Mirroring Power: Ethnogenesis and Integration among the Phunoy of Northern Laos

Bouté, Vanina; Tappe, Oliver

doi:10.1355/sj34-1k

Cited by 5 publications

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“…This brief description of the religious life of Phounoy villages at the beginning of the 2000s should not give the impression that there was no individual decision-making, marginal individuals or people singling themselves out from the collective. I have shown this elsewhere (Bouté 2018a) and I would just like to emphasise here that all of the households and their members, depending on an identical mode of subsistence (rice cultivation, animal husbandry), were thus linked to a community of destiny through the collective rituals. What the inhabitants of a Phounoy village expected of the future was characterised by a few requests to face a future made up of regularities (offerings on fixed dates to the spirits or the Buddha, to ask for the fertility of the fields and the prosperity of the families) and of expected irregularities (lightning, drought, disease, accidental deaths).…”

Section: The Phounoy's Aspirations and Relationship To Time And The Futurementioning

confidence: 90%

“…There were also some soothsayers summoned in case of illnesses, addressing rituals to spirits, possibly the dead (dead of the community, ancestors or others) and/or related to places such as forests, rivers, mountains, etc. The rituals were meant to incur their favour or to expel the misfortunes of which they were said to be the cause (Bouté 2018a).…”

Section: The Phounoy's Aspirations and Relationship To Time And The Futurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The collective rituals once celebrated in the village are no longer a recourse against misfortune, and they equally do not guarantee a serene future. While village rites were planned for each delicate moment of agricultural activity, or to respond to collective aspirations (Bouté 2018a), nothing like that existed to anticipate the hazards of an occupation in commerce or a career as a civil servant (should one invest in rubber or tea? Will one get a promotion?…”

Section: From the Village Cyclical Time To The Family And Individual Linear Timementioning

confidence: 99%

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Soothsayers and horoscopes: new modes of inquiring into the future in northern Laos

Bouté

2021

Soc Anthropol

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This article focuses on the transformations of therelationship to the future and to its knowledge among mountain populations inSoutheast Asia in a context of economic and social change. Since its spectaculareconomic development in the 2000s, Laos has experienced an increase inrural‐urban migration, which has transformed the configuration of the country.The massive resettlement of highlanders at the end of the 1990s (and continuing to this day), has led to the gathering of peoplefrom former mountain villages into large,multi‐ethnic villages, towns and even cities. This new context of lifegives rise to new aspirations among these "pioneers of the highlands"and thus the desire to better understand the future in order to know and securemore individual and numerous choices. The objective of this article is to showthe transformations of the highlanders’ relationship to time and to the future,through an insight into the ritual procedures linked to their new aspirations.

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Section: The Phounoy's Aspirations and Relationship To Time And The Futurementioning

confidence: 90%

Section: The Phounoy's Aspirations and Relationship To Time And The Futurementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: From the Village Cyclical Time To The Family And Individual Linear Timementioning

confidence: 99%

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Soothsayers and horoscopes: new modes of inquiring into the future in northern Laos

Bouté

2021

Soc Anthropol

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“…Pierre Petit (2015), in his discussion of upland Tai mobility in the Lao-Vietnamese borderlands, calls for a turn towards local oral traditions inspired by longstanding research traditions established in African anthropology (Vansina 1985). Such approaches enrich the existing excellent anthropological research among upland communities that stress relationality and (ritual) negotiation across cultural difference, (Sprenger 2006a;Évrard 2006;Jonsson 2014;Bouté 2018). Moreover, meticulous studies of indigenous chronicles document regional economic and political networks (see, for example, Grabowsky and Wichasin 2008).…”

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confidence: 98%

“…The latter aspect was presumably the reason why some French administrators did not categorise them in the pejorative 'Kha' category like fellow Mon-Khmer groups (yet others use 'Kha Phong', see Macey 1905). Today, oral accounts by village elders recall the older autonym 'K'nieng' (not in use anymore) and the title of phanya (lord), a Lao title that reveals a certain 'feudal' structure of Phong society in the past, and a longstanding relationship with the Lao realm (see as well Macey 1905: 20;Bouté 2018: 45 for such titles among the Phunoy; see below).…”

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confidence: 99%

Towards a historical anthropology of Upland Laos

Tappe¹

2019

THJ

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When travelling across Houaphan province in upland north-eastern Laos in 2010, I took with me a copy of James Scott’s (2009) Art of Not Being Governed. This thought-provoking book offered fresh perspectives to exploring this ‘Zomian’ landscape and its ethnolinguistically diverse population. Indeed a historical frontier zone of refuge and opportunity, Houaphan’s forested mountains always constituted an escape option for people facing (Siamese, Vietnamese, lowland Lao, or French colonial) imperial interventions (Boutin 1937; Tappe 2015). Even today, the different ethnic groups of Houaphan demonstrate a wide range of flexible livelihoods such as swidden cultivation that carried them through times of crisis and war at the margins of lowland state formations, often seeking creative ways to keep state authorities at bay.

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Controlled experiments: ethnographic notes on the intergenerational dynamics of aspirational migration and agrarian change in upland Laos

Lutz

2021

Soc Anthropol

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This article provides ethnographic insights into the Southeast Asian peasantry’s engagements with agrarian change. It speaks both to Southeast Asian studies’ longstanding interest in the dynamics of socio‐economic transformation, and to anthropology’s burgeoning focus on how future‐oriented aspirations are produced, negotiated and enacted under specific socio‐political, material and historical conditions. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in an ethnic Khmu hamlet in northern Laos, I show upland peasants on the cusp of agrarian transition engaging aspirational migration through ‘controlled experiments’: pioneering pursuits of betterment, crucially buttressed by multiple, locally specific factors. These factors include a still largely intact peasant natural economy, historically endowed intimacy with the modernising state and, not least, a precariously persistent ‘intergenerational contract’ in which youthful mobility and parental stability remain ambiguously yet irreducibly intertwined. Notably, whereas much research on Laos has focused on communities (adversely) impacted by transition, this article discusses a community that is both politically connected and, concomitantly, still relatively unscathed by the (transitory) detriments of commodification, enclosure and dispossession. In sum, this article confirms that while striving for a better future is probably a basic aspect of the human condition, definitions and pursuits of such futures are contextually contingent, not least along generational lines.

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Mirroring Power: Ethnogenesis and Integration among the Phunoy of Northern Laos

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Soothsayers and horoscopes: new modes of inquiring into the future in northern Laos

Soothsayers and horoscopes: new modes of inquiring into the future in northern Laos

Towards a historical anthropology of Upland Laos

Controlled experiments: ethnographic notes on the intergenerational dynamics of aspirational migration and agrarian change in upland Laos

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