Pierre Petit - History, Memory, and Territorial Cults in the Highlands of Laos

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.

Pierre Petit is Senior Research Fellow at the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research and Professor at Universit libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. His research interests include mobility, ethnicity, and interactions with the state among the Tai Vat of Houaphan.

Series Editors: Vanessa Frangville and Frederik Ponjaert

Research Centre on East Asia (EASt), Universit libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

Routledge Contemporary Asian Societies provides an original and distinctive contribution to current debates on evolutions shaping societies, cultures, politics and media across North and South East Asia. It is interdisciplinary in its approach and the editors welcome proposals across the social sciences and humanities; from political, social, cultural and economic studies to gender, media, literature, anthropology, philosophy and religion.

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

The Past Inside the Present

Pierre Petit

The Past Inside the Present

Pierre Petit

First published 2020

by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2020 Pierre Petit

The right of Pierre Petit to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Petit, Pierre, 1966- author.

Title: History, memory, and territorial cults in the highlands of Laos : the past inside the present / Pierre Petit.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019027858 (print) | LCCN 2019027859 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367211257 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780429265501 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429556043 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9780429564987 (mobi) | ISBN 9780429560514 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Black Tai (Southeast Asian people)LaosHouaphan (Province)History. | Black Tai (Southeast Asian people)LaosHouaphan (Province)Rites and ceremonies. | EthnohistoryLaosHouaphan (Province) | Collective memoryLaosHouaphan (Province) | CultsLaos Houaphan (Province) | Group identityLaosHouaphan (Province) | Houaphan (Laos : Province)History.

Classification: LCC DS555.45.T35 P48 2020 (print) | LCC DS555.45.T35 (ebook) | DDC 959.4dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027858

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027859

ISBN: 978-0-367-21125-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-26550-1 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders. Please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions.

Credit for Figures 3.4, 4.1 and 4.3: Archives Nationales dOutre-Mer (France).
Credit for all other pictures: Pierre Petit.

Credit for all maps: Pierre Petit and Isabelle Renneson

This book captures the dynamics of history, memory, and territorial cults in Houay Yong, a Tai Vat village encapsulated in a multiethnic highland frontier between Laos and Vietnam. It questions the standard national narratives about the past by investigating, from a remote valley unnoticed in the archives, the major developments that punctuated the last century-and-a-half in the region, from the scramble in Tonkin and Northern Laos on the eve of colonization, to the present dynamics of the Lao developmental regime. Decentering the focus of research from its usual lowland-based standpoint is an important step to refresh historical research in the region. There is more to do than detailing the royal chronicles from Luang Prabang and Hu, or glossing on the Vietnamese and American strategies during the war. Taking seriously history as it is experienced from a so-called back of beyond, the book partakes in a broader movement to reintegrate highlanders and their agency into history at large, a process catalyzed by the publication of James Scotts celebrated The Art of Not Being Governed (2009).

Based on fieldwork research carried out since 2003 and on French colonial archives, the book strives to find its way along the line between the booming memory studies and more classical history research. These two concerns are addressed here seriously. The volume discusses how the past is conceived, referred to, narrated, embodied, given material form, and purposefully performed by people and groups with their specific agendas. But it also engages with the usual concerns of history, and with the issue about what really happened, following a more chronological approach that has faded away in many scholarly works fascinated with subjectivities.

The central issue of the first part of the book is the relationship between oral and written sources: how can they be used together to produce a better understanding of history, and of historical imagination? The case of the Tai Vat in Laos is very telling on the way these sources shed light on each other, because it is only through their entwinement that a plausible reconstruction of the past can be proposed. Under the pressure of the Chinese Flag armies who invaded the northwest of Vietnam in the 1860s to 1870s, some Tai Vat villagers, living in the region of Muang Vat (named Yn Chu nowadays, see Map P.1), fled southward into the region of Houaphan, nowadays a province of Laos. The population concerned by the present study eventually settled in Houay Yong, a village encased in the steep valley of a stream that holds the same name as the village. They cohabited in the place with an obscure group, the so-called Tai Soi, who eventually left the valley. Three generations later, in the early 1950s, many Tai Vat of Vietnam followed the itinerary of their forefathers, fleeing the violence of the First Indochina War to settle among their cousins in Laos. As a consequence, these animist farmers presently straddle the LaoVietnamese frontier. If their society has evolved differently on both sides of the border, they keep a strong sense of their common origins, and visits to relatives living beyond the borderline uphold this feeling of belonging to a single group. Hence, if this book is clearly relevant for Lao studies, it can also be of interest for the anthropologists and historians of Vietnam.