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On the Writing of Lao History: Continuities and Discontinuities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

Martin Stuart-Fox
Martin Stuart-Fox
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
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Extract

The writing of Lao history presents peculiar problems, not because of the quantity and quality of sources available (though these leave much to be desired for certain periods), but because of the difficulty in deciding what is meant by “Lao history”. There is a problem in identifying the object of study. Is Lao history the history of those territories inhabited by ethnic Lao, or of the state of Laos as it has existed at various times under various names? The Lao have spread far beyond the geographical boundaries of present-day Laos: many more ethnic Lao live in Thailand than in Laos. Moreover the Lao state ceased to exist as a unitary entity in the early eighteenth century. What was reconstructed by the French nearly two centuries later and exists today is but a fragment composed of territories belonging to former principalities inhabited by diverse peoples, many of whom are not ethnic Lao. They are divided into three broad groups: the Lao Loum, or Lao of the valleys, comprise not only ethnic Lao but also upland Tai and account for about 65 per cent of the population; the Lao Theung, or Lao of the mountain slopes, speaking Mon-Khmer languages, account for around 25 per cent; while the Lao Soung, or Lao of the mountain tops, speaking Tibeto-Burman languages, number perhaps 10 per cent. The terms Lao Loum, Lao Theung and Lao Soung will be used to refer to these groups in this paper.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , March 1993 , pp. 106 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1993

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References

1 The government of the Lao People's Democratic Republic at first claimed there existed 68 different ethnic groups in Laos, though no list was ever published. More recently the number has been reduced to 38.

2 This is the term used in the Lao constitution.

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11 Kennon Breazeale has already made a notable contribution to the history of this period. See, in addition to his thesis cited above, his paper “Thai provincial minority elites: Aspects of their expansion on the eastern borders in the nineteenth century”, Proceedings: Seventh IAHA Conference vol. II (Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University Press, 1979), pp. 1667–91Google Scholar. Referring to the Isan region, Breazeale notes that: “Lao administration tended in exactly the opposite direction from unification. The ruling families failed to coalesce into hierarchies (as they did in central Thailand) centred around powerful individuals. Rather than combining to consolidate wealth and control over several towns, the ruling families remained independent of one another” (p. 1669).

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32 In order the four topmost positions in terms of status and power.

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39 American support for Hmong commander of military region two, General Vang Pao, during the “secret war” in northern Laos created a virtually autonomous administration for the Hmong.

40 Apart from the cosmetic addition of Hmong leader Touby Lyfong to the Cabinet, nothing was done to bring tribal minorities into the administration.

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62 Siamese policy was to depopulate Laos east of the Mekong by forcibly resettling people on the Khorat plateau, or even further east. Major resettlement of Phuan from Xieng Khouang took place as late as 1876–78. Cf. Smuckarn, Snit and Breazeale, Kennon, A Culture in Search of Survival: The Phuan of Thailand and Laos (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies, 1988), pp. 53–58Google Scholar.

63 The Party consistently lied to those with relatives undergoing re-education. It thereby destroyed precisely that trust in the regime which had led so many voluntarily to undertake re-education in the first place.

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