the slope that rose behind Wak village.

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The path cut straight upward, a narrow band of red earth that my eyes were fixed on almost constantly for the next nine hours. It was steep, just as they had warned me, until we hit the ridges. There, mist closed in so close so that I could not see more than a couple of yards on either side. Wiphat commented that this was fortunate, because it meant I wouldn’t see the sheer drops of hundreds of yards that he knew plunged away down either side of the narrow track. The rain started again soon after we started walking and kept up all day. Soon everything was wet. The red dirt path led us up and down, up and down, each new climb higher than the last. On the lower slopes we passed through dense forest that did indeed rip the rain sheets we had brought with us. As we climbed, the forest thinned out to spacious stands of pine. The ridgetops were often burned clear. At other places, the path led across steep grassy slopes. These were some of the most treacherous areas because they were precipitous. At times we passed by grasping great handfuls of grass and edging sideways like spiders. These slopes were also dotted with eroded gullies. The path had not always been maintained with adequate bridges or passes, and so many of these gullies involved hair-raising leaps. The idea of arriving in Old Kandon became more and more urgent to me as the hours drew on and I became more and more unsure. Wiphat had estimated that the path from Wak to Kandon would take three to four hours. When we stopped at the halfway point between Wak and Kandon, it was already midday. This point, which was the border between the two villages, was a gorgeous stream that gathered into a pond before crashing down a dramatic, vertiginous waterfall below us. We stopped again for another rest a couple of hours later, well into Kandon territory by then, at a place where a bench had been constructed at an intersection between two paths. In the clearing we found two sapling sticks pushed into the ground so that they stood upright, and both snapped so that their upper, leafy parts lurched down to the side. Wiphat said this was a sign that the way ahead was taboo. If there was a ritual event, such as the building of a new house or ceremonial hall, the beginning or end of the harvest, or a funeral, then the village would be closed to visitors for one or several days. However, we could not figure out which path the branch referred to: Was it warning us against the way we had come? Or the way we were going? Or did the sign refer to the path that cut left along the other track, which we were not planning to take? The boys inspected the saplings and decided that they looked quite old: perhaps they were out of date? Sonxay thought that they were current and indicated that Old Kandon was now taboo, perhaps for the harvest rituals.

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Wiphat agreed that it might be possible that the harvest might be ripe already, but he said he doubted they would put a sign like this so far from the village. “So far from the village? I thought we were getting close?” I asked. “No. We are not,” he replied. My heart sank. From there, the path cut down a steep descent. We were glad to be on a relatively well-maintained path now, but this one surprised us all with its intense slipperiness. Wiphat was the first to fall. Then I slipped and slid, as if on a waterslide. The boys fell too. Only Sonxay was sure-footed: he was modest enough to say it was because his plastic slip-on shoes had excellent grip. Then Wiphat, carried along by the muddy water, slid another five yards. I began to be afraid. This could easily result in a serious puncture or broken bone. I became very cautious, testing out my footing with each step, slowing our pace dramatically. Sonxay broke off a stick and held it by one end, holding the other end down to me. Whenever I slipped, he was ready to steady me, saying, “It doesn’t matter, you won’t fall, hold firm.” His voice behind me was as persistent as the rain, pattering on me from above, drip drip dripping reassurance as I walked. Tears of gratitude pricked my eyes—how awful that I had resented him as a possible spy and an imposition from the police. Pong kan, which can mean “police and their activities,” also is a more general word for “protection,” and that day Sonxay really did protect me. Although the walk was difficult and dangerous, or perhaps because of that, we were all starting to ease into one another’s company. Sonxay was an eager listener to Wiphat’s stories and asked him frankly what it was like to have three wives. Wiphat spoke glowingly of their mutual support for one another. Wiphat also made a point of explaining village history to the two boys as we passed further into Kandon territory. “Here,” he said, “we lit scrub fires on either side to drive away the French.” And “Here there was a training ground for the local militia.” And “Here your uncle was shot. He made it back to the village but died there.” And so on. Even though the perils of steepness and slipperiness kept me constantly attuned to my own movements, I also felt as though I, too, was being introduced to another way of seeing this landscape. Then another sign appeared: this time a single branch thrust upright into the middle of the path, again broken in the middle so that the upper leafy part angled downward with the leaves brushing the ground: a deliberate humanmade sign. Sonxay said he was sure now that Kandon was taboo. Wiphat said it just didn’t seem right. If there was a sign like this telling you where you shouldn’t go, there ought to be another sign that pointed you in the direction you should go. He searched out another path but the only one we could see led through the field to the left and appeared to peter out there. It was almost

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6 p.m. The sun was sinking fast, and the rain showed no signs of abating. I asked what would happen if it were a sign of taboo and we ignored it and entered the village anyway. Wiphat replied that I would be liable to sponsor the killing of at most a buffalo or a cow, but maybe just a pig or a goat. I said, “Even if it is the cost of a buffalo, I will pay it. I don’t have any money on me to pay for a buffalo right now, but I could give it to them when they come for the festival in New Kandon in March.” The others agreed. I suggested that Wiphat go first, alone, to discuss our planned transgression with the village. This was considered ridiculous: then we would break the taboo many times, instead of just once! We should all go past the stick together. There was some hesitating still; who would go first? Eventually the boys and Sonxay went ahead, and Wiphat and I followed slowly behind. Soon the first three were running back toward us. Sonxay had spotted a nest of Asian Giant Hornets, and the hornets were in pursuit. Everyone was urging me to run. We made it back to the branch unscathed. We now thought that the branch did not indicate a taboo after all: it was there to warn people about deadly insects a few yards up the path. With more confidence now about the sign’s meaning, we followed the path through the fallow field to the left. Now we found that this path did eventually lead us to the main entry to the village by an alternate route. The men stopped to wash in a stream that ran by the side of the village. I did, too, but was quickly repelled by the leeches and went on toward the village. So it was I who first approached the high fence that encircled the houses. Wiphat called out, instructing me to speak to any people I saw. If they were taboo, they would remain silent. I was not to cross the fence unless I was invited.

Arriving in Old Kandon As I approached the fence, I could see people scrambling to put on clothes and could hear them calling out to one another. I hailed them. They replied, saying, “Enter, enter.” With great relief, I clambered over the fence, and hands reached out to help me and relieve me of my backpack. Our party was directed to Canphon’s house. I showered briefly in the stream that poured through bamboo pipes into a pool at the top of the village. By the time I returned to Canphon’s house, a great crowd had assembled inside. There were 153 residents in the village at the time. It seemed that almost all of them crammed into Canphon’s house, fanned out like a shell around the huddle of our wet bodies and bags, the adults shaking our hands in greeting, sitting close and smoking pipes.

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A pile of bananas was in front of us. Eventually we were asked to speak. Sonxay told of the way I had initially been turned back to collect more papers, and emphasized that he was there only to protect me, not to collect information about them. I spoke, saying that I was visiting Canphon and researching the life, culture, and economic changes of the Kantu. Then Wiphat spoke, telling an amusing story about all the troubles we had encountered: the fears the village was taboo, the leeches, the poorly maintained path of the Wak side of the border, the slips, and the hornets. We presented the gifts we had brought with us. Canphon responded on behalf of the village by saying that they were happy but also unhappy that I had arrived: glad I’d made it but sorry that I had encountered so many problems on the way. He said that he had expected me in the sixth month; he’d cultivated an extra field in anticipation. He thought I might have been delayed, and thought I might come in the seventh, eighth, or ninth month. “I have only just stopped thinking that you might come!” he said. But then the night before our arrival he’d dreamed of Wiphat and me: in the dream, I’d given him coffee seeds, and he’d planted them. After his speech, he and I sat close, an arm and a leg touching, in that smoky, large, crowded room. Gesturing at the crowd, Canphon said to me buoyantly, “These are all my children or grandchildren.” In the morning, he eagerly asked what I had dreamed. I had only one fragment in my memory: some unidentified people in this house had offered me a chair to sit on, and I was not sitting alone. There were six chairs for us. The chairs were red plastic, and I had thought, “How did they get those chairs up here? Carry them?” Canphon asked me to repeat the dream a couple of times, then both he and Wiphat agreed that it was good: it was the jaaŋ daŋ (K: house spirits) welcoming me. We planned to stay for several nights. During that time, I interviewed each household on marriage and family life, historical change, the decision to return here in 2001, and the current situation of the village. Wiphat showed me a place above the village just outside the fence where fresh water was captured from a stream using bamboo pipes. It was a quiet, clean place to take a shower. The path there led past the giant fig tree standing over the village that Liliha had told me about. In a reflective mood, Wiphat said, “There is no one who remembers when this tree was first planted. My father and grandfather did not remember—it was here long before them. Maybe it is five hundred years old. Before 1964, this site was full. There were thirty houses in this village, and most of those with more than one hundred people each.”

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Vietnamese loggers had been operating in Old Kandon territory, but the villagers had seen little of the compensation promised to them. Despite Canphon’s avowed commitment to remaining in the old village site, a commitment he understood as required by kinuh and for the good of all the people in both Kandons, the government continued to pressure him and the others to move. This time the proposal was to join a Focal Village site a couple of days’ walk away. Focal Villages are notorious in Laos as a miserable option, with typically far too few productive fields for subsistence and yet few chances for good work.1 An alternative strategy being speculatively discussed while I was there was that of joining the new district capital then under construction: there would be better-than-average services and work opportunities there. But the new capital was a considerable distance from Old Kandon. Canphon’s preference was to stay on his ancestral lands; indeed, he maintained that this was a spiritual imperative. On our third day in Kandon, a school inspector arrived. He toured every village in the region once a month to keep track of the schoolteachers. Song was an ethnic Kantu man originally from this area whose bureaucratic career had led him to tertiary education in Vietnam. Now returned, he was energized by a passionate concern about the poverty he saw around him. He said that the government was trying to offer progress and development but that every initiative stumbled on the most basic problems, for instance, education. He was meant to inspect the schools to make sure the teachers were doing their jobs, not skipping out, as many are tempted to do. But the district chief provided no funding for his food or transport. He had to walk from village to village every month, eating whatever the locals offered him. He was concerned because some of these villages were themselves severely short of food. “They can’t feed themselves,” he exclaimed. “Their cheeks are thin from hunger.” How, then, could they feed him? The district chief, he said, responded by saying “Od ao” (L: Endure it). “But how can I endure having no food at all?” Song asked if he could join our party as we visited the remaining villages in the area. He had to make the circuit anyway, and it would be safer and more pleasant with a group. So our party swelled to six, recalling the six chairs of my dream. Each day, a new house would take its turn in hosting us with what I now understood was a luxurious meal of rice and meat. At one such meal toward the end of our visit, Wiphat made a long speech. He noted that this was his second visit since Canphon’s group had left New Kandon, the second visit in twelve years, and the reason he had not visited more often was that he was busy and poor, and it was not easy to come. But he considered this village and his own as the same village: “There is only one Kandon.” He advised them to carefully

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consider and fully investigate each resettlement option before making any move. He also said that the split in 2001 had not been anything other than a necessity: Canphon’s father and uncle had died, so he could not remain in New Kandon. Wiphat ended by reaffirming his sense of ekaphap (L: unity) and goodwill. A resident of Old Kandon followed Wiphat’s speech, acknowledging it but playfully noting that Wiphat had visited only twice—once with Dosi, and once with me. Perhaps he just wanted to accompany foreigners on tours? The joke raised some strained laughs but also some serious questions. Why did Wiphat so embrace these outsiders? And a more serious implication of that question: Had it been right for Wiphat to accept the outside suggestion by establishing New Kandon? Had Canphon been right to renounce this and go back to Old Kandon? And was there really only one Kandon, or were there two? We had stayed for four nights. I had already conducted interviews with each household, and we were concerned that we might be overstaying our welcome; maintaining us with such hospitality must be a strain, even if they were too gracious to let it show. We planned our departure for the next day. However, we were told that Kandon was preparing for the harvest festival, and they needed to clean the village. This entailed making the village taboo. No one was to leave village bounds, no one was to enter, and we were to ignore any outsider who approached. Our stay necessarily stretched to six nights, another interpretation of the six chairs of my dream. The day of taboo started slowly. Young people dug out prominent rocks and filled in erosion gullies to smooth out the central area of the village, sweeping it clean. The bamboo piping that delivered fresh spring water to the top of the village was repaired, and a new hollowed-out tree log was installed to distribute the water through multiple spouts. Though our stay was short by anthropological standards, I felt that I was beginning to get a sense of village life here: the houses in a circle, members of each intermarrying; the high fence clearly demarcating inside from outside, insiders from outsiders; the dusty intensity, even claustrophobia, of the village space as opposed to the wide vistas in the ridges and fields where people spent most of their time; the closely-tied cycles of monsoonal rains and ritual. Though Old Kandon was now much smaller than it had been in Wiphat’s youth, it felt cohesive and solidly—even defiantly—distinctive. A pig was killed in Canphon’s house to alert the household and village spirits that we would be leaving the next day, and to ask for their protection on our journey and for their enduring protection of the residents of the household. Usually, Canphon would gift a part of the pig to each household, but this time he invited everyone to his house for our parting feast that evening.

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It seemed as if almost everyone was assembled and sitting close in Canphon’s house, just as they had done on our first night. Women brought tobacco pipes from the kitchen in a constant stream. Canphon announced that although the village was taboo, he had sought special spiritual permission for us to have music and, if we liked, dancing and drinking. Duly, a khaen (L: traditional wind instrument), a bell, and a drum were produced. Men took turns singing improvised poetry or reciting classics while the rest of us clapped. Although Canphon’s party was enormous fun, I was asleep in the center of it by 8 p.m., exhausted from the effort of understanding so many new things and breathing the smoke-filled air. A mosquito net was strung around me. The hours slid by, and eventually it was Wiphat’s voice that woke me up; he was explaining to some older men how he made the best of what was on offer from the government for New Kandon. Some younger people were sitting in another part of the room, smoking and playing tunes on a mobile phone, but other than that the party was over. I could not get back to sleep; the talking, smoke, and music were grating. At last I decided to sit up for thirty minutes, then try going to sleep again. I busied myself fixing my flashlight—the bulb had blown but I thought I had a spare. The others asked if anything was wrong, and I mumbled that everything was fine, without joining their conversation. Eventually the guests drifted off, and Wiphat went to bed. I checked if there was any water to drink in the kitchen and then sat quietly fiddling with my flashlight. Sonxay woke up then, saw me sitting alone, and asked me if I was all right. Again, I said I was fine but did not elaborate. When my flashlight was working, I walked outside to the area where people defecated. I then washed my hands in the kitchen, crawled back under my mosquito net, and went back to sleep. All of this must sound unremarkable, and that is how it seemed to me, too. I only recount it here by way of background to the frenzied worry that it caused. In the morning Canphon and Wiphat said they both thought I was bewitched. Perhaps a young man had put a spell on me to draw me out of the house to him. Perhaps my mother and father wanted me back home and had called out to me. Perhaps it was like that time Sonxay heard of when a spirit directed a young woman to walk off into the forest: she returned after the village sponsored an eat buffalo event for her. Wiphat thought I was possessed by a ghost. My actions of sitting quietly, making a trip to the kitchen, stepping outside, coming back, and going to the kitchen again were all repeated back to me by Wiphat and Sonxay through the prism of such interpretations. I had spent very little time outside, perhaps five minutes at the most, but Wiphat said he was on the verge of grabbing Sonxay and sending out a search party. Sonxay said he was so worried about it that he could not sleep after I came back to bed.

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The morning was clear and sunny as we set out on the path that led past the ancient fig tree at the head of Old Kandon village and up the mountain into dense forest. Later, we passed fields of manioc, sugarcane, and rice: an amazingly varied landscape, so unlike the monotony of lowland rice and villages. Here it was great smashing waterfalls, clear streams with swinging bamboo bridges, climbs through forest opening onto vistas of high fields and gardens. We walked across one garden that had been cleared to grow coffee. In another, we passed people harvesting rice. I hailed them out of a politeness taught to me in my previous fieldwork with ethnic Lao; they did not reply, and my friendliness embarrassed my companions. These harvesters were clearly taboo for the first few days of their rice harvest. Their blank faces and unresponsive silence were eerie. But it was a pleasure to scamper down the slopes that morning through forest, field, and garden, to observe new scenery, and finally to arrive in Padrang’s beautiful valley with its magnificent waterfall. Padrang is an ethnic Kantu village, too, but it had always been distinct from Kandon. Located in a valley, previously it had wet rice fields that produced a rice surplus. These were destroyed in 2009 by Typhoon Ketsana. Vietnamese loggers and persistent talk of resettlement had arrived here, too, as had miners. That spectacular waterfall I had seen on my descent, I was told, was likely to be mined for gold in the coming years. After arriving, Wiphat, Song, Sonxay and I headed to another waterfall that had a hot-water spring. We waded upstream to where the waterfall formed a pool surrounded by rocks. Our guide picked his way along the rocks, almost scaling them. He stopped very close to the crashing water and indicated that a small pool just to the left was our destination. I told the boys to go ahead, I would just watch from a rock. Once I had become accustomed to the thunderous sound, spray, and tug of the water, I decided the current was not as strong as I feared. I began to pick my way around the rocks, finding the way less slippery and perilous than it had looked. When I reached the others, I found the hot-water spring extended up into a cleft in the rock. There was an upper pool and a lower pool. Song dared me to leave my foot in the lower pool and count to ten. I did so. It was about as warm as a bath that you slowly realize is slightly too hot for comfort. Wiphat began to splash me with the warm water. So did the others. It felt amazing to bathe again in warm water, and I was gleeful. It was time to go. Our guide picked his way along the rock wall so that he was yet closer to the waterfall, almost under its weight. He then dove off and swam with the current back the way we had come. I decided to trust his knowledge this time and followed, diving and then swimming. My friends cheered me along; I thought

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they were happy to see me throwing off my habitual caution. We waded back to a spot just above the confluence with the village drainage stream and stopped there to wash with soap and scrub our clothes. I felt divine, but I didn’t feel that I was doing anthropological research. I felt that I was wasting my time deliciously, free now of Old Kandon’s close boundedness, the taboo restrictions, and the constant work I had done there. My companions, I was to learn later, saw it differently, but I found this out only later. When we returned to Padrang, I started to conduct interviews. I learned that the road built by the mining prospectors cut straight through what should be the bounded, fenced village area. The villagers themselves could not use the road: the heavy tractors left deep grooves in the mud, making it impassable for buses or even motorcycles. Locals told me that they suspected some money must have been paid to the government for the gold they have found so far, but they have seen none of it. The village had put in a request to the company for fifteen million kiip to fund a ritual in the ceremonial hall at the center of the village. The company and its road were thought to have caused offense to the village spirit, and now the village languished in a state of phid baan (L: wrong to the village). There was an epidemic of illness. Many had already died, and many more were sick. The rice harvest was also poor that year. They were harvesting at the time I was there, but it would not be enough to last even one month. Visibly, the village was dusty and rundown, and strewn with pig, goat, cow, and buffalo feces. Later, when we were walking on the road again, Song told me of his dismay with the Vietnamese prospectors. He called them “thieves.” He explained that they had permission to prospect in a limited area, but they tell local people they have permission for the whole area and have approval to operate as they wish. The local people, he told me, are overwhelmingly illiterate, so they can’t verify the company’s story. The schoolteachers, generally outsiders stationed there temporarily, can read, but the Vietnamese company discourages their involvement by soliciting village leaders directly with gifts. On the night we arrived in Padrang, the mining company had provided seventy sacks of rice to the village in return for logs that they had taken from the forest, apparently undocumented. Song explained that the company needed only the silence from the village to have their complicity; if locals did not report on them, then nobody would, because the village was far from any direct government oversight. On finding out that our party included a government worker (Sonxay, the policeman), the Vietnamese company had invited him to drink with them on the night of our arrival and gave him 100,000 kiip. Sonxay used the money to pay the

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women who prepared pipes for our party all the next day. Song acknowledged that companies like that were one of the only paths to development for this area. He asked me, “What other prospects are there?” I didn’t have a solution to offer. He conceded that companies were one of the few avenues willing to invest in an area like this, but the development they offered, he said, was “not real development.” In interviews, locals told me that there was talk of resettlement here, too, in this case merging with a neighboring village. The government was offering an enhanced school and a health clinic there. But it is “complicated,” one man said. “We are already short of rice. We are eating just manioc. And now the thought of building new houses? Moving further away from our fields? We pay attention to our dreams to see what the spirit of the village wants us to do.” I spent the afternoon talking to local residents and slept soundly in the house of our host, but I could not shake the feeling that there was something wrong with this village. If Old Kandon felt tightly cohesive, sometimes to the point of claustrophobia, then Padrang felt rent open like a bleeding wound. Was this what people meant by phid baan?

The Conflict I was enthusiastic to leave in the morning. We were planning to head on to the next village so that I could complete more interviews before we slept for the night. It was only half an hour’s walk away. However, the schoolteachers of Padrang had called off school for the day so they could personally cook a feast for us. They had provided a pig. As they prepared it, tiny morsels emerged from the kitchen throughout the morning: barbequed fresh meat dipped in hot sauce, served with shots of rough rice whiskey. There were the smoking pipes, of course, and a round of sour fruit snacks. I declared myself out of the drinking circle after the second shot of rice whiskey, but Wiphat, Song, and Sonxay kept going. I roamed the village restlessly. Eventually I had an interesting conversation with a man claiming to have been born in 1913. A soldier for forty years, he had seen the war for independence against the French and the American war. As I sat and took notes about his life and recollections, I was completely and closely surrounded by people who wanted to watch how I wrote. The elderly ex-solider, Bunyaan, told me with pride how the Americans had tried to conquer Laos but had had to give up. Laos is just a little country, and the United States is large, but still. Laos has much that others want, he explained—wood, steel, gold.

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Weren’t they searching now for gold in those hills? But the Americans could not have Laos. I took a photo of him, making a note that here was a “winner” of the American war, declaring victory in his dust-stricken, desperate, sick, and exploited village. I knew as I wrote these words that they contained a mounting consternation. As I wrote, one of the boys who was porting for us, Mik, came to tell me to get my things—it was time to go. I jumped to my feet, eager to leave this place that had been making me feel so uneasy. No sooner had we rounded the corner than we saw Wiphat leaning out a window, vomiting. I said to Mik, “I feel sorry for him. He is old, small, and thin, and he gets drunk so easily.” Mik replied, “Why feel sorry for him? It was his decision to drink!” Back inside, I hurriedly turned over the blankets that we had slept in, looking for forgotten items. I found a few belonging to the others, but not my socks. Wiphat vomited a few more times, then asked for water. Sonxay was there, and I said, “We have to get Wiphat out of here. Let’s start walking and find somewhere to tend to him on the way.” Abandoning my socks, I made hurried farewells and led our bedraggled party on our way to the next village. I stopped at a bench a few yards outside the village to look in my bag for another pair of socks. When I turned around, I saw the local teacher offering yet more rice whiskey to Wiphat. Without thinking, I took the bottle from the teacher and said, “Enough already. Really, really, enough.” I said it slow and strong, looking him straight in the eye. This was no joke. I turned and put the bottle on the bench, and as I turned back I saw that Wiphat was holding a cup—and it was already full of liquor. I took it from his hand and poured it on the ground, saying, “I am afraid you will die if you drink more!” There was a shocked silence. All eyes were on me. Hands reached out to take my things. I said I wanted to carry at least my camera bag, but Sonxay had it and would not give it back. I walked on barehanded, feeling oddly naked. We came to a vine-and-bamboo bridge. It was narrow and wobbly, so we had to cross one by one. I crossed first and waited on the other side for Sonxay, still hoping to at least get my camera back. Wiphat followed Song over the bridge. He asked, “Are you still confident in me?” I said, “Yes I am. I only did that to care for you.” Sonxay and Song both said “Enough” and urged me to keep walking. I was confused: why didn’t they want Wiphat and me to have this conversation, to cool things down? Perhaps they thought Wiphat was too drunk for it to be of any consequence. I decided it was best to listen to Song and Sonxay in this case, so I walked on, but not before Wiphat squatted low, raising his hands to his forehead several times. He repeated one word as he did so: “idthiphon” (L:

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influence, power). Was he implying that I had some kind of power that he deferred to? Or was he mocking me, suggesting that my sense of my own power was inflated? By then I was shaking. Song and I walked ahead together while Sonxay hung back with Wiphat. Song explained that Wiphat had not seen many of the people in this area for a long time, some of them not since the operation on his harelip, so some did not recognize him. They wanted to make him welcome, so they served him alcohol. This added to my raging internal self-recrimination already underway. I had handled the situation poorly. I’d embarrassed him. I had been arrogant and high-handed. Moments before the incident I had said to the people near me, as I put on my shoes, “The children are adults and the adults are children today.” I chastised myself for making my own inversion: from the passive, nonintervening anthropologist into the do-gooder who assumes to know best. But this wasn’t just do-gooding; there was a practical concern. Wiphat was my guide in this area. My research here depended on his competence. And I really was worried about Wiphat’s health. Although I worried that saying something about it would damage my friendships and field relationships, and thus my fieldwork with the Kantu, I wasn’t sorry that I’d intervened. Wiphat caught up and told me that he was very sorry and was saddened by what I had done. I said I was sorry, but left it ambiguous as to whether I was sorry I’d acted or sorry he’d drunk so much. Song filled the awkward conversational space with his eternal wondering about how this area could ever be developed. “Look at these fields! For one family, that is maybe ten sacks of rice. That is not enough. Look at that rice. Is it beautiful? No! What can we do?” Wiphat pushed ahead of us with a jaunting, wobbling walk, uninterested. Finally, we arrived at the next village, Ahang. Not surprisingly, given the appearance of our party, we received a cautious reception. Most local residents were gone for the day, working in the fields. Wiphat fell asleep in the village chief ’s empty house. I walked through the village, taking in its magnificent views and finding a place to write field notes. The two porters, Sonxay, and I planned for the following day. We would first take the ugly Vietnamese mining road to the Focal Village I had heard so much about in Old Kandon, then push on via a footpath through the forest to Tamor. That left me only a few hours to find out about Ahang. What I heard, under these unconducive circumstances, was another story of phid baan. The manioc was tiny. The gardens and fields did not flourish. The animals were not thriving. There were no fish in the streams. For years residents there had been struggling with illness and epidemics. The village history recounted a

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number of previous moves conducted to ameliorate phid baan. But the misfortune of the village continued in the current site. One man told me, “We eat manioc and the bark from trees. We do not see a grain of rice.” Several years previously, the village had been involved in a resettlement program, and the bulk of the population had moved to a site not far from New Kandon. There was speculation that perhaps the abandoned houses and reduced population had incensed the village spirit, who then made the remaining residents ill. These residents had rebuilt the ceremonial hall earlier in the month that I visited. When they were finished, they all left the village and slept in the forest for one night, then came back in the morning “as if it were a new village.” They killed five buffalo, fourteen pigs, and fourteen chickens in the associated ritual. Each household furthermore performed rituals for the house spirits. It was still too soon to know if this measure had worked, I was told. It was hard, they said, to tell which spirits are angered, but since the ill fortune seemed to affect everyone, it seemed like phid baan. By next year it would be clearer. I asked one man why he and the few others remaining didn’t move to the government-sponsored resettlement village, too, and was told that if the spirits had wanted him to move, they would have made sure he’d had the money to relocate at the time.

“I Know You Have Something” The next day we continued our hike. As planned, we passed through the Focal Village that Old Kandon had been encouraged to join. It was a barren, dusty congregation of Lao-style houses raised on stilts under hot, corrugated metal roofs. The village was free of the livestock that had filled Old Kandon and Padrang. Instead, it was dotted with dilapidated “participatory development” signs. There was no fence marking the bounds of the village. Local residents were withdrawn and did not make any move to welcome us as we walked through. Tamor, when we finally arrived by way of a pleasant forest path, was noticeably more cohesive and welcoming than the Focal Village. It had been established in 1977, when the residents of old Tamor had “reconsolidated” to live together once again after the scattering caused by the war. As with every other village on our route, here too was talk of poverty, mining, logging, and impending resettlement. And here, too, were tales of how the land was animated. In the final village where we stopped, Taneung, I heard a story of the landscape’s revenge. Some

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mining prospectors had heard of an ancient mine in the area and went to investigate, even though locals told them about the spirit that appeared as a rat running in and out of the sheer rock. A prospector looked at the rock through a camera lens, took a photo, and died. This town was Song’s base, and we would leave him there. Sonxay would head back to the district capital after delivering the porters, and Wiphat and I would return to New Kandon. We started to make our farewells. Song asked Sonxay for those shoes that had showed such wonderful grip on the slippery slopes of the region. Sonxay obliged. Separately, both Song and Sonxay asked me for some of the “khuang” or “khong” (L: things) that they knew I must be carrying. Song had told me about the sorcerers that live in some of the outlying Katu villages, villages I did not visit on my trip but that Song regularly visited as school inspector. He said that they have khong (L: things) that they put in the food of victims, who die hours later from blood loss. Locals themselves are invulnerable to the “things” because they have other things to protect them. He said he is terrified when he goes to these villages, afraid to even eat the food. Song told me that he knew I had “things” as well. He claimed he could feel them around me. He was sure they were not the Lao Buddhist amulets I willingly showed him, gifts from my previous field site. He could sense that the really powerful things I had were from my own country. I swore I had no protective amulets other than those gifted to me in Laos, but he did not believe me. The conversation petered away there; Song would tell me no more. The next morning Sonxay and I were alone for a moment between two interviews. He said with great seriousness, “Holly, I want to ask you to help me. When you go back to your country, can you send me some things?” “What things?” I asked. His own father, he said, had passed on to him some red soap originally obtained from a Frenchman that protected from attacks. Could I send him some? He wanted things to pong kan too (L: protect his body). I responded by saying that I purchased my soap in Vientiane. I purchased my insect spray in Pakse. I could give him mine before I left, but they were just ordinary things and easily obtainable in a city. Again, the conversation died away. The next day I was given another chance. Sonxay came to join me on the veranda, where I was writing field notes. He lowered his voice so that only he and I could hear and said again, “Please do try to find those things I asked you for.” He explained more about his father, who he said was a servant for the French. They gave him a substance that had the consistency of wax. It was like soap. You could apply it to your skin or clothes, but his father just wore it around his neck in a small amulet. His father had given this charm to Sonxay, but it was stolen when Sonxay removed it before taking a shower once. “Now

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I have nothing at all to protect my body.” He said then that he knew I must have similar things to protect me because when we went to the waterfall I had been able to stay in the hot water without discomfort. He had been at the hot spring with me, but that night he did not dream. Usually after going to such a spiritually powerful place he would dream of bad things—perhaps of a tiger or a snake. But with me, I sat in the hot water perfectly comfortably, and the rest of the party was fine afterward as well. We all slept peacefully. I was surprised at his assessment, because my recollections of the hot waterfall were that I had lost my shoe twice, screamed at the leeches, and was content at first to let the men go ahead as I sat and watched. But now I found that despite this somewhat cowardly showing, what had really impressed my friends was my tolerance for hot water. Song had commented several times in the ensuing days how remarkable it was that the hot water did not hurt me. I had thought he was only making small talk until Sonxay connected the dots for me. Sonxay explained, “I travel a lot because I am a policeman. I am always afraid. I am afraid the people I meet will hate me.” He reminded me again of how in Padrang he had given the money the mining company had given him to the women who lit the pipes for us, and how he always good-naturedly joined the drinking circles when they appeared to welcome us. He told me that he was hurt when I had teased him about flirting with the young women who had carried our bags from Tamor to the next village—he was not flirting. Rather, he was just being friendly to everyone. He was even overtly friendly to the Vietnamese prospectors, even if he criticized them in private. He said it was important not to be hated, for one never knew who had harmful things. I reflected that perhaps my outburst at Wiphat had also been a confirmation that I had a supreme confidence that could be explained only by possession of such things. I had acted outside the frame of enduring good-naturedness and the veneer of friendship, as if it didn’t matter a jot to me if I broke this conviviality to assert my own wishes. I had thrown caution to the wind, not caring if Wiphat or anyone else resented me; I had acted with a sense of invulnerability. Was this what Wiphat meant when he had knelt and said “idthiphon” (L: influence, power) over and over? Sonxay had protected me by getting me safely to Old Kandon on that first, treacherous day of hiking. Now, he wanted something from me that he thought would protect him. I was profoundly disappointed that I could not give him what he wanted. I wanted to show my gratitude to him with a parting gift, but this was beyond my capabilities. By this time, I had learned that protesting that I had none of these things was unhelpful; it would not convince and might,

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to the contrary, suggest a devious selfishness on my part. Instead I said that I was not sure what he was talking about, but that if he explained them clearly to me I would ask my mother back in Australia—perhaps she had provided something to me without my knowing. He gratefully agreed, offering in return a sumptuous meal and a skirt hand-woven by his wife if I ever came to the district capital again.

Back in New Kandon Sonxay was careful to insist on and maintain secrecy around our conversations about these “things,” but it seemed that nonetheless the story was spreading. When Wiphat, Sonxay, the porters, and I finally arrived home in New Kandon, a great mass assembled in Wiphat’s house to watch on my computer a display of the photographs I had taken in the mountains and hear the stories of our adventures. In the relaxed conversation that followed, the father of one of the porters, Malo, asked me for what he called cud falang. He said he did not know anyone who had any, but that “some people say that falang (L: foreigners, French people) have no shortage of it.” As soon as the topic was raised, Sonxay said cryptically, “Do keep in mind that stuff that I asked you for: don’t forget it.” When the others asked him what he was referring to, he said he just wanted a book that translates Lao into English, and laughed nervously. He quickly gave himself away, however, by taking part with relish in the conversation that followed about protective “things.” He repeated his claim that his father had given him some sabuu luet (L: blood soap) that he had obtained when serving French soldiers, but that it had been stolen. Malo affirmed that the only people who could get “things” like these were people who had a relationship with falang. He told me that the Japanese had none of these “things.” The local soldiers who fought for the French side, however, were given protective items. The cud falang was a small stone. When soaked in water, the water could be drunk by multiple people to protect them against poisoned, contaminated, or rotten food. It also protected from attacks by witches, sorcerers, and dangerous forest spirits. It was considered the best cure for sorcery. Sonxay said that he thought that cud falang was the same thing as the sabuu leut that his father had given him, but the others thought that sabuu varieties differed from the cud varieties. Sabuu leut ensured that a flesh wound, for instance, from a bullet or a knife, would heal itself without significant blood loss. Sabuu tang, by contrast, ensures that bullets, knives, and

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tiger claws won’t be able to pierce your skin in the first place. Cud falang, by contrast again, was protection against things that you ingested or spiritual attacks. Malo said he only wanted the cud falang from me. He said he did not care for the sabuu because he was not a soldier so had little fear of direct physical attacks. But Sonxay pointed to himself and said, “But I am. I do soldiering: I know about this.” Several times in this conversation Sonxay asked Malo to keep his voice down, and when I finally asked why, he said that he was afraid the people sitting outside would hear us—outside was a small meeting about the New Kandon school. Malo was not deterred by this, however, and in general seemed less hemmed in by secrecy than Sonxay. He also seemed less hopeful that I would give him anything, and more convinced that as a falang I would simply lie and continue to pretend that I had none of these items, even though it was common knowledge that all falang had them. At the end of our conversation Malo shifted to saying how poor he was, and how if he knew me better he’d ask me to help him more. I didn’t know what to say—I asked lots of questions because I wanted to know more, but at the same time I knew that by doing so I was committing myself to disappointing him and the others; after all, how could I in good faith give them a waxy item or stone claiming that it would protect them? In desperation, I asked them how Dosi, the other anthropologist, handled such requests—Malo told me that Dosi had said he had only a little that he had purchased for himself, and not enough to share out to others. Feebly, I said that all I had were the amulets and items given to me in my previous field site by Buddhists. Malo said that they were just hak saa thammadaa (L: ordinary protections) and did not have the power of cud falang. His disappointment was clear, but he also seemed resigned, as if to say, aren’t falang always this way? As the walk through the mountains unfolded, I had begun to fancy that I could feel the spiritual powers of the places we visited: the closed in and close feeling of taboo; the rent-open and desperate feeling of phid baan; the vigor, impressiveness, and awe of spiritually powerful waterfalls, rocks, and trees; and the cryptic messages delivered in dreams. But my friends’ ultimate conclusion—that I was carrying something that could protect me from the dangers we were all facing—could be interpreted as a recognition, in their own idiom, of the limits of my ability to truly enter into their world. They saw that, as interested as I was in learning about the spirits of the landscape and the dangers of bewitchment and sorcery, I was never truly afraid of these things. And their subjective, insider experience of these things was a very real fear. By contrast, my intrigued investigation of these and my disregard for

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normal caution and conviviality must have seemed like a breezy sense of invulnerability. I actually sought out new people and remote villages. I was interested in seeing outstanding features like the hot spring. I happily ate the food offered to me by strangers but then withdrew from drinking circles at will. I dismissed the fears that I had been bewitched in Kandon that night as carelessly as I had rested in a hot spring and even enjoyed it. When I grabbed the alcohol from Wiphat’s hand, I showed a distinct lack of conventional conviviality, as if I unflappably did not care if he or anyone else slighted by that act might ensorcell or bewitch me in revenge. My differences in this regard were interpreted in terms of something I had, rather than something I was. And this was perceived as an ethnic or racial possession—falang is the word for “French,” and is used to refer to white people generally (Pattana 2010).2 These were things the French and people like the French had. It would be erroneous to interpret such notions as exotic local beliefs. In fact, certain French colonialists deliberately propagated such ideas in the highlands. Gerald Hickey, for instance, recounts the bizarre story of Mayrena, who claimed that he had magic powers residing in his music box (1982, 229), a second Frenchman who claimed that his compass was a magic talisman (241), and a third Frenchman who claimed that he harboured a powerful spirit in his stomach (244). Jean Le Pichon, in his pamphlet on the Katu, states plainly that he sought to convince his informant, Go, that Le Pichon himself was cursed (1939, 36). After Go’s death, Le Pichon lied to Go’s relatives, telling them that he had had a dream visitation from Go describing his wishes for his funeral (36). All of these accounts strike the contemporary reader as unethical manipulations. How far these deceptions were believed by locals, or whether they were merely politely tolerated, is unclear from the texts. What is clear is that French colonists employed what anthropologists call “mimesis”: that is, rather than simply imposing French forms of administration and control, they also mimicked and attempted to appropriate local forms of power, including occult power. What marks this mimicry as mimesis is the excess and borderline absurdity of it all, as well as the embodiment in the colonialists of the violent barbarity they ascribed to the savage other.3 By contrast with these examples, I never claimed to possess the items my interlocutors suspected that I had. The very fact that I claimed ignorance of these objects and that they were not visually obvious seemingly only added to the potency my friends ascribed to them. In Hickey’s account of potent and protective objects in the central highlands of Vietnam, he notes that the power of potent objects is that they remain hidden and unused: they are “the symbol of a power that is not exercised” (Hickey 1982, 135). My encounter

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with the spirit of the hot-water spring, then, could be understood as a sign of my power even if—especially if—I made no claim to it. The holder does not need to deliberately use or claim his or her power because “being thought to have such objects . . . at one’s disposal is just as politically advantageous as actually having or making serious use of them” (Anderson 1990, 27; emphasis in original).4 Concomitantly, an intentional claim to power or a deliberate grasping after it might mean its loss; my incredulous denials in this case only confirmed their suspicions. My testimony was not the best indicator of what I actually had. What counted here were events, and the way others could read these as signs. Persons were understood here as differentiated by the things they possessed. The Kantu have long cultivated a reputation for themselves as notable, especially in terms of the things they possessed. In the past it was the lakam drums and the other village valuables that were said to protect the village from US bombardment. Today, they possess a plethora of certificates, medals, and flags. Further into the hills were the possessors of poisons and other dangers to the unwary. Notably, witchcraft and sorcery are understood as substances possessed. Cud falang, also a possession, was the best defense against these. These things, moreover, were understood to be transferable and effective across differences of space, language, and belief. The drums were stolen, poisons could be slipped to an unwary guest, the French left wondrous substances with the people and places they came into contact with, and I could give some of my falang protective devices to my new friends, should I so wish. The problem as they saw it was that I simply did not want to. I was feigning ignorance to avoid sharing. My inability to hand over this substance was viewed by them as a selfish failure of friendship on my part at worst, or ignorance of my own privileged possession at best. Like many outsiders before me, I was enthralled by the Kantu, but not for the reasons they put forward. It wasn’t the possession of a drum, another valuable, or any of their certificates. It was the passion with which they spoke of spirits and ancestor ghosts. It was the cohesiveness of their village, despite innumerable family dramas and a horrific war. It was the way the trade in weavings and buffalo ramified through economy, family, ritual, and illness. These captured my imagination. These could be considered possessions, I suppose, but intangible ones, the kind often understood as “culture,” “beliefs,” or “worldviews.” My own cultural background and disciplinary training predisposed me to represent the differences between us in this way. For my companions on the hike, however, our differences were in this case explained in terms of potent things possessed.

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My combination of curiosity and fearlessness was, for my new friends, a confirmation of my outsider status. Perhaps anthropology is always a sort of outsider art or science. Perhaps the common disciplinary emotional experience of wonder and pleasure in encountering difference is a symptom of this particular way of being with others but always being on the outside.5 Prosocial abilities “to read and share the feelings or concerns of others” (Hrdy 2009, 11) has been touted as the key element that defines the distinctiveness of humans as a species. Ethnographers have been using and discussing these capacities as a field technique for understanding humans for over a century (in the form of participant observation, immersion, and intersubjectivity). One of their main findings of this effort has been difference and diversity. That is, the human abilities of “reading and sharing the feelings or concerns of others” often result in experiences like mine, where it becomes all too apparent how little has actually been shared, perhaps how little could be, and how commonly our assumed mutual understandings are actually misreadings. My friends could tell me, but not convince me, of their convictions about me and the supernatural world. And I, for my part, could show an interest in, but could not actually share, the “things” they thought I had; my hands were empty. Reflecting on this, Kasun’s prediction, “You will reach the Katu,” using the exonym Katu rather that the local Kandon ethnonym Kantu, took on a new significance: I had indeed come to know my companions better, and reached them in that sense. But it had always been from this outsider’s perspective. I could not share their subjective experience—empathy in that sense was beyond my abilities in this case. But I maintain this was productive for me in terms of my aim to gain anthropological knowledge. The careful tutoring that I received on the various protective devices thought to be held by people like me was prompted by a mutual recognition of our very different subjective experiences. Jessica Benjamin has insisted that mutual recognition can take place only when difference is accepted.6 Benjamin understood the acceptance of difference as underlying not only successful infantile development but also all subsequent relationships; an object acknowledged as different from the self is an object to love. For the infant, the realization of indissoluble difference between self and the (M)other is experienced at first as a loss, but the compensation is that, in the intermediate space between two distinct subjects, the “catching and throwing” of genuine interaction can take place (Benjamin 1998, 29). Benjamin extends this to societal questions about how to relate to others without assimilation (94). For Benjamin, this requires first acknowledging that the other is an other, with their own inner life that is not subsumed by the subject.

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It requires relinquishing various forms of projections that reduce the other to an element of one’s own fears or fantasies. Anthropology has a disciplinary commandment: to see things “from the Native’s point of view” (Malinowski [1922] 2002: 19). What my hike taught me was that this method works as much by its failure as success. It can be the failure to share experiences and perspectives that allows the apprehension of a different point of view. Failure to share a perspective allows us to grasp just where the differences lie. Put another way, what an anthropologist gives in such situations in the field is her lack, in the sense of her ignorance and lack of understanding, and also the sense of the simultaneous importance yet impossibility of our disciplinary commandment. I believe I will always be ignorant of what it is truly like to be Kantu, to truly share their point of view, but in the face of this ignorance my companions filled my hands with nuggets of a different kind of understanding.

9 Conclusion The Problem with Projects A year down the track, on the last visit before I had my first son, Wiphat, one of his wives, and my husband and I went to Luang Prabang. Wiphat had been invited to demonstrate Kantu culture as part of an exhibition opening at a museum, and I had been invited to give a talk about the Kantu. My talk was mainly attended by foreigners, and I spoke about the village’s Culture Village status (chapter 3). In the question-and-answer session afterward, an audience member asked if it was the Culture Village policies that were responsible for eroding Kantu traditions. I replied that my own study and the museum’s exhibition—the very setting that we were in as we spoke that day—were themselves part of the very changes under discussion. A whole series of very broad forces were at play in culture change in Kandon, not just Culture Village policies. The very fact that my own research had been possible was an indicator of the depth of these changes: previous to socialist cadre infiltrating the highlands, outsiders had not even been permitted to stay in the village. I was trying to put the museum patrons into the same frame as the people they were there to learn about. But this did not seem a satisfactory answer to anyone. Representatives from many ethnic groups had been invited for the exhibition opening, and the museum made an effort to entertain them during the visit to Luang Prabang. The day after my talk, the group visited some waterfalls, a popular tourist attraction. As we walked through the forest around the waterfall, I was thinking about this desire I’d felt from the people who listened to my talk at the museum: the desire to see the true, undisturbed Kantu culture, to see—as it were—through the realities of the present into the past, and without having one’s own seeing self as part of the picture. As if they wanted to peer at the Kantu through one-way glass, I thought. Was this a desire to see without being seen? Just like the Kantu ancestor ghosts, who see the living but can’t be seen. The path through the forest opened out and onto a fenced area around a

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concrete cave. A sign read “Free the bears” and offered educational material about a threatened bear species. Inside the enclosure were bears that had been rescued from even worse cages.1 They seemed bored and listless, moving from one sleeping position to the next. I felt a sense of loss as I watched the bears— shouldn’t there be a way for them to be free in their forest? It seemed a tooperfect way for me to raise my thoughts with Wiphat. Looking at these bears, their habitat destroyed, and now penned up for people to come and look at: did he feel for their loss, too? Wiphat replied he could see why I might feel sorry for the bears, and perhaps part of him felt sorry for them, too, but mostly he thought what a comfortable life they must have, with people to find food for them all the time. He used to see this kind of bear wild in the forest, and they were always looking for food, always hungry. These seemed to be living a comfortable life, and all they wanted to do was sleep. He turned to reminiscences about what a prodigious hunter he had been in the past, and how many bears he had killed. I was tired because of my pregnancy, and I kept walking. There were signs along the path identifying trees and admonishing us not to litter or pick things from the forest to eat. This was a remnant of forest kept now to educate and inform, a forest self-consciously presented as such. I recognized that I’d fallen into the pattern of “just keep walking” that I had adopted during our hike into the mountains when my knees hurt so much I thought I could not go on but had kept walking anyway. The voice of one of the museum staff interrupted my reverie; he was calling me back because the path further up was not safe in the wet season. Wiphat pressed on up that path. I sat in the shade by the waterfall and watched the spectacle as more and more people arrived and attempted the path, most unsuccessfully. Wiphat emerged half an hour later on the other side of the waterfall, alone. He said all the others had had to turn back. The path was as difficult as the one we had taken in the mountains, he said. Wiphat seemed to take pride in the fact that he was the only one who made it. His suit was spotless despite the mud: he paused on a rock by the waterfall with his faux-leather business shoes in one hand, safe from the mud, and his suit trousers rolled up around his ankles. I felt proud of him, too. It was soon time for me to go back to Australia. Wiphat knew, probably better than I did, that it would be a long time before I could come again. He had fathered nineteen children, but I was only on my way to my first. Kasun, the fortune-teller in New Kandon, had predicted that once I started a family I would never return to Laos. I’d scoffed at that prediction. Wiphat offered as parting words, “Even when we are far apart, although we cannot see each other, our hearts can still touch.” No doubt it was a formula he had learned in his

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studies of Lao socialist etiquette, but it was still a touching one. As we said our farewells, my husband expressed an interest in going to the mountains with Wiphat one day, and Wiphat agreed, inviting us back as guests to New Kandon as well. He speculated that his house on the fishpond might be finished by then, and we could stay there. We smiled and said our last farewells. I gave him an envelope with some cash, as I had many times before: a small token of thanks. Wiphat’s insistence on ending on a bright note is his answer to the question put to me in my talk, and which I also put to Wiphat in a roundabout way, about change and loss. Looking at it one way, Wiphat asserted an understanding of change in positive terms. There was no going back, Wiphat seemed to say of the bears, so best to savor all the positives of change. Optimistically, he was looking forward to building that house by the fishpond. This temporality put me in mind of Mircea Eliade’s notion that socialism reinvests meanings in “historical time.” “Historical time” is the temporality of modernity, where things happen not because of the spirits or God or the ancestors but simply because events follow upon each other one after the other (Eliade 1974, 95). The anxiety of the historical understanding of time, Eliade notes, is that suffering becomes meaningless and people understand themselves as powerless. He argues that socialism offers a reinvestment of meaning into historical time. In socialist sentiment, the Golden Age is reinstalled not as a lost past but is imagined in a future. Eliade understood socialism as a defense against history, that is, against the meaninglessness of events. Instead, in socialism, events “exhibit a coherent structure and, above all, they lead to a definite end” (149). In this view, the evils of the current day are necessary because they are all steps along the road to “the approaching victory that will put an end forever to all historical ‘evil’ ” (149). When Wiphat spoke about Kandon’s resettlement, about how he had led his people out of the mountains and into Tok Lok, he emphasized positive change even to the point of leaving out the significant epidemic that occurred soon after the resettlement. He could be drawn to talk about the epidemic, but at first only in the framework Eliade suggests above, in which the sufferings of the present are only steps toward a more glorious future. The longer I knew Wiphat, however, the more I saw that he also had a nonhistorical sense of time. Eliade identifies the “Eternal Return” as a temporality that dwells on repetition and archetypal acts (1974, 86). Much like James C. Scott’s (1976) moral peasants, this understanding of time focuses on a restoration of a past perfection, what Eliade calls a Golden Age or “mythical memories of a paradise” that are progressively lost due to human error. Man

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here is “fallen man,” seeking always to restore and return to a perfect past through ritual, sacrifice, and restoration. Suffering is due to a failure to reproduce archetypes—either through personal fault or the malevolence of another (human or spiritual)—and is a deviation from the norm. This was strongly evident in Canphon’s self-presentation of his decampment from Tok Lok and return to Old Kandon as an attempt to restore a past. It was also a feature of a remarkable set of myths told in both Kandons about the period after the flood. Originally, the children of Grandmother Mek and Grandfather Dog lived in a kind of paradise: hoes and machetes took themselves to the fields, worked there, and then took themselves home. The rice would harvest itself by following a string tied from a rice stalk to the granary door. People needed only one small insect wing full of rice at each meal to be satisfied. People died from the smallest leech or insect bite, but they could be brought back to life just by being buried for three nights in the trunk of a soft-fibered tree and then washed in a stream. The imagery used here suggests this idyllic condition was delicate: it was all insect wings, strings, and soft-­ fibered trees. It was lost because of coarse behavior. Some people were too lazy to call in their tools from working in the swidden, and so they sent their dog instead. The tools were shocked at the dog’s barking and fell to the ground, never to rise again. When the rice was making its way along a string to the granary one day, a young woman was meant to have swept out the granary in preparation but was threading beads on a necklace instead. An old woman, angered, shook the string while reprimanding the young woman. The rice was so frightened it fell off, never to rise again. The two women fought again when the elder told the younger to cook some rice. After a series of (humorously related) misunderstandings, the elder yelled, “Just make a pot of rice!” Flustered, the young woman cooked a huge pot of rice instead of an insect-wing full. The whole village could not eat it all, and ever since people have needed to eat a lot of rice to be satisfied. Finally, a man was washing his grandson back to life. His grandson was very careless and often died. Frustrated, the grandfather said, “So many times I have had to wash you back to life! Just die!” The grandson did not come back to life, and neither did anyone else from then on. But at the same time, people stopped dying from leech and insect bites. People became less delicate, but had to work much harder. According to this set of myths, much of the suffering known today—work, hunger, and even death—was introduced to the world through a series of mistakes, the consequences of which could not have been predicted by the protagonists. This sets the tone for Kandon ritual today: the most important rituals are the ones brought on by mistakes made in daily life, such as affronts

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to various kimoc or jaaŋ (chapter 5). Usually it is only retrospectively that people realize the mistake and its gravity. Rituals seek to make amends, to restore things, most archetypally through eat buffalo events. I came to see that Wiphat shared this temporality of return and repair, and not only in his enthusiasm for the efficacy of eat buffalo events. In Wiphat’s compulsive interest in going to the mountains and repeating elements of his past there is a clue to the urge, still strong in him, to make a return. Eliade saw historical time and eternal return as different, even contrasting, temporal orientations because one points toward a glorious future while the other is always trying to restore a lost, authoritative past. What I saw in Kandon, however, is that these orientations often implied one another. Wiphat was caught between two Golden Ages: one in the past, lost forever but not forgotten, the other in the future, just out of reach. He hung somewhere in the middle, sometimes radiant about the progress he and the village had been able to make, sometimes raging and drunk. I wondered how much the burden of leading his people through such a dramatic change had contributed to his alcoholism. I first saw the extent of Wiphat’s problem with alcohol during his descent into drunkenness on our hike into the mountains. Song insisted that this particular bout of drinking was only the result of a desire to celebrate with old friends. But even when we returned to New Kandon after the hike, his drinking continued. He was wasting away and was thinner than I had ever seen him. When it was time for me to return to Australia weeks after that trip, Wiphat had still not sobered up. He was visibly improved when I returned a few months later, but thereafter he would regularly lapse into drinking binges even when I was there. After we said our farewells in Luang Prabang in 2013, a Kandon woman called me later that night. She told me her husband had taken the money I’d given them on farewell and gone out drinking in Luang Prabang. She was worried about what he would do when he came back to their hotel room; he was violent to her when he was drunk. Regrettably, this was not an isolated event. Two other women in New Kandon confided detailed stories about ongoing and repeated violence from their husbands, and I had heard other stories secondhand. There are no statistics on Kandon in particular, but a national survey found that 11.6 percent of women in Laos who had ever had an intimate partner had experienced intimate partner violence (NCAW 2015, 4). There is some evidence that increased domestic violence is associated with resettlement in Laos (Hill et al. 2017). For years I hesitated to write anything about drinking or gender violence in Kandon. By the time I found out about the violence, I was already friends with some of the worst perpetrators. One of them calls me “little sister.” Sometimes it seemed easier to write nothing about these troubling events because

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of the way these feed into existing prejudices in Laos against ethnic minorities as uncouth. So at first I left the drinking and the violence out of this book. As I wrote and rewrote it, however, I came to question whether by leaving out these elements I was contributing to the conspiracy of silence about the violence to women in general, not just in Laos but also in my own society. Gender violence appears to be a universal, but it is always linked to larger patterns of social inequality, power, and meaning (Merry 2008). My book deals with cultural change in Kandon. One of the major changes has been the availability of alcohol. Previously, people told me, alcohol was available only at festivals. It was home-brewed and served in the jars that form part of bride-price. In New Kandon, alcohol is available any day of the year. It is the potent lao lao (rice whiskey), often poorly distilled. I worried that Wiphat’s deteriorating eyesight was due to drinking it. I tried writing about the drinking and its toll while taking out personal stories, but this seemed even more pathologizing of the Kantu; it made it sound like this was a general problem in the entire village, whereas what I saw was quite specific. Wiphat was responsible for Kandon’s resettlement out of the mountains, the fate of roughly one thousand lives. Most of the time, Wiphat took the success of the village as his own personal success and derived satisfaction from reflecting on its various glories and achievements. But resettlement had not come without its costs: the epidemic in the early years, trouble with the water supply, and less land than expected (chapter 2). On our trip to the mountains, I also witnessed his nostalgia, for instance, for the old fig tree, the long houses, and life as it had been in Old Kandon (chapter 8). A sense of loss must have been part of his emotional orientation toward resettlement, even if he did not dwell on it in his public performances. Perhaps his loss found expression in other ways. His wife told me that it was under the cover of hosting visitors—as he does almost daily in his role as chief mediator with the outside world for New Kandon—that he obtained alcohol and found the excuse to drink. I remembered the very first day I’d met him, when I turned up with Khancay and a guide from the museum: he invited us up for a shot of rice whiskey. Was drinking his response to the unspeakability of his sense of loss in such contexts? Certainly, our trip to the mountains brought his drinking to a head, and I noticed that other times when he was asked to “perform” Kantu identity also tended to be times he would drink; the trip to Luang Prabang museum was one such example. Wiphat’s power and influence also contributed to the continuance of this destructive situation. He borrowed money in the village to buy alcohol, and many people were afraid to ask him to repay it. No one seemed brave enough to challenge him on his behavior, even when his wife—a close relative of many

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in the village—spoke openly of her distress at his behavior, even to me. There seemed to be a destructive complementarity between his role as a village leader and his drinking. His leadership role contributed to the emotional strain that led him to drink, and his leadership role also gave him opportunities (indeed, drinking on these occasions could be seen as a requirement) to have a “solidarity” drink with visitors and officials, which perpetuated his drinking and often led to a binge that could last several days. The concept of culture as a deliberate cultivation of the best of the old and the new has implanted a legitimized place for critique and the constant striving for self-improvement in Laos, and it is keenly expressed by people like Wiphat. I think this is what motivated Wiphat’s insistence that, in my representations of Kandon, I tell the whole truth. I think it might also have been part of the reason women reported domestic violence to me so frankly: it was not presented to me as a culturally sanctioned part of life as usual but as a scandal that ought to be challenged, although these women did not seem to think there was any authority they could appeal to for help. If my observations about alcohol and domestic violence point to flaws in New Kandon’s social fabric, then this is not an observation that comes entirely from outside the social milieu of that village. The scenario reminded me of George Devereux, who in his fieldwork with the Sedang in French colonial upland Vietnam, noted that it was only when he voiced his own discomfort at some of the more brutal aspects of Sedang “culture” that he learned that many Sedang agreed with him.2 Devereux gave this and other examples as a warning against cultural relativism; relativism, he argued, was an emotional defense against the anxi­ eties provoked by fieldwork, one of these being the anxieties of witnessing cruelty, including self-destructive behavior. He argued that hiding behind a relativist position in such cases came at the cost of the kind of learning that was made possible through true dialogue. The Kandon woman had called me because she was afraid, because she thought her husband’s violence was wrong and because she wanted me to know. Her perspective, and that of other women who reported experiences like this in New Kandon, is likewise shaped by a decades-long immersion in socialist ideology, part of which teaches the importance of gender equality, unity, and solidarity. When Malo interpreted the carvings in the community hall for me, he said that the intertwined snakes represented village endogamy in the past, and he used the words “unity” and “solidarity” to describe this. This was the ideal of how men and women—and through them, whole families—could be united. He imagined this unity as lost, and he was very involved with the oath that was motivated by the attempt to restore a new sense of unity. New Kandon

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was depicted in performances of “village history” as a triumph partly because it was a reunification of a village that had been disrupted by the war, when people lived either scattered in the forest or in refugee villages, or they traveled with the military. The creation of New Kandon was a chance for the members of this newly reunited village to make a new future for themselves together. Even when the returnees decamped to Old Kandon, people there and in New Kandon still insisted, “Really, there is only one Kandon.” Unity was a core value for the village’s vision of how it ought to be. But the pursuit of this value was made in a context where internal divisions, antipathies, and dangers even from one’s closest kin were experienced as very real. In chapter 5, I discussed the perceived threats of sorcerers, witches, and thieves in terms of “living with the enemy”: all of these are seen as threats quite possibly from one’s neighbors and relatives. I came to see violence against women in this light, as part of a theme in Kandon whereby some of the people most dangerous to you are among the people closest to you. Although people valued and pursued unity, unity was often present as an absence: it was that which was left to be desired. The value put on unity also suggested a coexistence of multiple temporalities. It leaned on yearnings for a lost past. It was washed away by “history,” in Eliade’s sense of a march of events largely out of the control of the village. But it was also a future-oriented concept, drawing on the socialist vision of how the coming Golden Age could be achieved. If people in Kandon want unity, how different is that from my desire to see less violence against women? Just as I had tried to say, in a roundabout way, in my museum talk that I am not outside the frame of what is under discussion here, in the case of gendered violence, the deep concern I felt for these women seemed to be congruent with socialist ideals. My concern with domestic violence was not provoked by a nostalgic desire to imagine what the Kantu had been before socialism had been propagated in Kandon, but by a bothered sense that these ideals had not been translated into reality. At the heart of my ethnographic project on the particularities of Kandon, then, I encountered a kernel of a more universalizing tendency. I found myself wishing for Kandon a condition that all women ought to share: being safe in their own homes. My concern with domestic violence in Kandon was uncomfortably close to the kind of sentiment that was driving the Culture Village policies (chapter 3) and early socialist “revolutionizing missionaries” (chapter 2), and hinted that at heart I do share some aspects of that evolutionist concept of culture. My work in Kandon has taught me that the evolutionary and relativist approaches to culture and its study can be experienced as being at odds with one another (chapter 3), and can even be experienced as morally repugnant when viewed

Conclusion : 199

from the vantage of the other (chapter 4), but they are also linked, so that one leads to the other (chapter 2). The movement between them is not linear but cyclical, a kind of anthropologist’s Eternal Return. This recalled for me the question I’d posed in chapter 3: what would it take to imagine Lao socialist thinking not as part of our collective past but as a possible future? There is a tendency in anthropology to deny coevalness with our subjects of study, to project onto the practices of the Other an imagination of our own collective past, and to implicitly place ourselves as the Other’s collective future (Fabian 1983). Johannes Fabian’s observation here applies aptly to the study of socialism. As Michał Murawski notes, “There is more than a hint of Cold War triumphalist Schadenfreude, or of Fehlerfreude, in continuing to revel in . . . socialism’s dilapidations and disintegrations” (2018, 910). In the context of Laos, this is all the more disturbing given the current situation of land grabs, authoritarianism, allegations of corruption, and rising inequality in that country. Lao socialism provides a wealth of potentially counter­ hegemonic concepts—such as solidarity, equality, democracy, equal rights, gender equity, subjecting oneself and one’s cherished ideas to criticism, and reflection in the pursuit of the best of the old and the new—that could be wielded against these real and present threats. Yet, despite this, foreign scholarship has tended to dismiss socialism as a slightly ridiculous part of Laos’ past, even in cases where that same scholarship uses Marxist concepts to criticize, say, frontier capitalism in Laos. Rather than being consigned (wrongly) to the past, socialism could be viewed as a live concern in Laos and as one of Laos’ greatest assets in facing the problems of today and of the future. It could even be treated as a field where we—anthropologists and other foreign observers of Laos—stand to learn something about our own practice and beliefs through genuine dialogue. This kind of dialogue can open up only if we start from an admission of coevalness (Fabian 1983, 42). Where my disciplinary sensibilities differ from those promoted in Lao socialism is not in terms of its ideals. Solidarity and gender equality are wonderful goals. Where I differ is in how these can be achieved. Lao socialism remains a vanguard project. There is no end in sight envisioned for the leadership of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP). Vanguard projects are another form of denying true dialogue between contemporaries. And, as Michael Walzer recognized, vanguard projects tend to produce an elite who feel justified in using terror to protect their ideology. Joining the revolution means learning this ideology, and ordinary people are always playing catchup to a center that continues to refine and differentiate itself from the masses. LPRP elitism, tragically, tends to undermine the very values propagated by

200 : Chapter 9

Figure 9.1. Vanguardism in the Sekong Museum in 2018. This hall was empty when I first visited in 2009, but by 2018 this display had been installed. The words read, “Long live the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. Long live the honorable and glorious Laos People’s Revolutionary Party.”

that ideology. For instance, in the case of domestic violence, the reality of violence in the home in Laos needs to be related to a political situation in which the vanguard retains leadership through terror, including the threat of violence. It is not insignificant that a large proportion of employed people in Kandon work for the military (chapter 1). When state violence is entrenched and justified, a space for violence is perpetuated in ordinary life. State violence and gendered violence are not separate issues (Merry 2008, 52). I have argued that Lao People’s Democratic Republic is a “projectland.” It is the outcome of a vanguard revolutionary project. The doctrine of the Partystate has become the metalanguage of Lao political culture. In this evaluative language, personal agency finds little room for legitimatized expression, except if (as with Wiphat) one expresses one’s agency as an energetic adoption of Partystate guidance and pursuit of its definitions of success and its projects. Outside of that, people discussed the limits to one’s ability to participate in such efforts in terms of nonagentive “necessity.” Lao Party-state projects reach into the most intimate expressions of people’s selves and their personal agency. This is project as projection.

Conclusion : 201

Projections, in the psychoanalytical understanding of that term, are fantastical misrecognitions that deny the reality of difference between self and other. In projective identification, an aspect of the self is attributed to the other. The other is misperceived as what is actually a reviled or cherished aspect of the self (see Braddock 2018; Benjamin 1998). For instance, the enduring concern with solidarity can be understood as a projection onto the populace of the Party-state’s own concerns with unity, hence its delirium-like repetition, in which the population is at once admired for displaying it as part of their culture, and also educated to obtain it as part of socialist teachings (High 2014). The problem with projection is that a true relationship—a true experience of love, for instance, or a truly diverse, dynamic, and inclusive society— cannot be experienced when the difference between self and other is not acknowledged. Mutual recognition, the to-and-fro of intersubjectivity, hinges on an acknowledgment of the difference between self and other. If the Lao political field is to develop into something more than a collection of fantastical projections, and if socialist ideals are to find effective realization, there needs to be room for this kind of difference. This would require genuine platforms for political dissent, a legitimate place for genuine cultural difference, and a relinquishment of elite vanguardism. Then the fantasies that make Laos a projectland could ease their grip, and a more robust political culture based on mutual recognition could flourish.

Notes Chapter 1: Introduction to Projectland 1 The Kantu, like the wider Katu group (Hickey 1982, 454), practice the sororate (where a man marries the sisters of his wife), the leveritate (where a man marries the widows of his deceased brother), and polygyny (plural wives), although none of these is obligatory. 2 A convention existed in foreign-language scholarship of asserting that Laos’ equivalent of Doi Moi was the “New Economic Mechanism” introduced in 1986. However, as Yamada’s detailed assessment confirms, it now seems unlikely that this was a systematic set of reforms and was in reality a rather short-lived slogan introducing a new managerial style for the bureaucracy, a style, furthermore, that was not a radical break with socialist ideals but a break with perceived deficiencies such as corruption, laziness, and lack of initiative (Yamada 2018). 3 For such an analysis of socialisms elsewhere, see Murawski 2018; Schwenkel 2015; and Todorov 1991. 4 Simon Creak (2018) has provided a history of literacy campaigns. He argues that the socialists’ program of the “construction of the new” involved teaching a new vocabulary to the Lao population, through unprecedented and far-reaching efforts at attaining universal literacy. The language the population was taught in these campaigns was steeped in socialist concepts and values. Even if people disagreed with socialism, the “official register” (Badenoch 2018) enabled by the literacy campaigns and subsequent universal schooling have allowed a common vocabulary in Laos with which people can describe themselves and others. 5 The recent call for anthropology to turn its attention to social movements and agents agitating for positive change (see Ortner 2016 for a summary) is in this way part of an enduring fascination. 6 This is only a skeletal version of the myth: many versions circulate in New Kandon and they differ in important respects, importantly in terms of where the fire came from and who helped the dog get it. I understand this present lively variety as indicating that the myth continues to be a fertile way for thinking about transformation in New Kandon today. 7 Buddhism became increasingly common over the ten years I conducted fieldwork in this village. However, even in 2018, Buddhists did not form a bloc or community in the village, and their practice served more to differentiate them from others in the village than to form cohesive bonds within it, in contrast to my previous field site in an ethnic Lao village (High 2014).

203

204 : Notes to Pages 22–34 8 The number of workers on the plantation at any one time depends on the productivity of the trees. Workers say they earn about eighteen million kiip a year ($1,940). Although this work is valued, comments on the rubber plantation were generally negative. Most people would rather have the productive land than work on the plantation. In addition, many people expressed concerns about the impact of the plantation’s use of chemicals on the village water supply. Initially, the agreement with the rubber company stipulated that the profits of eventual rubber sales would be split with the village, but no money had arrived during my fieldwork (the trees had only just started producing), and the people I spoke to sounded doubtful about whether it would ever materialize. The rubber company did connect the village to the electricity grid as an initial payment. The Kandon villagers that I spoke to about this unanimously believed that any benefits of the plantation had not been worth the costs, but they felt that nothing could be done about it: a neighboring village had initially agreed to the project, and Kandon villagers were not given choice in whether it would go ahead or how it would do so. 9 The situation of the Kantu of Kandon in relation with the military has some parallels with the relationship of the ethnic Phu Noy of northern Laos with the civil service described by Vanina Bouté (2018). She notes that finding a job as a bureaucrat has become emblematic of that ethnic group (257). Chapter 2: Who Are the Katu? 1 Namely, Goscha (2012), Le Pichon (1939), Pholsena (2006b, 419–423; 2008, 457), my own observations of the language and architecture of the upland Kantu near Vietnam, as well as verbal accounts I was told of the life history of Boonyoen Leewiedmuang, member of the Central Party Committee, secretary of the Provincial Party, and provincial chief of Sekong Province in 1984–1988. Boonyoen was born in Vietnam and lived in Kandon territory during the war before taking on a leadership role in the province after the war. 2 Important exceptions are Engelbert 2004; and Pholsena 2006b, 2008, 2012. 3 This is according to 2015 census data as reported by an interview with the Sekong Province statistics office in November 2017. 4 The ethnic majority, Lao Lum, comprise 53 percent of the population. 5 Nishimoto (2011, 103), by contrast, suggests that the double-layered five-yard-high fences were designed to keep out tigers and elephants, and Goudineau (2008) suggests the fences may have been provoked by fear of French raids. 6 An earlier book with a similar name, Phawatsat heng kan pativat khong khweang Sekong, 1945–1975 (The history of the revolution in Sekong Province, 1945–1975) is discussed at length by Engelbert (2004; see also Pholsena 20006b, 2008). 7 Vietnamese cadre apparently handed out photographs of Kommadam to villages who were often wary of these unannounced strangers (Goscha 2012, 155).

Notes to Pages 37–48 : 205 8 One village near Old Kandon reported that in one day it would not be unusual to experience as many as seven attacks: “I can’t count how many times they came— every day, some nights, from 1964 to 1972, always during that time. We had no caves in this area. We had only dugouts.” In these villages, the bombing and chemicals severely affected the quality of the soil, and this remains a damper on agricultural production to the present day. 9 Pholsena suggests that they used the “classical anthropological method of ‘participant observation’ ” (2006b, 427). 10 Goudineau (2008) writes, “Their description of the important villages of the region (A-Roc, Kandon, A-Ling, A-Vac, A-Ro, etc.) suggests the existence, as late as the 1930s, of small cities, often originating in the merging of smaller cities, and constituted in liaison with satellite villages, which contained several dozen long houses and so could have as many as nearly 500 inhabitants in certain cases, depending on the year.” 11 He writes that “the ritual of Phra Krieng (the spirit who guards the village entrance) and of the Phra Kanhong (the spirit who guards against mental illnesses) were abrogated in the village of Ban Layao, today’s district of Samakkisay, in 1957, together with the decision to ask the Royal Lao provincial authorities for funds to build a school” (Engelbert 2004, 261). 12 This source, Xuan (quoted in N. Åhrem 2014, 184), like Le Pichon and Costello, dwells on the infamous blood hunts on neighboring Kinh. Xuan concludes, in true revolutionary style, that these raids were due only to ignorance on the part of the perpetrators of the identity of their real enemies. 13 This is not so far-fetched as it may sound. These data were collected in a concerted war effort in which ethnographic methods were employed on both sides. Georges Condominas’s ethnography is now suspected of having been used in the US war effort (Condominas 1977, xi). 14 On the importance of solidarity in revolutionary ethnography, refer also to Engelbert (2004, 253). 15 Some rivers and streams presented disagreements that were not resolved until 1986, although the reasons for this dispute were kept secret in the interests of preserving a face of Lao-Vietnamese solidarity (Hoang 2007, 12). Since the signing of the agreements, there have been intermittent efforts at erecting border markers. 16 Engelbert (2004, 264) suggests that after 1975 isolation in the highlands was increased—it was an inward-looking economy created by restrictions on trade combined with the limited resources of the new state. 17 The total government/state assistance in the first year was 92,042 tons of rice; 2,571 sheets of iron; 400 nails; 441 pounds of rice seed; one ploughing machine; 381 machetes; 254 hoes; 254 shovels; 2,996 yards of cloth; 254 blankets; 254 mosquito nets; and 765 items of used clothing. 18 Lentz (2019, 42) notes that as early as 1948 the Viet Minh depicted state recognition as an act of material care, akin to the care a parent ideally gives a child, to

206 : Notes to Pages 48–64 which the population ought to respond with “something akin to filial attachment.” 19 The village invited a Buddhist monk who at that time lived at the temple in Thateeng. He slept for one night in the village, and in the morning was carried, recumbent, by village residents in a great circle around the village boundary. At the four cardinal points he was set down. At that spot where he was set down, a hole was dug and a great rock inserted, half buried so that the top of it is still visible. A gunshot was fired into the air. Then the monk returned to the village and the village residents fed him. The village was taboo for a day—no one could enter or leave. That was the last time New Kandon has been taboo. 20 Note that at other times, Wiphat intimated that there were as many as three thousand people in Old Kandon in the past; see chapter 8. Chapter 3: Welcome to Kandon, Culture Village 1 An inscription above the entry to the ceremonial hall reads, “The ceremonial hall equally protects all the ethnic Katu of Kandon Village in order that children and grandchildren advance in the future.” 2 Note that the translation from the Lao wadthanatham to the English “culture” is not my own translation but a convention that is found, for instance, on the bilingual signs that are placed at the entrance to villages that have achieved Culture Village status. 3 The certification of changes in culture as well as things such as hygiene and peacefulness has a history in the southeast of Laos that is almost as long as the revolution itself. See, for instance, Engelbert 2004 and Pholsena 2006b. 4 It was either locked or rented by a local family for accommodation whenever I was there. 5 In his study of Vietnamese anthropology, Evans quotes Le Van Hao as stating, “To ethnology . . . the task falls of studying the formation and development of ethnic groups and the characteristics of their material and cultural life in order to bring out their best traditions, reveal the backward survivals so as to liquidate them step by step, contribute to the reformation and promotion of ethnic societies, [and] strengthen union and solidarity between ethnic groups as well as national pride” (Le Van Hao in Evans 1985, 131–132). 6 However, there are scattered examples in the literature of another variant of the culture village in Asia, where a preexisting village—one in which people actually live—is named a Culture Village more or less spontaneously as recognition of the way it typifies the cultural style most associated with a particular region within the national discourse of unity in diversity. Such efforts are often underresourced and poorly planned, and seem to be targeted mostly at attracting tourism (see, for instance, Schiller 2001 and Allerton 2003).

Notes to Pages 64–84 : 207 7 Although the spectacle of foreign tourists consuming this national image is no doubt part of the appeal. 8 In my reading of the extensive literature on culture villages I have so far found only one other example that matches Kandon in the explicitness of its embrace of moral instruction as its definition of culture. This is a culture village that was built in Japan in 1922. It was a model of houses that Japanese businessmen could consider building in Tokyo’s expanding suburbs (Teasley 2001). Sarah Teasley describes the model houses in this culture village as an exercise in eclecticism. The concern was not with authenticity but with blending in. “Cultural,” in this Japanese context, was synonymous with “tasteful” or “appropriate for the new lifestyle of the modern age” and also “simple” (Teasley 2001, 55). The culture village was aimed at reform and lifestyle improvement, offering advances in sanitation, efficiency, and practical living arrangements. 9 Oliver Tappe writes, “The leitmotiv of official historiography in the Lao PDR is without doubt the ‘national liberation struggle,’ called kantosou kou xat in Lao language or more briefly kantosou—struggle’ ” (2013, 434–435). Also, elsewhere, he writes, “The regime creates a genealogy of Lao national heroes fighting for sovereignty and unity—with Kayson and his comrades as final victors of this long-lasting struggle” (Tappe 2007, 101). Chapter 4: Open Defecation Free and Model Healthy Village 1 Andrew Kipnis (2011, 95) describes the certification of a “public health city” in China. He argues that this is part of a Confucian tradition of exemplary modeling in statecraft. 2 For the model healthy village accreditation, villages seeking accreditation were required to meet eight of eleven criteria: water supply, sanitation, village health volunteers, village drug kits, use of mosquito nets, immunization, birth spacing, breast feeding, antenatal care, risk case referrals, and birth and death reporting. The Open Defecation Free initiative was combined with this village accreditation scheme. While the Culture Village program is run by the Ministry of Information and Culture, the Model Healthy Village program is run by the Ministry of Health. 3 See Bartram et al. 2012; Chatterjee 2011; Engel and Susilo 2014. For a response to the criticisms, see House and Cavill (2015). 4 In Laos, it is estimated that about 37 percent of the population do not have toilets, composed of 29 percent of the population who practice open defecation and 9 percent who use dry latrines (World Education 2014). WSP partnered with the NGO World Concern to introduce CLTS Laos in 2009. 5 This is another reminder of how closely liberalism resembles illiberalism. 6 See spoke of her conversion to CLTS as an emotional epiphany that arose when she

208 : Notes to Pages 85–88

7

8 9

10

11

12 13 14 15

saw the method work the first time. She used the English phrase “I became a believer.” Sum (discussed in the introduction) was called “the short one,” and she was probably stunted due to childhood malnutrition (she was an orphan), but no one questioned her cognitive capabilities. In fact, as a money lender and rice trader, she seemed to have a reputation for being a little too clever. The links between open defecation, stature, mental ability, and future wealth seemed absent in New Kandon’s discussions of development and the value of CLTS. As of 2012, 44 percent of children in Laos were considered “moderately stunted” and a further 19 percent were considered severely stunted (MoH 2017, 3). An article in the Lancet has argued that height-for-age at two years was “the best predictor of human capital and that undernutrition is associated with lower human capital” (Adair et al. 2008, 340). The article pointed to a study in Guatemala that showed that male (but not female) manual laborers earned more if they were larger, and that this larger stature was linked to their intake of a more nutritious supplement in infancy (Hoddinott et al. 2008). This study has often been used to support arguments that shorter people are cognitively and physically “impaired,” and to explain economic underdevelopment. Furthermore, not only the short individual but also their offspring and even their grandchildren are thought to be “impaired” (Adair et al. 2008, 353). For instance, the sanitation hygiene infant nutrition efficacy (SHINE) flagship “proof-of-concept, 2x2 factorial, cluster-randomized, community-based trial” found that families who were put onto a program of enhanced sanitation had slightly more stunting than families who received only standard medical care, and concluded that “household-level elementary WASH [water sanitation and hygiene] interventions implemented in rural areas in low-income countries are unlikely to reduce stunting or anaemia and might not reduce diarrhea” (Humphrey et al. 2019, e132). Instead, these growth charts are based on a major anthropometry project launched in the late 1990s that looked at healthy children growing in optimal, well-­ supported conditions—with well-nourished mothers who breastfeed and do not smoke, for instance. It drew on studies of 8,440 children in Brazil, Ghana, India, Norway, Oman, and the United States. The study found that across these different ethnic and cultural contexts there was a remarkable similarity in the early years of growth, if optimal conditions were met (WHO report). “Frequently Asked Questions about the 2000 CDC Growth Charts,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accessed May 3, 2018, https://www.cdc.gov. Australia uses only the first two years of the WHO scale. For ages three to five Australia uses a scale devised by the US Center for Disease Control. On anthropometry in the history of anthropology, see Darnell 2008; Glick 2008; Kuklick 1991, 86; and Sibued 2008. For instance, they paid attention to the rapid changes of physical type witnessed in

Notes to Pages 89–101 : 209 the offspring of British rural migrants who moved to the city, or the descendants of Africans and Europeans living in Britain (Kulick 1991, 82). 16 The advancement of a particular society could be judged from a few key indicators, and if some information about one society was missing, it could be filled in by assuming it was similar to other societies at the same point of development. This was what was called the “comparative method” (Kulick 1991, 78). 17 According to Huk, the shacks were one meter square. 18 This health records booklet is called “Book for Health Checkups: Mother and Child” and is issued by the Ministry of Health, Department of Sanitation and Health Promotion, Division of Mother and Child. The inner back page states, For the child to be born safely and the mother to be safe: Must go for checkups at least four times during the pregnancy Must go to give birth in a public utility or with a doctor who has expertise in assisting at birth Must be inspected after birth Must plan to have birth spacing The newborn must have a health inspection Children from birth until 5 years must receive their immunizations and have their growth progress checked. Chapter 5: “Are We United?” 1 The written version of the final agreed upon and adopted oath was, “Clause 1: Waan yaa mon moo [sorcery] that will destroy good life, humans, and society. Clause 2: Poob pong [witchcraft] that harasses and destroys good humans, life, and society. Clause 3: Attempting to destroy or kill life in the above ways (i.e., sorcery or witchcraft) by giving payments to or hiring other people, directly or indirectly, whether the attempt is successful or unsuccessful. Clause 4: Theft of any sort, taking place within this village, of wealth belonging to others of any kinds with a value from 50,000 kiip upwards. If people undertake any of the above activities, the water drunk and the soil digested herewith will jinx them.” 2 Writing specifically of Sekong Province, Yves Goudineau (2015, 46) has suggested that there is a ban on buffalo sacrifice in Laos at present. 3 Guido Sprenger discusses “the end of rituals” in Laos (2006). He rejects the notion that the decline in sacrifice was due to state pressure. He argues that the state was far too weak in the remote areas where he worked to actually enforce a ban. He points out, furthermore, that the state in Laos has always been linked to ritual—and, I would add, especially sacrifice—so the revolutionary regime change could hardly have escaped impact in this area (65). Sprenger thinks that

210 : Notes to Pages 101–102

4 5

6

7

socialism in Laos opened up “new spaces” in which people came to understand themselves as having choices about rituals, among many other things (58). It should be noted that ritual killing of buffalo was once found throughout Laos, including in ethnic Lao and Khmer centers; see, for instance, Archaimbault 1956, 1961, 1975, 1991; and Chandler 1974. Jaaŋ, and its cognates, is used to indicate deities, divinity, or spirits in most of the languages of the central highlands of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—those of both Austronesian and Mon Khmer stock—as well as in Malaysia, some languages of Indonesia, and Malagasy (Hickey 1982, 24). In Kandon, women clarified that this word is considered a “big” word and is spoken only by people who have confidence. Sangkhom is the word used by more modest people. A note on divination: The primary means is dream interpretation. A further step is to gather family members around the sick person, who holds a gong containing cloth and rice (for a full description, see Nishimoto 2010a). Family members call out to the kimoc, or ancestor ghosts, asking for the sick person’s recovery and speculating about what could have upset any of the kimoc. Dreams might be discussed. Past behaviour is reviewed for any unthinking slips, such as mistakes in the courtesy required between wife-givers and wife-takers. Major transgressions, such as illicit affairs, might be exposed. Those addressing the ghosts snap their fingers under the sick person’s jaw—a loud snap is a positive answer from the kimoc that the family are on the right track. Other forms of this kind of “yes/ no” oracle included plunging a sword into a container of rice, and reading the position of an egg yolk in a boiled egg. People also commonly consult professional diviners, including two mediums who live in Kandon, an astrologer in Pakse (accessed by phone), and a man in Kandon who reads playing cards. If, through divination, it was revealed that illness or other misfortune was being caused by kimoc who were “hungry” because of the misbehavior of the living, then a promise was immediately made that an eat buffalo would be forthcoming by tying a white string around the sick person’s wrist. This promise was taken very seriously and couldn’t be reversed. Preparations were then made for an eat buffalo at a suitable time. In another Kantu village I visited in the highlands of Sekong, the recent history of the village was described as being profoundly shaped by a disgruntled village jaaŋ. In one sit, a landslide on a steep slope killed a man, a child pulled a pot of hot water over itself, and so on, so the village moved. In that new site, a man drowned, a woman died in childbirth, and a child wandered into the forest and was never seen again. So the village moved again. Between the end of the war and the eventual resettlement to the lowlands in the 1990s, the villagers had moved the site of the village six times. When I met the few who remained in the mountains, their troubles were continuing, with poor crops and few livestock. My informant said it was hard to tell which spirits were angered with them, but since it affected everyone, it seemed to him to be the village jaaŋ.

Notes to Pages 103–111 : 211 8 In the 2013 oath-taking ceremony in New Kandon described in this chapter, however, everyone agreed to drink. It was a success in that sense. 9 Wiphat told this story: A witch saw me carrying a large bundle of honeywood on the road and thought, “I want him as a husband.” I got home and I was sick. My mother tried to feed me, but I could not eat. I had a fever. I tried to sleep but all I wanted to do was walk to the old village (we were living in the refugee village then). I had studied a bit of [Western] medicine by then, so I took some tablets—too many, and I didn’t get better. I was really sick for four nights. But my mother killed a chicken and she gave rice to the witch [on an offering plate placed in the rafters of their home]. “Now, I am giving this to you,” she said. If she hadn’t asked a diviner, we would not have known it was a witch attack. One of my little brothers was killed by that same witch. But it is only a few people who ate people [like that]. They don’t eat the actual body. They ate the body you don’t see. 10 Another cure is to toss tobacco water or ash and coals over a victim, especially if they seem to have become paralyzed by fear. 11 This was not a universal opinion. Another leader who was instrumental in drafting the oath, Malo, explained that in the past witchcraft and sorcery were much more common than they are today because of the material poverty in the mountains. And there was a lot of witchcraft in the past, according to Wiphat. Liliha said that in the past it was the household spirits who had insisted on a range of strict taboos. But witchcraft attacks were rare. Since relocating, she observed, the household spirits had declined in significance, but now people were plagued with dammɑk. Since the oath, there had been no death from dammɑk, but illnesses were common. 12 The mass organizations are the Youth Union, the Women’s Union, and the National Front. These have branches and local members in every village that feed into district, provincial, and national levels of these organizations and are intended to facilitate wide participation in collective endeavors. 13 Georges Condominas notes that the ethnic “Kuddu” (perhaps his rendering of “Katu”) near the area where he conducted fieldwork traded in slaves that had been captured during a sorcery accusation. In my own fieldwork, I knew of one man—then in his forties—who had been orphaned as a child because his mother had been killed over witchcraft suspicions. 14 Only percussive music is allowed. Wind and string are not permitted. In the case of the consecration of a new house, men challenge one another to sing a blessing for the new house, and the challenger offers a man of his choosing a bottle of beer and a piece of raw beef hanging from a bamboo loop. The recipient can’t refuse. His song is accompanied by the previous singer playing a gong. At the end of his

212 : Notes to Pages 111–123

15 16 17

18 19

20 21 22

song, he then takes the gong, and the man who has been relieved of it then has the right to choose the next man who will sing by handing him the beef and beer. The men are usually relatives by marriage or blood who live in other households. Another variant is “We call those who want to destroy us to eat buffalo instead.” Some significant literature on sacrifice suggests that substitution is one of its defining characteristics, e.g., Smith and Doniger 1989; Hubert and Mauss (1898) 1964. Trays are also prepared for the village spirit (whose shrine is located in the community hall), the household spirits (in the same location as the kimoc), and the forest spirits. Usually the forest spirits are offered food in a location outside the village, although I saw people simply place such offerings in the garden well away from the house. These offering trays are usually left for three days, if not more. On the relationship between hunting, wild animals, and jaaŋ among Vietnamese Katu, see K. Århem 2008. Sprenger notes that the Rmeet likewise attribute souls to both buffalo and humans (2016, 77). Nishimoto suggests that in contrast to the Rmeet, the Kantu attribute souls also to cows and pigs. However, these were considered small souls compared to that of a human or a buffalo (Nishimoto 2011, 113). Nishimoto gives an account of a “hunt” for buffalo (2011, 115). Sprenger (2005) notes that the Rmeet also have an association between buffalo and trade. Nishimoto comes to a similar conclusion: “In other words, both the wife’s family and spirits of the deceased were beings that bestowed productivity and fruitfulness so the four-legged animals were offered in return for the protection received from them” (Nishimoto 2011, 111).

Chapter 6: “Women’s Preserve” 1 The authors don’t say why they think marketing is a serious obstacle. In fact, weavings make wonderful trade items: they are relatively durable and less likely to perish on the way to market than a lot of the products of gardening, hunting, or fishing. They are also relatively compact for their price, making storage and transport feasible. 2 The trade set off one ethnicity from another, so that the Suei worked on the rice fields of the Lao and sometimes of the Phu Thai; the Lao had an ascendency over the Bolaven people, which meant a relation of economic domination based on cardamom and ramie; the Bolaven had a similar ascendency over the Nya Huen, who were their immediate neighbors, and they used the Ta Oi as seasonal laborers; and the Alak furnished weavings and jewelry to the Nya Huen, with relationships of exchange that were often tempestuous and heated between them (Goudineau 2008, 646; author’s translation).

Notes to Pages 123–128 : 213 3 Goudineau also observed during his work with Kandon before their resettlement that the ethnic Ta Oi and the Pacoh of the region did not weave, but instead obtained their skirts and blankets from the other side of the Sekong from Nge Kriang or Kantu villages (Goudineau 2000, 559n11). He explained that the weavings were obtained in exchange for beads, gongs, jars or crafted items from Vietnam. 4 “Hoi An was the principal market town in past centuries, supplying the upland population with indispensable trade goods—salt, iron spear heads, pottery, porcelain jars and gongs. Conversely, the Katu supplied the coastal markets with honey, betel leaves, areca nuts, medicinal plants and other valued forest products” (K. Århem 2010, 12). 5 The impact of industrial textiles is evident in many handwoven textiles themselves: historic cloth from the region is composed in some cases of fine cotton from India, while today synthetic yarn from China and Vietnam is the most common medium (McIntosh 2012a, 65). Aniline and synthetic dyes were introduced around one hundred years ago and met with eager uptake not only because of the vibrant and sometimes new colours they made possible but also because of the status they indicated (McIntosh 2012a, 66). 6 Penny Van Esterik noted of weaving under socialism in the late 1990s that “local textile production has been considered part of the path to Lao socialist self-­ sufficiency” and that the socialists demonstrated an “infatuation” with textile cooperatives (Van Esterik 1999, 50, 47). 7 The restrictions on trade during early socialism created problems for this trade, but also new opportunities for profit. Wiphat said, In those days, it was them [their trading partners on the Vietnamese side of the border] that ate us. We would arrive, and they wouldn’t let us go further into their country: they said the police would arrest us, but really they were afraid we would learn the real price for our weavings in their country. We would arrive at our relative’s village on the border and we would do our work there. Then they would be the ones to go further on and buy the buffalo and cows. They would lie and say, “The police will arrest you if you go,” but really it was they were afraid we’d see the real price. Say one buffalo was worth twenty-eight skirts, they would take eight of those for themselves. They would lie and say, “This buffalo costs twenty-eight skirts,” but really it was twenty. Or they would say “It is twenty-five,” but really it was seventeen. We would work with them for seven or eight nights and they would go and buy it themselves, they would say the Vietnamese would arrest us but really they wanted to eat our kamlay (L: profits). 8 Wiphat said that one of the lessons imparted by cadre had been to value sons and daughters equally. Previously, daughters had been much more valued because it

214 : Notes to Pages 128–161 was they who would bring in wealth, first through their weaving, and then through their bride-price. 9 Ardener 2006, 49. 10 Indeed, Spirits in the Loom is the title of a book about weavings based largely on observations of weavings in Huaphan Province (Banks Findly 2014). The title is apparently based on Bank Findly’s observation that in these weavings, a common motif was humanoid spirits, a remarkable fact given that spirit religion in this area is often described as “aniconic” (2014, 19). In Kandon, I found no weavings that depicted spirits. 11 She used the money to contribute to the wages that she paid to labourers to transplant her rice fields that year. At other times, she wove on commission where the owner provided the thread and instead of paying her, she retained one of the skirts produced. She rarely gives these away, but typically sells them to pay for things like salt, MSG, and electricity bills. 12 The minimum wage in Laos is currently 1.1 million kiip per month. 13 Lúu Hùng notes of the Katu in Vietnam that a birth out of wedlock would be punished by being forced to give birth alone in the forest. If she survived, the woman could return to the village and be reintegrated, but with the status of a servant (2007, 88). 14 He continued, The fact that man—and why he alone?—begins to weave something, something that isn’t in the form of a covering or cocoon for his own body, but something that as cloth is going to take off on its own in the world, is going to move around. Why? Because this cloth has time value. That’s what distinguishes it from any form of natural production. One can come close to it in the creations of the animal world, but it is originated only when it is fabricated, when it is open to the world, to age and to newness; it is use value, time value; it is a reservoir of needs; it is there whether one needs it or not; and it is around this cloth that a whole dialectic of rivalry and of sharing is organized, wherein needs will be constituted (Lacan 1992, 228). Chapter 7: “My Children Have Eaten Only Tears” 1 The largest bride-price I recorded was US$3,600, but most were about half this amount. 2 This was a wait-and-see approach. Phut said, “We’ll wait and see what happens. If more people get sick, we will do it quickly. If not, then we can wait until after the harvest. You can’t forgo it because people will die if you do. But if no one else gets sick, if it all gets better, we can wait.”

Notes to Pages 174–197 : 215

Chapter 8: “You Will Reach the Katu” 1 For more on the Focal Site strategy, see Rigg (2006, 126). 2 The word first appeared in nearby Thailand in the Ayutthaya period. In one of the earliest recorded uses, the Law of the Three Seals (1804) lists “ farang, angkrit, wilanda, jinn, yuan, yipun, khaek, prathet malayu lae tang-prathet thang puang” (Pattana 2010, 62; emphasis added). Pattana translates this as “French, English, Dutch, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Malay, and other foreign countries.” That is, farang in early Thai usage specified the French in particular as opposed to both other specific foreigners and foreigners in general. Today, falang in its usage in Laos as “westerners in general” is mostly confined to colloquial street language and is a mark of coarse speech and unworldliness. 3 Recent contributions to the study of mimesis in the region include Tappe (2018) and Jonsson (2010). 4 This is part of the kind of “power” Benedict Anderson (1990) has so influentially described. It exists independent of those who hold it, a general force found in all things animate and inanimate but concentrated in particularly powerful people and things. Powerful people are able to amass around themselves powerful objects to concentrate their own power. That someone holds this kind of power is revealed spontaneously in its effects. 5 This experience of difference as wonder is identified by Scott (2014) among proponents of the ontological turn in anthropology, but is likely a much wider affective dimension of anthropological research. 6 In her account of the emotional development of the infant, an original omnipotent misrecognition of the other as an undifferentiated part of the self is overcome when the (M)other resists this negation, ideally by neither submitting nor retaliating but merely by showing he or she has received the child’s message but is not dominated by it. Chapter 9: Conclusion 1 Tat Kuang Si Bear Rescue Center is run by the nongovernmental organization Free the Bears. This center has educational signage within the sanctuary explaining the threats to bears in Laos. 2 “I discovered that the Sedang loathed many of their customs and complied with them only because they feared their vicious gods, who had imposed these senseless ( plam ploy) rules upon them only in order to exact from them sacrifices whenever they violated these intolerable rules” (Devereux 1967, 219).

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Index Page numbers in boldface refer to illustrations. adultery, 50, 135 agency, 14–15, 160; concept of, 15, 155; of government, 164; personal, 200 ahak. See spirits, local guardian Alak, 125 ancestor ghosts, 101, 117, 210n5–7; belief in, 118; carvings of, 5, 108; causing illness, 109–110, 114, 147, 150, 152–153, 155, 161; causing illness and death, 48, 100; communicating with, 143, 210n6; desires of, 155, 163; and fertility, 116; food for, 115, 117, 130, 160; hunger of, 48, 100, 110, 114, 210n6; and morality, 112, 142, 163; offended, 100, 182, 195, 210n6; possession by, 176; protection of, 153, 210n6; relationships and marriage, 110, 114, 134, 145–146, 151, 155; reparations to, 143, 147–148, 160–161; ritual for, 111–112, 114, 148, 160–161, 195; and surveillance, 106, 110, 114, 155, 163; and weaving, 131; weaving, 138, 140 ancestors. See ancestor ghosts Anderson, Benedict, 116, 188 animals; four-footed, 55, 116, 125, 161; two-footed, 55, 116–117, 125, 161 Annamite Ranges, 1–2, 41 anthropologists, 56, 88–89, 186, 190 anthropology, 189–190, 199, 215n5; evolutionary, 62–63, 88–89, 94; of exchange, 139; of kinship, 143; Lao, 87; and social movements, 203n5 anthropometry, 88, 208n11, 208n14 authenticity, 56, 59, 64–68, 70–71, 207

214n13; in the home, 92; and resilience, 92 blankets. See weavings blood, 96, 111, 205n12; buffalo, 95–96, 107, 111; of childbirth, 90; as offering, 111, 161 body; protection of, 171, 183–184; and spirit possession, 150; of spirits, 101; witchcraft, 103–104, 211n9 Bolaven Plateau, 2–3, 22, 32, 39, 73, 96 bombing, Vietnam War, 29, 36-37, 45, 50, 85, 90, 188, 205n8 Boonyoen Leewiedmuang, 30, 37–38, 204n1 border; between Laos and Vietnam, 21, 30, 213n7; Katu, 43 bride-price, 135, 144; divorce, 132–135, 137; gender inequality, 20, 135; as trade, 116, 126, 142–143; unpaid, 112, 114, 135, 143 Buddhism, 53, 118, 203n7 buffalo, 45, 69, 112, 114, 117, 182; black, 96, 100, 102, 108, 110, 116; as bride-price, 112–113, 142, 145, 148; domesticated, 115–116; fertility, 116; gift exchange, 113, 115–116, 126; killed as consecration, 109–110, 113–114; killed to cure illness, 61, 110, 150, 153; and outsiders, 116; price of, 124, 126, 130, 213n7; souls of, 115, 212n19; trade for, 115, 122, 124–130, 142, 188, 212n21; value of, 55, 107, 115–116, 166, 172; white, 50, 100, 102, 105, 107; women’s power, 119. See also eat buffalo buffalo events. See eat buffalo bun baan. See village festival

beliefs, abandoning, 41, 61, 118 birth, 87, 90, 93; facilities for, 87, 90–91, 93, 209n19; in the forest, 90–91, 134, 137,

caloen. See modernity cam pen. See necessity cauldrons, 111, 116, 125–126, 128, 142, 144

231

232 : Index ceremonial hall, 5, 16, 28, 107–109; consecration of, 100; features of, 16, 35, 55, 82, 119; and jaaŋ cinaar, 102; protection of, 206n1; and ritual killing, 19, 100, 107–108; and spirits, 182; and taboo, 170; use of, 178 certification and certificates, 4, 11, 14, 84; benefits of, 57; and culture, 58, 74, 206n3; and government policies, 57–58; history of, 11, 74; international, 207; of Kandon, 14, 55, 57, 188; and Lao socialism, 11, 74, n206. See also Culture Village, certified chickens; bride-price, 116, 143–44, 147; carvings of, 55; and culture villages, 66; domesticated, 116, 122; as food for ancestor ghosts, 161; gift exchange, 115, 142, 161–62; ritual killing of, 61, 182, 211n9; value of, 117 children; death of, 49, 134; development of, 85–86, 89–91, 208n7–8, 208n11, 209n19; education of, 1, 22, 45, 47, 62; marriage of, 152; and spirits, 110, 112, 134, 137, 147, 162; and the sun, 134; and violence, 158–159. See also stunting China, 64–65, 125, 207, 213n5 cholera. See illness, cholera Choummaly Sayasone, 74 cinaar. See ceremonial hall cit cay. See internal spirit civilizing process, 89, 93–94 cloth, 205n17; as bride-price, 144, 147, 165; ethnic styles, 123, 130; given during marriage, 125–126, 142–143; and politics, 127; as productivity, 116; time value of, 214n14; and trade, 123–127, 129, 137; value of, 124, 126–127, 129; and women’s power, 115, 130, 144; women weaving, 122, 124–125, 130, 135; See also textile as text; weavings CLTS (community-led total sanitation), 78–79, 90, 93, 207; in New Kandon, 74–75, 79–81, 83–84 collage as socialist artform, 10–13 companies; and development, 178–179; funding rituals, 178

consecration, 100, 110, 113–114, 211n14 constitution, Lao, 12–13, 20, 59, 164 cultural change, 43, 101, 196 cultural politics, 10, 35, 56, 62–63, 67–68, 70, 101 cultural relativism, 94, 97, 197 culture, 59, 62–63; authenticity, 58–59, 65–66; commodification of, 64, 66; desirable and undesirable, 59–60, 62; development, 58–59, 61, 63, 65, 69–70; evolutionary, 62–63, 69–70, 198; and Kantu, 57; Lao socialist concept of, 59, 62–63, 69–70, 197, 201, 206n2–3; in law, 20, 57, 59; loss and preservation, 56, 59; performance of, 64; and struggle, 56, 69; and weaving, 121, 123; Western concept of, 62–63, 70, 89 Culture Village, 3, 11, 74; authenticity, 66–67, 71; benefits of, 57; certified, 14, 60, 65, 74, 84, 206n2, 206n6; definition of culture, 59–60, 62, 191; history of, 59; international, 63–66, 207; Lao, 63–65; and other certifications, 14, 60; policies, 59–61, 63, 68, 100, 198; program management, 207 cunning, 67, 70 dammak. See witches death, 48–49; caused by witches, 211n9; caused by spirits, 7–8, 48, 50, 102, 160; in Kandon mythology, 194; and resettlement, 49, 53; and weaving, 139 debt, 6, 148, 158; and illness, 145, 153; and marriage, 144–145, 148–149, 151, 159; and spirits, 110 democratic centralism, 12, 83 Democratic Republic of Vietnam. See DRV development; and culture, 59, 69, 87; and government policies, 174; and inequality, 72; the nature of, 93; in New Kandon, 5, 58, 83, 90, 208n7; in Old Kandon, 51. See also doctrine of development development projects, 19; success of, 74 divination, 102, 110, 112, 144, 210n6 diviner, 163; and debt, 142, 147, 159; and eat

Index : 233 buffalo, 110; and illness, 146–147, 150, 161–162; and marriage, 134, 145–146, 153, 162 divorce, 110, 119, 132–133, 144, 152, 162 doctrine of development, 63 domestic violence. See violence, against women DRV (Democratic Republic of Vietnam), 11, 27, 35, 38, 74 eat buffalo, 41, 100, 109, 112, 212n16–17; and alcohol, 158; changing nature of, 101, 124; and construction, 95, 100; decline in, 61, 109; and necessity, 97; and occult powers, 101–102, 110, 112, 114–15, 118; and political culture, 111; renaissance of, 101, 107, 109–110, 112; village festival, 97, 100, 117; and women’s power, 97, 116, 119–120, 130 ekaphap. See unity elders, 45–46, 98, 194 emotions, 84, 89, 166; and Katu identity, 30; and Lao socialism, 83–84; as a measure of success, 84, 94 emulation, 11, 74 Engels, Friedrich, 66 epidemics, 48–50, 178, 181, 193, 196. See also illness ethnicity, 42, 56, 121–122; and colonialism, 33, 39; Kantu, 30; Lao history of, 63, 212n2; and solidarity, 42, 63 ethnography, 30, 63, 233; French colonial, 32, 43, 123; Lao, 41, 43 Evans, Grant, 9, 43, 59, 63, 68–69, 127 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 103 exchange. See gifts façades, 56, 62, 66, 68 failure (failure-centrism), 8, 10, 190, 194 falang. See foreigners fear, 103, 166, 186, 204n5 feces, 76–78, 81 fertility, 50–51, 115–116, 139–140, 144 Fields of Desire, 1, 8, 71 fig tree, 6–7, 173, 177, 196 flood myth, 16–18, 21, 45, 55, 194

Focal Village, 24, 51, 174, 181–182 forest; as birthplace, 90, 92, 134, 137, 143, 214n13; person lost in, 176, 210n7 forest spirits, 102, 111, 137, 212n17 four-footed animals. See animals, four-footed free choice, 140, 154; and desire, 155; ideology of, 140, 145; and marriage, 140, 151, 154 French colonialism, 27, 33, 39, 123, 127, 129; in the 19th century, 31; and the Indochina War, 29, 34; and mimesis, 187; resistance to, 34, 42, 129, 171, 179 gender equality and inequality, 20, 117, 197, 199 ghosts. See ancestor ghosts gifts, 40, 126; between ethnic groups, 212n2, 213n3; flow of, 126, 147; and keeping while giving, 139; and marriage, 55, 116, 119, 142–144, 146, 148, 165; as social model, 128; for spirits, 115; and weaving, 115, 130, 139; and women’s potency, 119, 140 gongs, 108, 125, 211n14; as bride-price, 142, 144; during divination, 210n6; during eat buffalo, 95, 107, 111, 116; value of, 116–117 Goudineau, Yves, 204n5, 205n10, 213n3; and buffalo sacrifice, 109, 209n2; and ethnic relationships, 123; and Kandon, 21, 38 Grandmother Mek and Grandfather Dog, 51, 121, 126, 194; carvings of, 5, 16, 55; descendants of, 45, 194 Hegel, Georg, 71 Hickey, Gerald, 35, 187 historical time, 193, 195 hospital; and childbirth, 91, 134; construction of, 48; and illness caused by spirits, 114, 145–146, 150 household spirits, 111, 117, 153, 161, 173; offerings to, 150, 212n17; origin of, 102; protection of, 103; rituals for, 182; and witches, 211n11

234 : Index houses; consecration of, 170, 211n14; construction of, 156, 179 ho whathanathum. See Palace of Culture Hùng, Lúu, 130 ideology, 42, 199–200 idthiphon. See power, influence illness, 188; caused by spirits, 100, 110, 150–151, 153, 160–161, 163; cholera, 49; and debt, 145; and desire, 8; and eat buffalo, 109–110, 147; epidemics of, 178, 181; malaria, 4, 49, 153–154; and marriage, 146–149, 153–155; measles, 4, 49; and the oath against harm, 103, 211n8, 211n11; and the role of divination, 62, 102, 142, 162, 210n6 indigenous culture villages. See Culture Village, indigenous Indochina Wars, 14, 29, 32, 34, 130 Indochinese Communist Party, 10, 32 Indonesia, 64, 143, 210n5 inflation, 127, 132 jaaŋ daŋ. See household spirits jars, 111; as bride-price, 142, 196; trade of, 116, 125, 213n3–4; value of, 116–117 Kaleum, 23, 30, 34, 49, 62, 123 Kamal Kar, 75-77 Kandon village 29, 45, 56–57, 135, 206n19, 206n1; political culture of, 58, 90; occult powers of, 122, 118; territory of, 38, 46, 170–171; villagers, 50 Kantu, 125, 190, 196; compared with the Lao, 69; and domestic violence, 198; marriage practices of, 203n1; and occult powers, 101–103, 188; and relinquishing tradition, 69, 82, 140, 198; terminology, 30, 168; and trade, 115, 128; traditional items, 188 Katu; history of, 16, 27–33, 41, 67, 115; and sorcery, 211n13; terminology, 31, 168; and trade, 124–125, 129, 213n4; and weaving, 130 keywords, 42–43, 80–82, 108, 127 khaa. See bride-price

kimoc. See ancestor ghosts kinship, 128, 143 kinuh, 14–15, 50, 53, 174; and fertility, 50–51; forms taken by, 50; misfortune caused by, 6–7, 50–51, 53; offences to, 50; protection of, 7, 50; and resettlement, 25, 50–51 Kong Hoy Ekalaad, 22 Lacan, Jacques, 138–140 lakam drums, 37, 104, 106 lam wong, 44, 108, 109, 112, 117 Lao, ethnic, 23, 29, 177, 210n4 lao lao. See rice whiskey Lao Party-state. See LPRP (Lao People’s Revolutionary Party) Lao PDR (People’s Democratic Republic), 7, 105, 200; constitution of, 20; national liberal struggle, 207n9; as projectland, 200 Lao People’s Democratic Republic. See Lao PDR (People’s Democratic Republic) Lao People’s Revolutionary Party. See LPRP (Lao People’s Revolutionary Party) Laos; border with Vietnam, 30, 129; childhood development in, 85–86, 88–89, 92, 208n7–8, 208n11; ethnicities within, 30–32, 212n2; history of, 29–30, 34, 36; and marriage law, 62; the politics of recognition in, 64, 67, 70; and revolution, 13–14; service provision in, 57, 86, 91; spiritual belief in, 118. See also cultural politics; LPRP (Lao People’s Revolutionary Party); Lao socialism. Lao socialism, 8–12, 56, 199, 201; and occult powers, 112; and postsocialism, 9; and self, 68; and solidarity, 42–44, 83; and struggle, 43; and success, 74, 80; and unity, 83, 108. See also metalanguage Le Pichon, Jean, 32–33, 187, 204n1, 205n12 lineage, 133, 142–143, 165 loincloths, 54, 108, 111, 121, 139 looms, 131, 133, 140, 214n10 love marriage, 146, 151–153 LPRP (Lao People’s Revolutionary Party),

Index : 235 12, 19, 68, 71, 97, 129, 199; constitution of, 12; and development, 49, 90; economic policies, 9; and gender equality, 145; history of, 34; ideology, 9, 68, 129, 199; leadership of, 34, 199; metalanguage of, 13, 30, 164, 200; and projects, 72, 200; stance toward tradition, 52, 164; and vanguardism, 12, 199 Luang Prabang, 18, 121, 128, 191, 195–196. See also museum, in Luang Prabang malaria. See illness, malaria Malaysia, 64, 66, 210n5 manioc, 24, 28, 137; cultivation of, 36, 177, 181; and food shortage, 45, 179, 182 marriage, 112, 154, 165; and eat buffalo, 109, 112; and free choice, 140, 145, 154, 164; illegal types of, 62; and illness; necessity of, 154–155; and the spirits, 146–147, 152–154; and weaving, 130, 139; women’s lives in, 119, 130; women’s potency, 130. See also matrilineal cross-cousin marriages; divorce; illness; love marriage; violence, against women matinyay. See spirits, sun matrilateral cross-cousin marriages, 142–146, 148, 165 measles. See illness, measles medals, 14, 74, 80, 93, 108, 188 medicine, 36, 167–168; and ritual, 161, 211n9; as sorcery, 103 metalanguage, 8, 10, 12, 30, 109; and gender equality, 20; Lao socialist, 10, 12, 14, 53, 56; success and necessity, 8, 14–15, 74, 97, 164 military, as employment, 22–23, 200, 204n9 misrecognition, 62, 67, 70, 215n6 Model Healthy Village, 4, 57, 73–75, 77–93, 207n2 model village, 15, 62, 70, 72, 79, 164. See also Culture Village modernity, 58, 156; concepts of, 9; and socialism, 9, 130; temporality of, 193; of Tok Lok, 49. See also historical time.

Morgan, Lewis Henry, 63 murder, 32, 98, 106 museum; in Luang Prabang, 18, 121–122, 191; Sekong. See Sekong Museum; Skansen, 65 music, 84, 176, 211n14 myths, 18, 194-195, 203n6; and weaving, 131. See also flood myth; Grandmother Mek and Grandfather Dog necessity, 14, 97, 166; and agency, 200; and desire, 8, 160, 162, 164; and eat buffalo, 97; and exchange, 148; and marriage, 146, 154–155, 162; and morality, 160, 163; and the Party-state, 164; and resettlement, 175; and spirits, 140, 146; and success, 8, 14; and weaving, 132, 138, 141 New Kandon, 21, 73, 76; certification of, 74–75, 80, 84; and childbirth, 86–87, 91–92; and CLTS, 75, 79, 83–84, 208n7; demographics of, 22–23; development of, 58, 75, 90, 93; establishment of, 91, 175; and kinuh, 7, 15; as model village, 8, 74–75, 129, 164; public profile of, 55–56; and resettlement, 15, 109, 129; as a socialist project, 15; success of, 12, 74, 84; and unity, 197–198; and weaving, 130 Nge, 125 Nishimoto, Futoshi, 21, 31, 110, 115, 204n5, 212n22 oath against harm, 97–100, 102–108, 116, 118–119, 197, 211n8, 211n11 occult powers, 101–102, 138; and illness, 150, 155; in Kandon, 97; and the oath against harm, 98, 106, 108; and state power, 106, 118, 187; and weaving, 138 ODF (Open Defecation Free), 57, 73–75, 79, 83, 93 Old Kandon, 21, 172–174; and buffalo, 109, 112–113, 115; and death, 49; future resettlement, 51; and kinuh, 6–7, 25, 50–51; and necessity, 14; and New Kandon, 15, 23, 49, 113, 175, 198;

236 : Index nostalgia for, 139, 196; poverty of, 24, 50, 78, 128; return to, 4, 6, 14–15, 47, 49, 52, 194; and struggle, 24, 47; and taboo, 52, 170; and trade, 115, 125, 129; and weaving, 129–130. See also returnees Open Defecation Free. See ODF Padrang, 177–179, 182, 184 Paksong, 4 Palace of Culture, 3, 5, 58 Party-state. See LPRP (Lao People’s Revolutionary Party) pawat, 34, 38–39, 41–44, 123 Pholsena, Vatthana, 29, 37, 67, 204n1–2, 205n9 pipes, smoking, 6, 17, 28, 44, 108, 117, 124, 145, 172, 176, 179 poisons, 166, 188 policies, 9, 40, 57, 74; and agency, 14; of the center, 57; and certification, 57–58; and Culture Villages, 58; economic, 9; Lao Party-state, 8, 12; three builds, 48; three togethers, 37 political culture, 10, 58, 74, 80; of Kandon. See Kandon, political culture of politics of recognition, 67, 69–70 pong kan, 171 pong kan too. See body, protection of postsocialism. See socialism, and postsocialism postwar conditions, 45, 86 power, 97, 102, 215n4; and buffalo, 112, 114; influence, 48, 180–181, 184; Lao Party-state, 9, 118; and the oath against harm, 103, 106–107; spiritual, 53, 118, 186. See also occult powers, women, potency of pregnancy, 134, 152, 154, 192, 209n19. See also birth procession, 84, 108 projection, 15, 190, 200–201 Projectland, 15, 200–201 projects, 8, 13; and agency, 15, 200; and childhood development, 85, 92; and development, 26, 93; evaluation of, 74;

and New Kandon, 47, 80–81, 84–85, 204n8; vanguard. See vanguard projects rape, 99, 106, 119. See also violence, against women recognition; and authenticity, 56, 64, 66; mutual, 189, 201; struggle for, 70–72. See also politics of recognition resettlement, 44, 53, 105, 128, 210n7; change since, 15, 18, 127, 167; death during, 48–49, 53; and domestic violence, 195; in future, 177, 179, 182; perspectives on, 25, 45–47, 193, 196; and return, 6, 52, 129, 167; spirits’ views of, 7, 25, 48, 53 returnees, 6, 15, 50–51, 112, 129, 198 revolution, 12–13, 29; and doctrine, 13, 199; and the pawat, 41; and social change, 13, 38, 122; and struggle, 38 rice, 35, 91, 102, 205n17; and childbirth, 90, 92; and food shortage, 28, 124, 179, 182; harvest of, 52, 92, 124, 161, 177–178; in myth, 194; taboos involving, 52, 92; and trade, 16, 124–126, 129, 137, 178; use in ritual, 98–99, 111, 210n6; value of, 16, 24 rice spirit, 35, 52, 90–91, 102, 117, 131 rituals; changes in, 61, 131, 205n11; and childbirth, 92; and development, 15, 101; and the Party-state, 101, 105, 209n1; and resettlement, 105; and spirits, 102; and weaving, 122, 124, 188; and women, 97, 117, 130. See also eat buffalo; illness; oath against harm Royal Lao Government, 34, 42 rubber plantations, 4, 22–23, 25–26, 157, 204n8 sacrifice; feelings toward, 215n2; reduction in, 69, 209n3; and substitution, 212n16. See also eat buffalo Salemink, Oscar, 31–33, 35, 123 samakkhii. See solidarity sanitation, 75, 78; certification of, 84, 207n2; development of, 77; in model village, 75, 207n2

Index : 237 Sekong Museum, 2, 25, 29, 38, 121, 200; project collage, 11, 13; promotion of New Kandon, 3, 7, 10–11 Sekong River, 1–2, 21, 24, 168 sibling marriage. See matrilateral crosscousin marriages sii kimoc. See ancestor ghosts, reparations to sii nam. See advice site, old. See Old Kandon slavery, 20, 71, 88, 124, 140, 211n13; history of, 31, 63, 67; and the struggle for recognition, 71 Small Kandon, 51, 103 Smith, Adam, 78–79, 83 smoking. See pipes, smoking socialism; ideals of, 97, 117, 198, 201, 203n4; ideology of, 10, 197; and postsocialism, 9 solidarity, 43–44, 82, 206n5; in a culture village, 60, 62, 81–83, 109, 119; and eat buffalo, 41, 111, 117; ethnic, 42–43, 63; and ethnography, 43, 205n14; and gender, 197; and Lao socialism, 38, 42–43, 199, 201; metalanguage of, 30, 79, 84; and the pawat, 42, 44 sorcerers, 103, 106; protection from, 98, 105–106, 108, 183, 185; proximity of, 104–105, 198 sorcery, 103, 106, 186, 188, 211n13; protection from, 98, 103, 185, 209n1 souls, 103, 115, 212n19, spirits, 53, 182, 186, 205n11, 210n5–7; local guardian, 48, 50, 102, 111, 179, 183; nature of, 101–102; and the oath against harm, 102, 105–106; offerings to, 115–116, 160–161; protection of, 103; stone, 6–7, 50, 102; sun, 102, 134; and weaving, 131, 214n10. See also household spirits; rice spirit; village spirit Sprenger, Guido, 209n3, 212n19 state service provision, 58, 72, 75–76 stone, ritually significant, 6–7, 25, 50 struggle, 42–43, 53, 56, 59, 69–71, 207n9 stunting, 85, 88–89, 92, 208n10 success, 8, 14, 19, 21, 43, 71; of development

projects, 74; and ethnic minorities, 29, 43; in Lao political culture, 8, 21, 30, 52, 74, 79–80, 164; of the Lao revolution, 13; markers of, 18, 86, 97; metalanguage of, 8, 14, 30, 74, 83, 97; and necessity, 8, 14; of New Kandon, 8, 12–14, 74–75, 97, 196, 211n8; of resettlement, 53 sun spirit. See spirit, sun taboos, 35, 54, 58, 175–176, 186, 206n19; abandoning, 39, 52, 91; and the rice spirit, 52, 91, 177; sign of, 170–172; and weaving, 131 Ta Oi, 125, 212n2 Tappe, Oliver, 207n9, 215n3 Taylor, Charles, 66, 68 television documentary, 54–55, 58, 108 temporality, 193, 195 textile as text, 138–139 Thateng, 22, 73, 75, 133 thidsadii. See doctrine time. See temporality toilets. See water rooms Tok Lok, 21–22, 46–51, 53, 125, 193–194. See also New Kandon trade 24, 125, 127, 205n16, 213n4; of buffalo, 124, 126, 129, 188, 212n21; items of, 124–126, 129–130, 212n1; and potency, 115–116, 119, 130; and weaving, 123–126, 128–130, 188 Traditional Arts and Ethnology Center, 121 transvestitism, 111, 116, 130 two-footed animals. See animals, two-footed Typhoon Ketsana, 2, 136, 177 unity, 5, 59, 118, 175, 198, 201; and eat buffalo, 111, 117; ethnic, 64, 206n6; lack of, 105, 198; and Lao political culture, 61, 79, 83–84, 108–109, 197, 207n9; metalanguage of, 30, 81; in a Model Healthy Village, 82–83; and the oath against harm, 99, 105, 108, 119, 197; occult power of, 108; as sexual consent, 98–99

238 : Index vanguardism, 12, 81, 83, 93, 200 vanguard projects, 199 Vietnam; and colonial conflict, 31–33; influences on Lao socialism, 12; Lao border with, 21, 30 village festival, 62, 98, 100, 110, 115, 117; suspension of, 109; and violence, 118–119 village plaza, 4, 35 villages in Laos, total number of, 75 village spirit, 100–102, 117, 136, 175, 178–179, 182, 212n17 violence 33, 200; against women, 98–99, 118–119, 158, 195, 197–198, 200; and desire, 160, 163; and silence, 158, 196 wadthanatham. See culture, Lao socialist concept of Walzer, Michael, 13, 199 war; conditions during, 29, 85, 91; and food shortages, 36; and ghosts, 48, 114 watches, 126–128, 135–136, 142, 147, 177 Water and Sanitation Program. See WSP water rooms, 74–76, 78–84, 87, 90, 92–93, 207n4 weavings, 24, 54, 108, 121–123, 125, 127; description of, 122; and desire, 138,

140; history of, 127; and keepingwhile-giving, 139–140; and marriage, 139, 214n8; men wearing, 111, 121; necessity of, 138, 140–141; practice of, 137; recipients of, 136; ritual importance of, 130, 161; and socialism, 213n6; and spirits, 131, 214n10; and trade, 125–127, 129–130, 188, 212n1, 113; value of, 126, 129, 132, 161, 213n3; women’s, 116; women’s potency, 116; as women’s work, 122–123, 125, 130, 135. See also textile and text Weiner, Annette, 139 WHO (World Health Organization), 85, 208n11 witches; killing of, 106; and the oath against harm, 98, 105, 108, 211n8; protection against, 104, 185; and self-awareness, 106; soul of, 103–104; and unity, 105 women; perspectives of, 20; potency of, 116, 130; pregnant, 87, 91 Women’s Three Goods Village, 4 World Health Organization (WHO). See WHO (World Health Organization) WSP (Water and Sanitation Program), 77, 80, 85, 207n4

about the author Holly High received a PhD in anthropology from the Australian National University. She has held postdoctoral positions at Yale University, Cambridge University, and the University of Sydney. She is currently an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Fields of Desire: Poverty and Policy in Laos, an ethnography of poverty-reduction policies from the perspective of a poor ethnic Lao village in Champassak Province. High has been conducting fieldwork with an ethnic Kantu village in Sekong Province since 2011, following an initial scoping visit in 2009. Projectland: Life in a Lao Socialist Model Village is her first monograph recounting that fieldwork.