World Food Policy Volume 3, No. 2/Volume 4, No. 1, Fall16/Spring17 | Page 88

World Food Policy ities of state relations created through land policies in different contexts, mainly in rural areas. Most studies on the topic are based on a detailed case study. To refrain from the tendency to present a specific situation as a paradig- matic example, this article will rather develop ethnographic vignettes to de- scribe state relations related to land in a wide range of situations. I will first emphasize their pervasiveness, showing how they have created a new lexicon, a specific “language of stateness” (Han- sen & Stepputat, 2001) that is obligato- rily used when discussing land issues. And second, I shall show that this does not deprive stakeholders of their agen- cy in their often-tense interactions, but instead reframes such interactions en- tirely. remote mountains of Attapeu Province, in the far south of the country. During my fieldwork in 2012, no land or forest allocation had been carried out yet, nor any land-use certificates granted. Land use was managed through customary practice and swidden cultivation was still extensively practiced (Fig. 2). The village chief claimed that all residents knew the rights of each family, so he seldom had to settle land disputes. Similarly, in the same period, the Tai Vat inhabiting Houay Yong Village in the mountainous northern province of Houa Phan reported that access to their upland fields relied on knowledge shared by all of them, for they all knew which families had cultivated which plots of land in the past (Petit 2015). However, Dak Seng, and Houay Yong were indeed affected by national The Practicalities of land policies. The 1990s were marked Land Policies by campaigns against swidden culti- ased on my visits to Laos since vation. Though cultivation practices 2003, I have observed how land themselves may not have been changed policies are central to ongoing by these campaigns, the villages have socio-economical changes throughout both been affected by the concomitant the country, though the range of situ- promotion of migration to the low- ations is wide. 4 In some places, land lands. About half of the population policies seem at first glance to have of both villages left within a decade minimal impacts. This was the case in as part of an ongoing process. And in Dak Seng, a small Talieng village in the 2007, Dak Seng was resettled closer to B 4 As a Belgian anthropologist, I have been working successively in a research on rural development in Bolikhamxay Province (cooperation between the French-speaking universities of Belgium [CUD] and the National University of Laos, 2003-2008); in an assessment of Nam Theun 2’s social develop- ment plan (Agence Française de Développement, 2004); in Annâdya, a food security project imple- mented in Attapeu and Ratanakiri (EU, 2012-2015); and in a joint research on the socioeconomic transformations of Houay Yong village (ULB-NUoL, 2009-2017). See Fig. 1 for locales. Fieldwork was carried out in collaboration with Lao research assistants/interpreters. Beside the data collected formally throughout these researches, much information was gathered through observation and casual discussions with Lao people. My intermediate-level understanding of Lao enables me to have basic conversations in that language. I warmly thank all the institutions previously listed, the many Lao colleagues who took part in the researches, and the anonymous readers of a former ver- sion of this paper. 88