World Food Policy Volume 3, No. 2/Volume 4, No. 1, Fall16/Spring17 | Page 97

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. 97