Reconfigurations of the Past in an Ambiguous Present. Memory discourses, social change, and inter-ethnic relations in Houaphan, Lao PDR

Historical Periods

In pre-colonial times, the sparsely populated highland region of present-day Laos used to be in a symbiotic relationship with the Tai-Buddhist polities located in the river basins. Flows of goods, ideas, and people connected different regions and groups. However, the Mon-Khmer speaking highland groups – pejoratively called kha (servant) – resumed the lowest position in the traditional political hierarchy of the Tai-Lao principalities as reflected in many local myths and royal chronicles (Photisane 1996). Under French colonial administration (1893-1954), the flexible exchange relation between lowlands and highlands was turned into a state-minority-relation according to European concepts of the nation-state introducing forms of centralised authority and taxation systems. Lowland Lao political, economic and cultural domination over the highland people increased at the end of the colonial period and after Laos’ national independence in 1954. The Lao communist movement translated these developments into a discourse of suppression and exploitation, thereby mobilising many minority groups for the revolutionary cause. During the two Indochina Wars (1946-54, 1964-1973), the Lao communists – as well as their Vietnamese comrades – relied heavily on the support of the marginalised highland population. Ethnic groups such as the Khmu or the Hmong carried the burden of the war, many of them becoming victims of the American bombing raids, and joined the communists as guerrillas.
From the 1950s onwards, the so-called ‘liberated zone’ along the Lao-Vietnamese border was established. During the continuous American air bombing in the 2nd Indochina War (1964-73), the leaders of the Lao communist movement and thousands of civilians hid inside large caves near the town of Viengsay in Houaphan province. The region is thus regarded as the cradle of the Lao revolution. Here, the revolutionaries created a model version of the later socialist state of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, which was to be declared in 1975. Communism arose as a specific form of modernity that was meant to develop the ‘backward’ highlands, and consequently Houaphan was one of the first regions that faced immense transformations concerning political organisation and agricultural production. Concurrently, the heterogeneous population was moulded into the ‘Lao multi-ethnic people’ (pasason lao banda phao), a key phrase in the revolutionary discourse propagating ethnic equality and solidarity. Traditional ethnic hierarchies that characterised the relations between lowland Lao and the highland population as well as between the minority groups themselves were condemned as ‘feudal’. A society of new socialist man beyond ethnic boundaries was supposed to substitute these relations.
Transformations of the political and socio-economic domains in the highlands were further aggravated in the Lao context by war-induced displacement and resettlement programms. Sedentary villages consisting of different ethnic groups became the rule. More recently, the shift to a capitalist market economy entailing agricultural commercialisation and land reform projects marks a clear break with both traditional and socialist patterns of land tenure and property relations. By taking other development schemes into account – e.g. projects encouraged by international actors such as the World Bank or Asian Development Bank – it becomes evident that the ideology of market capitalism and economic growth currently sweeps away the legacy of the Lao socialist project of creating an egalitarian multi-ethnic society. Despite its significance as a revolutionary lieu de mémoire and its prominent role in official Lao historiography, Houaphan has economically and politically a rather marginal position. While cross-border trade with nearby Vietnam is growing, the connection to the prospering Mekong region and therefore integration into the Lao national economy is still insufficient. Yet, tourism is picking up, and together with the gradual commercialisation of agriculture these developments are emblematic for the arrival of globalised modernity and a new dynamic of social change in the region.