Buddhist Statecraft and the Politics of Ethnicity in Laos: Buddhification and interethnic relations in historical and anthropological perspective

3. Field sites, historical sources, research methods, and questions

The historical part of the project dealing with the pre-colonial and colonial era is based on textual and archival research. Textual materials from Laos – mostly local chronicles and law texts to be found in the national library or local monasteries – are then compared to the sources that deal with Theravada Buddhism’s general political philosophy as presented for example in the Buddhist canon and its commentaries. Archival research on French colonial sources will investigate how the colonial politics of religion and culture shaped ethnic and religious identities and transformed notions of statecraft. Assuming that the French colonial archives not only exemplify a functional production of knowledge through colonial governance with regard to religion and ethnicity, research in and on the archive will also focus on traces of incompleteness or uncertainty of knowledge and ‘colonial anxieties’ (Stoler 2008). An analysis of Lao sources that were produced by the Ministry of Religion and Culture and the institutions responsible for ethnic minority affairs can provide important information. French colonial and Lao sources also document the uprisings of ethnic minorities in the early colonial period, and the project will investigate if these can be seen as resistance strategies aiming at an active withdrawal from state integration based on differing concepts of socio-political organisation and their manifestations in space (Deleuze & Guattari 1987). A comparative outlook at Thailand’s missionary programmes in the 1960s will supplement the Lao data. In the context of these programmes monks visited minority villages in order to spread Buddhism aiming to integrate them into the nation state and ward off the communist threat via a Buddhist mission civilisatrice. This will involve fieldwork in Chiang Mai and an investigation of the documentation of this programme. If possible, oral history interviews with monks who were involved in this programme will be carried out. Minority villages around Chiang Mai that were targeted by proselytising monks will also be visited.

A period of fieldwork in Northern Laos (Luang Prabang) will examine the integration of Mon-Khmer minorities such as the Khamu into Buddhist state rituals. The latter have undergone significant transformations as the Party has rearranged the role of minorities in these rituals. An in-depth look at the ritual domain will help to determine if and how a socialist discourse on ethnic equality is now being replaced by a carefully engineered Buddhist hegemony expressed in rituals. Here, the contradictions of this Buddhist revival shall be researched, as this process remains incomplete and deeply ambiguous due to the surviving official discourse on socialist ethnic equality. Oral history interviews will allow for an analysis of the changes that occurred since 1975. The largest Buddhist festival in Vientiane also features ‘minority parades’ and will be researched. Here it is also crucial to examine how state discourses have been propagated by the state and its multiple agents (Krohn-Hansen & Nustadt 2005), and to understand how these ideas are received and deflected in local settings among minorities. Another focus of the fieldwork in the North of Laos (Phongsali province) will be on the topics cultural assimilation and religious conversions to Buddhism. In the last 20 years the massive resettlement of minority groups into the lowlands has caused an intensified contact with Buddhism. It will be studied how the religious field in some of these ethnically mixed villages has been transformed due to the exposure to Buddhism and its institutions. By looking at the motivations for and contexts of conversion and the multiple outcomes of this process, it will be possible to analyse how cultural and religious assimilation is negotiated in relation to ethnic identity and the promoted national culture (Buckser & Glazier 2003; Keane 2007). Fieldwork in urban temples – especially in Vientiane and Luang Prabang – will research the roles of the increasing number of ethnic minority monks and novices. Their ordination enables them to move to the lowlands and receive a free education in Buddhist schools, and thereby they get into contact with lowland Lao lifestyles. Buddhism here functions as a social support institution enhancing social upward mobility, but also brings members of minorities into contact with the orthodox Buddhism promoted by the state and thereby establishes new centre-periphery links.