Experimental Consensus: Negotiating with the Irrigating State in the South of Laos

Abstract

It is common to view Laos as a political culture prone to “consensus”, yet it is also true that policy is constantly changing there, often radically. If everyone is always “in consensus”, what can explain this change? I suggest that the answer is found in the particular kind of consensus at play: it is informed by a wider “experimentarian” ethic evident in rural Laos, where ideas (including the latest policies) are put to the test through practical implementation. The results of these experiments are used to validate policy change and reversal. This allows rural residents a degree of manoeuvrability in their engagements with the state that is striking given the “authoritarian” status of the current regime. It can explain and is used to justify, for instance, the oft-observed gap between policy and actual practice. This room for manoeuvre comes at the price of “playing the game”, at least for a while, of the latest policy fad, sometimes with disastrous consequences for rural livelihoods. I use the example of an irrigation project that was implemented in the south of Laos from 1999–2002 to examine “experimental consensus” at work as policy was received, engaged and eventually relinquished.     

From revolutionary heroism to cultural heritage: museums,memory and representation in Laos

ABSTRACT. Museum exhibitions in Laos represent two main strands of Lao national identity discourse. First, they glorify the ‘liberation struggle’ of the so‐called ‘Lao multiethnic people’ under the leadership of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party, and therefore serve as important ideological tools for the current regime's self‐legitimisation. Second, they display the history and cultural heritage of the Lao nation, providing the postcolonial state with a narrative of historical continuity and civilisation that is focused mostly on the dominant ethnic Lao culture. This article explores the contradictions within official images of the Lao nation‐state and how these opposing strands of national identity compete or interact. Museums as key arenas of ideological tensions constitute illuminating fields of research on discourses of national identity in Laos.     

State Spaces of Resistance: Industrial Tree Plantations and the Struggle for Land in Laos

Land grabbing has transformed rural environments across the global South, generating resistance or political reactions “from below”. In authoritarian countries like Laos, where resource investments are coercively developed and insulated from political dissent, resistance appears absent at first glance. Yet, it is occurring under the radar, largely outside transnational activist networks. In this article, we examine how resistance can protect access to rural lands in contexts where it is heavily repressed. Resistance here occurs with, rather than against the state by foregrounding the contradictions of land use and ownership within state spaces, such as competing goals of large‐scale industrial plantations versus smallholder agriculture and national forest conservation. Such contradictions are engaged by using historical, place‐based political connections to exploit the scalar frictions of a fragmented state and occupying plantation clearance sites to highlight contested lands in situ. Nonetheless, such strategies remain spatially and socially uneven amongst the Lao peasantry.     

Harnessing the sending state: Pragmatic improvisations and negotiated memberships of the Chinese diaspora in Laos

As a form of state-led transnationalism, diaspora strategies have garnered much scholarly attention over the past two decades. Yet, the robust intellectual field still sees a dearth of works addressing how the power of the sending state is lived and experienced in the prosaic lives of transnationality. This paper fills the gap by examining the grounded ramifications of a specific approach that the Chinese government deploys to cultivate diaspora. It prioritizes coopting civil association leaders (hui-zhang) from populations abroad for diaspora governance. I unpack how street-level bureaucracies involved in the execution of this sending state strategy has been exploited by the Chinese entrepreneurs in Laos through qualitative fieldwork. My analysis reveals that these situated actors scrambled to set up their own diaspora associations in an attempt to make themselves hui-zhang eligible for the home country government's targeted engagement. In doing so, they accessed opportunities to appropriate and rework resources from the Chinese state for self-interested accumulation of symbolic and social capital. Both forms of capital are crucial to propel their wealth amassment in private career as intermediaries who extract commissions and kickbacks by brokering Chinese investments into Laos. Detailing these dynamics, the paper elucidates how the power of the sending state is disseminated and enacted through mundane and pragmatic improvisations of diasporic actors. Empirics presented also bring forward a nuanced understanding of the de facto convoluted relations between the Chinese government and the overseas Chinese populations.     

Artur Hazelius and the ethnographic display of the Scandinavian peasantry: a study in context and appropriation

Artur Hazelius (1833–1901), founder of the Nordiska Museet and the Skansen Open-Air Museum, was a pioneering figure in the practice of ethnographic display in Europe. Hazelius achieved Europe-wide recognition following his presentation of Swedish and Scandinavian peasant ethnography at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1878, where his displays were reviewed positively in the international press. This paper argues that the significance of the Hazelian ethnographic project was embedded in overlapping contextual frames with centres in Stockholm and Paris. If the displays most readily spoke to a general concern with the decline of traditional life as rooted in the countryside, they arguably took on other, different and occasionally conflicting meanings as they were moved from one exhibitionary context to another. Whereas in Stockholm the ethnographic displays were inscribed in the conciliatory rhetoric of Scandinavism, the exhibitionary setting of the exposition universelle imposed an interpretative frame defined by the logic of a competitive nationalism. For Nordic audiences, the scenes reflected the positive historical significance of the peasantry in the unfolding narrative of Scandinavian political modernity; for the French audience, however, those same scenes were either applauded for their life-likeness or seen as reflective of the ethnographic richness of the ‘kingdom of Sweden’.     

The Legacy of the Vietnam War: Making a Living amid Unexploded Ordnance in Xieng Khouang Province,Northern Laos

Laos was drawn into the Second Indochina War, making the country the most heavily bombed country on earth. Although the war ended more than four decades ago, unexploded ordnance (UXO) continues to kill and injure civilians. In many provinces UXO constitutes the major hindrance to socioeconomic development and obstacle to local people earning a decent living. The aim of this article is to examine the ways in which local people have developed livelihood strategies to survive in dangerous environments through the lens of sustainable livelihood perspectives. This article argues that livelihood improvements in Xieng Khouang Province should be characterised as a bottom-up phenomenon. UXO is still a major concern for the government and local people with respect to achieving development objectives. As the financial resources for UXO clearance are limited, education is a powerful tool for creating awareness of UXO risks among local people. The research suggests that more resources should be mobilised to deal with UXO problems.     

Governor Sir Thomas Brisbane's experiment in press freedom: A quantitative evaluation through media system dependency

ABSTRACT

The relatively isolated circumstances of colonial Australia provide a natural laboratory for examining the establishment of press freedom there in 1824. A quantitative content analysis of newspapers from 1821 to 1825, guided by media system dependency (MSD) theory, suggests publishers were more concerned with exploiting the end of their dependence on the government as censor than with addressing their remaining dependence on the government as a well-funded advertiser. Findings also reveal considerable variation among publications and between colonies. The analysis also demonstrates the value of MSD theory in historical research.     

Interpreting Gender Mainstreaming by NGOs in India: A comparative ethnographic approach

This article examines the way gender mainstreaming is interpreted by specific non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in India whose development initiatives draw upon particular ideologies of gender equality in their attempts to apply gender analysis. Its purpose is to locate and situate gender mainstreaming in the culturally specific contexts in which it is practiced to capture the complex realities in which gender policies are implemented and women are positioned to effect change. This is an important focus given that gender mainstreaming now pervades transnational governance and yet is informed by feminist analysis. Moreover, NGOs form key sites in which these policies are expected to be implemented. Of the critiques of gender mainstreaming which have emerged in the last 10 years, I examine how potentially conflicting models of gender inequality and equality take local expression and expand on the importance of framing in making gender mainstreaming meaningful by attending to indigenous interpretations of feminism and gender equality. The analysis I offer provides an ethnographic and comparative contribution to an understanding of gender mainstreaming as a contested site whose possibilities and limitations can be revealed by an attention to its feminist origins, namely a focus on context, process and identity formation.     

Assessing Methodologies in Archaeological Ethnography: A Case for Incorporating Ethnographic Training in Graduate Archaeology Curricula

Abstract

Archaeologists have increasingly turned to ethnography as a tool for understanding the contemporary social context of material culture, archaeological practice, and ‘de-colonizing’ archaeology. Furthermore, ethnographers have turned their analysis to the practice of archaeology, providing insights into key ethical dilemmas. This work has produced signi?cant dialogue, demonstrating the potential for research and collaboration at the interface of two sub-disciplines. However, much of the research to date has relied on a limited range of ethnographic methods. We suggest that archaeologists working in this area would bene?t from using a wider repertoire of ethnographic data collection tools and ethics training opportunities. We advocate for greater collaboration between archaeologists and ethnographers and provide suggestions on methods that are well-suited for use in archaeological practice. In the long term, the most effective and far-reaching solution may be to incorporate ethnographic methods training as fundamental to graduate programmes in archaeology.     

A missing link in the history of historiography: scholarly personae in the world of Alfred Dove

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the case of Alfred Dove (1844–1916), this article contributes to an emerging line of research on scholarly personae in the history of historiography. It does so by addressing the important but so far neglected question: What exactly does the prism of scholarly personae add to existing historiographical perspectives? The German historian Alfred Dove is an appropriate case study for this exercise, because historical scholarship in Wilhelmine Germany has been relatively well studied, from various angles. Most notably, it has been studied (1) through biographical lenses, (2) from institutional points of view, (3) as the cradle of ‘scientific history’, with special attention to historical methods of the sort codified by Ernst Bernheim, and (4) in relation to religious and political fault lines that divided the German Empire shortly after the Franco-Prussian War and the Kulturkampf. The thesis advanced in this article is that scholarly personae are a missing link between these four dimensions and therefore a theme of key importance for anyone trying to understand German historical studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.     

Hybrid territorialisation: A reconfiguration of rural spaces through gold mining in Upper Guinea

In this article, our aim is to analyse the process of territorialisation in the region of Upper Guinea following the rapid increase in gold mining exploitation since the 2000s. Territorialisation is analysed as a new way of doing space and creating boundaries in an area where boundaries have historically been negotiable and where artisanal and small-scale mining is plurisecular and gives rise to ephemeral spaces. Our first objective is to retrace changes in gold mining activities and spaces over the last decade, and to analyse the expansion of the mining industry as an extractive territorialisation, involving processes that lead to the fixation of the gold diggers’ mobility. Secondly, this article shows how this extractive territorialisation can in fact be analysed as a hybrid one, since it seems to lay the groundwork for state territorial control: first, it formalises spaces linked to and surrounding the exploitation area; second, it seems to correlate to a more general tendency of appropriation under the territorial model by local communities. Territorialisation, understood as both a political and a spatial process, serves thus as a starting point for the analysis of space formalisation in a peripheral region where the state is often seen by locals as mainly absent.     

A College Student's Rural Journey: Early Sociology and Anthropology in China Seen through Fieldwork on Sichuan's Secret Society

This paper focuses on the investigators of rural society in the Republican period,specifically research made through fieldwork on the Gowned Brothers (or,Paoge) in 1940s Sichuan.It takes up one such investigator,Shen Baoyuan—a student at Yenching University;her youthful work never became published or recognized.The present study reveals how the pioneers of Chinese sociology and anthropology,who called themselves "rural activists," tried to understand rural China.It argues that the developments in those fields in China of the 1920s and 1940s made it possible for us today to have a better understanding of the contemporary rural problems.The investigators played an important role in the Rural Construction and Rural Education Movements in Republican China.They show us how Western sociology and anthropology were localized in order to answer "Chinese questions" and to solve "Chinese problems." As source material,these investigations have given us rich records,which in turn have become precious sources and historical memories of rural China's past.