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