History, Memory, and Territorial Cults in the Highlands of Laos

The Past Inside the Present

Pierre Petit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367211257
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429560514
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: Social Sciences

This book captures the dynamics of history, memory, and territorial cults in Houay Yong, a Tai Vat village situated in the multiethnic highland frontier between Laos and Vietnam. By taking seriously the experiences of the villagers, it partakes in a broader movement to reintegrate highlanders and their agency into history at large.

Based on comprehensive fieldwork research and the examination of colonial archives, this book makes accessible, for an English-speaking audience, untapped French archives on Laos and early publications on territorial cults written by French ethnologists. In so doing, it provides a balanced perspective, drawing from the fields of memory studies and classical historical research. Following a chronological approach stretching from the nineteenth century to the present, it extends narrative analysis through a comparative ethnography of territorial cults, a key component of the performative and material presentification of the past.

Highly interdisciplinary in nature, History, Memory and Territorial Cults in the Highlands of Laos will be useful to students and scholars of anthropology, history, and religious studies, as well as Asian culture and society.

1 Introduction

The stakes of history in a highland village

June 9 2010. A busy day in Houay Yong: the canals of the rice fields have to be maintained. Teams of workers are constituted in the morning, each house providing one laborer. Bunnyèng, head of the Youth Union and son of the naai baan (chief of the village) Bunsoon, supervises the activity; he explains to us precisely how it is organized based on chu, the smallest administrative units of the settlement. We follow up the workers who proceed upstream along the canal close to the village, removing the dirt and other elements that congest the water flow.

We chat with some workers and are eventually invited by Bunsoon, the naai baan, to take a rest with his stepbrother Buasai and some of their friends, mostly male adults and elders (phuu nyai), who speak proudly – and loudly – about their coconut trees in the place. After that pause and some coconut tasting, we walk upstream with the naai baan alone to complete the visit of the village’s irrigation system. We cross the small river Huai Yoong and climb eastward up the terraced rice fields on the mountain slope. Bunsoon and the two Lao members of the team (Sommay and Amphone V.) can easily find their way on the narrow embankments between the paddies, but I feel much less at ease, and end up after the climb quite muddy, which is great fun for my younger colleagues. The height we reach, just above a little canal, offers a splendid view of the valley (Figure 1.2). We pause and gaze – we often joked saying we had chosen the fieldwork site for the beauty of the landscape. We launch the discussion about the former inhabitants of Houay Yong village, the mysterious (to us, at least) Tai Soi, switching on our small voice recorder.

Figure 1.1 The maintenance of the lower canal (9 June 2010).

I provide here two excerpts of this discussion to immerse the reader into the complexities of oral narratives [51]. The first one explains how the Tai Vat, the present inhabitants of the village, eventually replaced the Tai Soi, who were settled in the valley when the former came. The Tai Soi could reportedly not compete with the industrious Tai Vat, and went back to their place of origin, Muang Soi.

Figure 1.2 The valley seen from our resting place, above the higher canal, on the day of our visit. Note the terraced rice fields (front) and the swiddens on the mountain slopes on the other side of the valley (9 June 2010).

¹, ²

After explaining how the Tai Soi left the place to the benefit of the Tai Vat, the naai baan explains the origins of other villages in the valley. From where we stay, we can see Houay Yong on the right (the North, downstream), and the vicinity of the village of Ban Kang on the left (the south, upstream) (see Map 2.1). As appears in the following excerpt, Ban Kang is a new village compared with Houay Yong. It has been displaced three times, moving upstream on the Huai Yoong stream, pushing out some Khmu (a Mon-Khmer people widely distributed in northern and central Laos) to their reported place of origin, the village of Nong Thop, in the mountains on the west (see Map 3.1).

These transcriptions provide a glimpse of how history is narrated by villagers – a village chief, in this instance – to visiting scholars interested in their past and their society. In this rural highland context, orality is the main source of history, because no manuscript in the village keeps a written record of past events. It has always been a challenge, first of all, to make history from such statements because of the confusion linked with the oral style: actors are ill defined, information is thick, sometimes contradictory, consisting of shortcuts, and laden with elements that have been taken for granted. In addition to these trivial elements, which are rarely addressed in the literature, scholars ascribe the difficulty of making history from oral statements to the scarcity of written sources for crosschecking the data, and to the complete intertwinement of the past and the present. As the historian Jan Vansina wrote, long ago, in his seminal book on oral traditions:

One cannot deny either the past or the present in them. To attribute their whole content to the evanescent present as some sociologists do, is to mutilate tradition; it is reductionistic. To ignore the impact of the present as some historians have done, is equally reductionistic. Traditions must always be understood as reflecting both past and present in a single breath.

(Vansina 1985: xii)

The interview excerpt brings out the fluidity and complexity of the human settlement in the valley: it refers to no fewer than six resettlements, four ethnic groups, and five ethnonyms – and this is just the tree hiding the forest. Dates, the cornerstone of history, are often absent in such oral accounts. The narrative above, with two reliable dates, is an exception. As a state officer, Bunsoon is eager to refer to specific years, in line with what is expected in official documents. But if plausible dates are sometimes provided about recent events, this hardly applies to ancient times. At some point, Bunsoon mentioned 1769 for the settlement of the Tai Vat in the valley, a date he got from another villager presented as the local historian, Thaabun [42, 250]. This last date is, however, not plausible from a chronological point of view, as is demonstrated later.

Despite all this, historical research in this regime of orality is very rewarding for historians as well as for anthropologists. It is the central topic of the first half of this book. History, in the common sense of event-driven history, is a never-ending issue many villagers indulge in discussing at length with passing researchers, because it deals with questions of origins and identity, of morality and legitimacy. This last point appears strikingly in the excerpt, when Bunsoon compares the industriousness and diligence of the different populations to explain and justify how the Tai Vat took over the leadership from the Tai Soi, and how the Tai Dam of Ban Kang eventually displaced the Khmu. Rather than a statement on chronology, the whole excerpt can be deciphered as an assertion of the group’s virtues and its legitimate rights to land. The local interest in history is also motivated by the fact that narrating the past is an important enactment of one’s status, especially for adult and elder men.

The reference to history and memory in this book’s title reflects that, in line with the inspirational quote of Vansina above, my interest is limited neither to the objective aspects of history nor to its subjective dimension. The historical accounts reported throughout the volume are in no way ‘neutral’ oral archives, but situated assertions. In this sense, the present book is a contribution to ethnohistory, if we characterize the latter as research on “folk history,” or “the view a society has of its past,” as Carmack defined it in his seminal article (1972: 239).³ How do the people narrate their own past in specific contexts? Who is entitled to do so? How is this narration supported, or enacted, by non-verbal supports? How do the current stakes of a society inform the whole process? Whatever the interest of such issues, they can hardly be addressed if one ignores the alleged referent of these discourses and performances, that is, the past, in the sense of events that happened some time ago. This deserves a chronological approach as well, which is underdeveloped in the current research in Laos.⁴ The twin concerns I have raised here are in line with the commitment of ethnohistory, in opposition to memory studies, which often lack an interest in the objective aspects of the past, and to classical history, which usually lacks an interest in the present stakes for the past. The late Grant Evans told me a few years ago he regretted how few historians were involved in research in Laos, compared with the huge contingent of anthropologists. I hope the present monograph, a study of history through the lens of anthropology, will contribute to a better balance between the two disciplines.

Another relevant point of our ethnographic vignette is the role played by materiality and visuality in the discussion with Naai baan Bunsoon. Our dialogue was geared by the landscape in front of us. He referred to the canals we had just crossed to emphasize that his ancestors built them; he mentioned the place where the temple of the Tai Soi formerly stood, where bronze artifacts were discovered when the school was built later on; he pointed to the mango trees down on the road as a reminder of the time when the population of Ban Kang had not yet resettled upstream.

On a subsequent visit in 2017, strolling down the mountain slope after a washed-down lunch on the opposite side of the valley, a fellow guest pointed to the eastern side of the valley to tell me that this area used to be reserved for the village chiefs before the communist revolution, which happened in 1953 in this province [218]. Indeed, as recently argued by Pholsena and Tappe (2013: 6–7) about post-conflict landscapes in former Indochina, landscapes are much more than a “setting”: they are meaningful. But their meanings change with time and with the vantage point of the speaker.

The landscape is only one of the material supports of memory in the valley. The second part of the book is devoted to village shrines and territorial cults. Most settlements in the valley have a shrine for village spirits, typically a wooden post imbued with a power of protection for the village, and miniature houses for the local spirits. It is placed under the responsibility of a descendant of the first settlers. This is very much in line with other founders’ cults that have been described across the whole subcontinent of southeast Asia (Mus 1933, 1975; Tannenbaum and Kammerer 2003; Schlemmer 2012). The shrine is not a commemorative monument: it is activated through ritual performances taking place every year, or when a special event requires a ceremony. The distribution of roles in the ritual is still related to pre-revolutionary lineage hierarchies, despite the 65 years that have elapsed since the communist revolution in Houaphan (1953), and despite the policy restricting or prohibiting reportedly ‘superstitious’ rituals at the turn of the 1970s/1980s. Such resilience is much more than the conservative perpetuation of a frozen past. Some rituals have disappeared – this is the case of a territorial cult involving about ten villages in the vicinity of Houay Yong – whereas some others have transformed. New political incumbents have been coopted in the narratives about the village shrine in Houay Yong, and are materialized through a specific spirit house. In 2010, the wooden post has been encased with cement and inscribed with dates, similar to new memorials erected throughout Houaphan, under the influence of a neo-traditional monument built by the authorities at the province capital. The subtitle of this book – The Past Inside the Present – originates from my own surprise: I was impressed that a village pillar so intimately attached to the historical memory of the group had been enclosed in cement, a material associated with modernity by the Tai Vat. It was for me a strong metaphor about the way the past survives inside the present, encapsulated, framed, and veiled by it.

Figure 1.3 The village post (lak man) of Houay Yong. The date of its enhancement (2 February 2010) has been molded on the cement when it was fresh (June 2010).

This transformation of the shrine, through cement and writing, has been the first occurrence of modern monumentality in Houay Yong. It opens the question about “places of memory” (lieux de mémoire) in this local and rural context. The concept was coined by the French historian Pierre Nora to describe material, but also immaterial institutions created with the intent to support memory, such as monuments, museums, popular books on history, commemoration ceremonies, and so on (Nora 1997 [1984–1992]). Intentionality is a very important component of the concept, compared with non-intentional traces of the past that are to be found everywhere (ibid. 37–38). According to Nora, the lieux de mémoire are typical of (post)industrial societies, like France, that underwent an acceleration of history, a rupture from their past, due partly to rural flight to the cities. If a society has to sustain a specific memory through such institutions, it is because it is not anymore a “memory-society” (ibid. 23), that is, a society where the transmission of values, worldviews, and practices is spontaneous. As Nora observed, “the less memory is lived from inside, the more it needs external supports and tangible benchmarks of an existence that goes on only through them” (ibid. 30).

Nora’s book has been a turning point in historical studies, and triggered a wave of research on memory, with a focus on spatiality, emotions, identity making, and political use of the past. As Berliner (2005) rightly notes, memory has since become a buzzword in anthropology, due to its capacity to reformulate old debates on culture and identity. This present book tries to avoid the traps of this “memory boom” by focusing on historical memory, defined as the situated narration of past events of collective importance, through discursive and performative statements. The larger issues of cultural transmission and continuity covered by the flow of memory studies are not the central theme of this book, although the latter does contribute to this larger debate.

To come back to Nora’s seminal work, it has been criticized for being unquestionably based on the French nation-state, which limits its comparative use. The “peripheral” societies Nora refers to in his introduction were brought to historicity after they were “awakened from their ethnological sleep by the colonial rape” (Nora 1997: 23). Many authors have disapproved of such a conception of a great divide in the regimes of historicity (Moniot 1999: 18). Despite this obvious flaw, the question remains: can the concept of lieux de mémoire be used in contexts wholly different from France? Can we use Nora under the tropics, as Moniot (1999) asked provocatively?

The challenge has been partly taken up in Laos. In 1998, Grant Evans published The Politics of Ritual and Remembrance. Laos since 1975, which investigates the rhetoric of political legitimacy at the turn of the last millennium. The book can be read as a study about the continuity of symbols despite political changes in Laos. The transitions from a monarchy to a republic, from a Buddhist state to a Marxist–Leninist state, from revolutionary socialism to market socialism, all failed in Evans’s view to produce a new symbolic order. Hence the regime progressively relied on older references to sustain its legitimacy through ceremonies, statues, iconography, and the like. However, this process does not amount to a simple restoration of former symbols: no overt reference is made to the pre-revolutionary monarchic regime or to touchy aspects of the early post-revolutionary past. This triggers a paradoxical memory, half-performed, half-unspeakable, and hardly acknowledged as such by the authorities who rely on it. This ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Dramatis personae
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The setting
• 3 Traditions on origins
• 4 From the French colony to the present
• 5 The ethnography of territorial cults
• 6 Territorial cults in a regional perspective
• 7 Conclusion
• References
• Archives
• Fieldnotes
• Index