The politics of ritual and remembrance: Laos since 1975 by Grant Evans (published by University of Hawaiʻi Press in 1998) remains a lively and highly readable account of Lao politics and society. It offers a thorough meditation on the implications of the revolution of 1975 for the people and government of Laos.
For this New Mandala series on the moments that matter most for the study of mainland Southeast Asia it is clear that Evans’ contribution is still one of the crucial texts.
In one section, on page 6, Evans argues that:
New regimes, like the LPDR [Lao Peoples' Democratic Replublic] at the end of 1975, set out to reconstruct the past through repression and reinterpretation, in order to create a different present. Yet, despite the massive means of coercion at the disposal of modern states, this project is an extremely difficult one to accomplish. In Laos we saw the spectacle of books and memorabilia from the old regime being burned by soldiers. Anticipating trouble, others burned books or old photographs, depleting the sources of stored memory in a country with a preciously small historical archive anyway (fortunately, many people hid them away in the bottom of draws or cupboards). Some with surnames belonging to “leading reactionaries” changed them or ceased to use them — in a historically perverse reversal to an earlier time when Lao did not use surnames.
As a starting point for our understanding of modern Laos, 1975 requires constant attention. I have no doubt that even since Evans’ work in the 1990s the conceptualisation of the revolution and its pivotal year has changed significantly. There is still much to say about 1975 and all that.
So far in this series we have touched on Burma in 1962 and Thailand in 1932. I am the first to acknowledge that all of these starting points have been reasonably predictable. Next up is Vietnam in 1986.
1975 seems rather too obvious. Why not 1962?
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you have very interested Lao History. Lao them self are lack off about their Lao history. PLease send me more if you have any writing about the correct Lao history. Thank,
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I agree that Grant Evan`s book remains a crucial text in the study of contemporary Laos. I would add that Vatthana Pholsena`s book of 2006 provides additional incites of great significance.
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“(fortunately, many people hid them away in the bottom of draws or cupboards)”. There is actually a large amount of old books printed before 1975 sold at books stores in Vienchan. Although there quite expensive, well worth it. Especially, for those Lao who grew up abroad.
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1975? 1962?
I think that to understand the history of modern Laos I think is necessary to go back to the split of the Lan Xan Kingdom or, at least to the arrival of the French.
Beside Evans and Pholsena, I would also recommend, of course, Stuart Fox.
A book I would recommend to everybody interested in Lao history is “The politics of heroin in South East Asia”. Through the subject of the opium and heroin gives a general overview of the complicated modern history of, not only of laos but all the Indochina countries (which of course is interrelated).
Curiously there is not apparent censorship on foreign books in Laos, the only problem is that books are very expensive in this part of the world.
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True, I was quite surprise to find Grant Evans “The last Century of Lao Royalty” at the little book shop in Wattay Airport.
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There are several indications of surprise that Laos appears to have no censorship, particularly in foreign languages. There might be more if anybody wrote or translated into Lao — so far the only significant translation is Grant Evans excellent ‘Short History’…which did not endear Grant to the Ministry of Culture, although neither the English nor the Lao version are banned — I have both in my bookshop and no problem for the seller or buyer (not 100% sure about the author). Compared to its neighbours, Laos might well be the only ASEAN country not to have officially banned any book. Of course, to ban it one or more officials would have to read it. We should make no assumptions about comparative liberalism in Laos until Lao really begin to read. As for symbols of the old regime — has nobody noticed that Laos is the only People’s Republic to name its roads after kings, and to welcome visitors with statues of kings not revolutionaries.
And the three-headed elephant in the middle of the main road in from the airport. Maybe nobody could be bothered to knock it down, maybe nobody takes such decorations seriously except a few western or westernised academics.
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I turned up a few books that had “disappeared” within Laos in 1975 by searching archives in Thailand. One was (memorably) printed at the absolute last minute before the revolutionaries took over the capital (something like 1974?) but had the ancien régime promoted on the cover, title page, etc. etc. …and despite the fact that its contents were Buddhist, the book as a whole looked like such an absurd piece of propaganda (for the pro-American government that had just disappeared) that I could hardly blame them for taking it off of library shelves (circa 1975).
The copy of that book (that I found and brought back from Thailand) was reproduced by photocopy in a plain cover –omitting the illustrations and insignia (i.e., that did not contribute to the content of the book, but reflected the political patronage that paid for it pre-1975). It is now, thus, available in Vientiane.
The Communists didn’t do all that much book-burning in Laos, compared to China (to the north) or Cambodia (to the south), but the mean spirit of censorship remains strong among some in the party elite. Leafing through books at the National University will reveal that many have specific pages torn out… and I was assured that this was not done by students accidentally, but by individual professors and Party Members who take the time to do this (i.e., without being paid to) so that the students can’t read whatever they consider ideologically unacceptable.
The original National Library of Laos was burned down by the Japanese, and the current library is housed in what used to be the French colonial era “public security” building, where people were tortured (or “interrogated”) in sheds around the back. Presumably, a large part of what was lost in the Japanese conquest would have been the French Colonial administrative records… but I have never read a study of this question.
Robert, the Lao government’s re-appropriation of the nationalist discourse of historical kings (and the raising of new monuments to them) is a recent chapter of history that has been well-researched and widely written about. If you’re reading the high-school level history books (in Lao, by the Lao government) you will see that these kings are now valorized as one stage in the nation’s “material dialectic” of progress… a trope that was not at all unusual in Leninist states rewriting their pre-modern histories (although, in Laos, it did follow after a brief period of rejecting all of that history as “feudal”, and therefore having nothing good in it, etc.). This is to say that even feudal kings can now be celebrated as stages in a struggle for national liberation, that culminates with the Communist Party. This point is not too subtle at the Army Museum in the outskirts of Vientiane (where most of the visitors are themselves members of the military, but foreign tourists are also welcome to attend). The military history of the country there does indeed start with remote Lao kings… and progresses to the more recent wars against the Americans and the Thais. Of course, more generalized Marxist concerns like slavery and the oppression of the poor have largely disappeared from this latest stage of the re-writing of Lao Communist history, while other themes such as the historical borders of Laos having been larger than they are now (etc.) still have a place of prominence in the story as it is now told.
With all of these things, N.F., the question soon becomes what is anyone going to do about it now?
In terms of extant literature of/from/in Laos, a large part of it is in Pali (or demotic Pali mixed with old local dialects) that almost nobody can read… and another large part of it is in very well-bound books printed in Moscow that nobody does read.
Many of the Soviet-era translations of the Marxist canon into Lao were completed too late into the 1980s to be influential within the country (although they are written in impeccable, high-quality Lao translation…). I’m saying this of “canonical” works (like Das Kapital itself, etc.) –I’m aware that there was also a strange literature of in-classroom pamphlets of the Communist era that was more influential (and these have been surveyed in a few conference papers, etc., in recent years). Some these canonical works were translated from Russian, but many were translated directly from German, resulting in dictionaries (etc.) for both languages (rather better than the Lao-English dictionaries, etc.). During a period of two and a half years in the country, I did not meet a single Lao person who considered Lenin and Marx to have been two different people, as they had learned this as a hyphenated name (as per “Marxist-Leninism” in English).
The current generation of in-classroom propaganda, I note, was paid for by the government of Australia, and deserves to be the subject of its own critique in turn.
In Laos, I never met one person who really read Pali; conversely, I never met one person who really read Marx. They’ve had several successive waves of “canonical literature” created and then lost… or that they’ve simply lost interest in.
However, still today, the Communist Party provides an education (and access to literacy) to a far smaller number of students than the Buddhist temples do… and somewhere out of the mixed influence of those temple-schools and Thai soap-operas, the next generation of the Lao intellectuals will emerge. Whether or not any of them will take an interest in the work of Grant Evans remains to be seen; but, for better or worse, it is possible that Evans will be more influential than Karl Marx and the Pali canon combined (and yet, far less influential than Thai soap-operas…).
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I think Dr. Chou Norindr’s studies of Laos are quite significant as is the thesis on Lao politics done by Dr. Mongkhol Don Sasorith. Dr. Chou became a critic of the LPDR but his writings on pre-1975 Laos are useful for all scholars. Dr. Mongkhol’s thesis is hard to find. However, it provides a rare breakdown of the key factions dabbling in Lao politics. Recently a new set of texts on Lao-Viet relations has been put into print. It is not available to the public at this time but having gained access to a set I can say it has some new details which were previously excluded from earlier studies. The most striking to me is an actual listing of the number of Viet Minh volunteers fighting in Laos in the early 1950s. At this time the Neo Lao Issara (early name for the Pathet Lao) amounted for less than 15% of the revolutionary forces.
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