Land, State, and Society in Laos: Ethnographies of Land Policies
equated with a story of dispossession
without resistance. New bureaucratic
language allowed the villagers to formu-
late legitimate claims that were not al-
ways in line with the dominant groups’
interests. To be sure, our case studies
are not success stories: the Hmong were
resettled against their will with limited
compensation; the 52-family commit-
tee was not granted the land it claimed;
and the bulk of Attapeu villagers ended
up with no choice but to sign away their
land to the Vietnamese company. But
in all three cases, individuals drew on
state relations to contest decisions and/
or claim compensation. This eventually
helped to bring benefits they would not
have gotten, had they reacted passively.
The apparent insufficiency of the com-
pensation and its limitation to a few
people should not obscure the fact that
using the bureaucratic idiom was met
with partial success in the three areas,
and allowed for voicing discontentment
in an authoritarian regime.
A third example comes from
Phouxay, a small Laveng village in Atta-
peu Province. When it became evident
to the villagers that Vietnamese HAGL
workers had surveyed the border of a
future plantation to be well inside their
village’s territory, the village chief gath-
ered a delegation of six people to meet
the workers, explaining that they would
not allow the work to proceed if the
company could not produce an autho-
rization from the governor of the prov-
ince. Though the Vietnamese agreed to
sign a document in which they prom-
ised to seek the governor’s approval be-
fore doing anything, they did not end
up respecting this commitment.
What is revealing here is the
villagers’ reaction: they assembled an
official delegation, including the chief
of the village, a policeman, a militia-
man, a village forest warden, etc.; they
asked for a permit from the governor;
and they made the Vietnamese sign
a document. They were framing their
contestation in legal language to most
effectively protect themselves from the
company. Miles Kenney-Lazar (2010),
who wrote a detailed report on land
concessions in Attapeu, lists other in-
stances in which households tried,
based on what they knew of their land
rights, to oppose sub-standard financial
compensation offered by the company
in addition to cases of villages that re-
fused to sign away their land (2010, p.
25–28, 46–47). In at least one case, this
opposition was successful.
Hidden Transcripts
T
his point addresses another
modality of the social relations
emerging from land policies,
namely forms of resistance popularized
by James Scott as “hidden transcripts”,
a concept referring to these “low-pro-
file forms of resistance” of “subordinate
groups” that fight an “ideological guer-
rilla war” against power holders (Scott,
1990, p. 19, 137). These are distinct
from the contestations discussed above
that use the legal lexicon to defend one’s
As these examples demonstrate, rights; hidden transcripts circulate un-
the new land policies and their vari- der cover, and have more to do with
ous implementations cannot be simply moral economy than with legal rights.
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