Land, State, and Society in Laos: Ethnographies of Land Policies
resort to certificates, district officer sig-
natures, fines, and meetings with village
authorities. The language of stateness is
conspicuous in these transactions that
paradoxically do not abide by the law.
This could be labeled, to quote Strauss
(1978), a “negotiated order” of land. In
contrast to the contestations and denun-
ciations addressed in the two preceding
subsections, the present case studies
demonstrate how state officers and us-
ers of land can find common ground be-
tween the strict application of land laws
and a total departure from them.
tration into the inescapable mediator
in land issues, increasingly replacing or
overlaying the village institutions that
used to govern such issues in the past.
Land policies have thus often been ap-
proached with a critical stance and
framed as the imposition of decisions
made by the state or companies working
under its aegis. However, this article has
traced ethnographic vignettes showing
how people and groups react; how they
comment, appropriate, and possibly
transform such measures; and how they
sometimes resist their implementation.
I have demonstrated that the lexicon of
land policies is not used by state em-
ployees alone, for it is often appropriat-
ed by those the administration intends
to control. Land policies arouse critical
comments in private among the weak
as among the powerful; such “hidden
transcripts” can, through a war of attri-
tion, reorient policies. Finally, land pol-
icies exist only through their concrete
implementation, entailing processes
of vernacularization in the local arena.
A negotiated order on land eventually
emerges from these usually tense inter-
actions.
Lestrelin (2011) elaborated on
this topic in fine-grained ethnographies
of two villages close to Louang Prabang.
In his own terms, territorialization, as a
powerful technique of regimentation of
rural populations (especially ethnic mi-
norities), cannot be addressed without
taking into account the counter-terri-
torialization processes through which
official plans are rephrased, mitigated,
or ignored once implemented at the lo-
cal scale. Such accommodations clearly
blur the state/society divide, as employ-
ees are enmeshed in the local networks
of power. This pragmatic dimension of
However, unpacking the dynam-
land issues has been under-studied, but
ics of state relations on land from an
seems to be a most interesting research
ethnographic point of view and stress-
avenue for an ethnography of bureau-
ing the agency of impacted populations
cratic routines.
should not lead to the underestimation
of the disruptive consequences of such
Conclusion
policies. The recent transformations of
and policies are one of the main land relations worldwide have deep-
vectors through which the Lao- ly affected small farmer societies. As
tian state imposes itself onto the recently reported by Li regarding the
population’s daily life. The expansion rural highlanders of Sulawesi (2014),
of these policies’ scope has progres- such process can create a great divide
sively transformed the local adminis- between the few who can take advan-
L
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