World Food Policy Volume 3, No. 2/Volume 4, No. 1, Fall16/Spring17 | Page 89

Land, State, and Society in Laos: Ethnographies of Land Policies
Figure 2. Swidden Agriculture in Dak Seng
© P. Petit 2012
the road serving it, about 1 km from
its former location; although this was
not presented as an imposed measure,
it clearly followed the priorities of the
administration.
through which one can access land;
they are in charge of land allocation and
establishing land-use planning. Most
villages now have a colored map spec-
ifying land uses within their divisions
(Fig. 3). Villagers are often unable to
understand the representation of space
on these maps and do not seem to care a
lot about them, but are more concerned
with obtaining highly valued tempo-
rary land-use certificates from district
officers specifying the location, surface
characteristics, and shape of their resi-
dential and cultivated areas 5 .
In all the other places where I
have worked, the constraints intro-
duced by land policies are much more
onerous: land relations have become
increasingly mediated by a series of ob-
jects, practices, discourses, officers, and
institutions related to the state. In most
regions of the country, district employ-
ees are now the mandatory mediators
5
Paradoxically, such zoning—intended to protect villagers’ rights—has been used by companies and
authorities alike to legitimate massive land deals, targeting agricultural or nonagricultural land de-
pending on the context (Dwyer, 2013). Recent (2017) field researches in Houay Yong revealed that
land-zoning and land certification are currently being implemented in the area.
89