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In Lao Buddhism, each year during the ghost festival, disembodied and hideous spectres are believed to be released from hell and enter the world of the living. This crossing of an ontological boundary, and the subsequent interaction of humans and ghosts, can be understood as a process of establishing hospitality in which both guest and host are transformed. The hospitality encounter can here simultaneously trigger an ontological shift of the ghost's position in Buddhist cosmology, but also contribute to the ethical self‐cultivation of humans as hosts. Ghosts as guests can escape hell, receive a new body, and re‐enter the cycle of reincarnations, while humans can practise a Buddhist ethics of hospitality based on the confrontation with a horrifying and pitiful species of beings. Résumé Les bouddhistes laos croient que chaque année, lors de la fête des fantômes, de hideux spectres désincarnés s'échappent des enfers pour passer dans le monde des vivants. Ce franchissement d'une frontière ontologique et l'interaction entre humains et fantômes qui lui fait suite peuvent être envisagés comme un processus d'hospitalité qui transforme aussi bien l'invité que l'hôte. La rencontre hospitalière peut déclencher un changement ontologique de la position du spectre dans la cosmologie bouddhiste, tout en contribuant à l'éducation éthique des vivants qui s'en font les hôtes. Les fantômes accueillis peuvent échapper à l'enfer, recevoir un nouveau corps et revenir dans le cycle des réincarnations, tandis que les vivants peuvent pratiquer une éthique bouddhiste de l'hospitalité par la confrontation avec des êtres aussi pitoyables qu'horrifiants.

In Laos—one of the few remaining ‘officially’ socialist countries—Buddhism was abolished as a state religion after the revolution in 1975. However, since the 1990s the communist government has been increasingly using its patronage of Buddhism to gain legitimacy. With reference to the divine sources of power in Theravāda Buddhism, this article explores the extent to which modern Lao state socialism is still imbued with pre-revolutionary patterns of Buddhist kingship and statecraft. The analysis will focus especially on ritual patronage of a Buddhist relic shrine and on the recent inauguration of statues of deceased kings in the Lao capital, Vientiane. With reference to the ritual animation of ‘opening the eyes’ of the statues, and with regard to theories exploring the agency of objects, I argue that the Lao palladium has to be understood as being made up of ‘living’ entities. Finally, the article explores to what extent the control, worship, and creation of statues and relics today are still essential for the legitimacy of rule in the Lao People's Democratic Republic.

The study of ghosts and spirits, and the ethnographic evidence associated with this, is a fertile area for developing methodologies. By employing theories of materiality and the anthropological study of ontologies, I argue that looking at the traces of spirits and ghosts in the material domain can reveal crucial insights into their nature, position and relationships with the living. Two ethnographic case studies from the Buddhist ethnic Lao are used to demonstrate how material traces can explain the ‘ontic shifting’ of certain ghosts. I will then explore how through the modernization and rationalization of Buddhist cosmology there have evolved competing ideas of the nature of ancestral spirits addressed in Buddhist rites. While in an older interpretation these spirits are accessible through objects and the exchanges between layperson, monk and spirit, ‘modernist’ Buddhist monks advocate that the dead cannot be reached through objects. Finally, I argue that the material traces of spirits and their different readings hint to important transformations regarding the conceptualization of ghosts and spirits through the socialist revolution and the rationalization of Buddhism.

With reference to (mainly Pali) textual imaginaries and historical data on outbreaks of millennial movements in southern Laos and parts of Thailand around the turn of the twentieth century, this essay discusses the revolutionary potentialities embedded in Theravada Buddhist thought and its localised cosmologies. The essay begins with an examination of the various sources of charisma and the roles of charismatic leaders in these movements, focusing on the tension between institutionalised state Buddhism and peripheral figures such as lay ascetics, holy men or forest monks who are more likely to be involved in millennial movements. Next, eschatological visions of the decline of the dhamma, utopian imaginaries of renewal and the (re-)instantiation of righteous kingship are discussed. I argue that many of these movements can be understood as forms of 'restorative millennialism'. In order to better understand the rebellious and revolutionary features of the cases presented, in the final section I discuss theories relating to potentialities and messianic time, and suggest that the activation and actualization of millennial imaginaries are -despite failure and disenchantmentalways immanent to society and reflect the friction between its actual and virtual dimensions.The very idea that the dawn of the millennial kingdom on earth always contained a revolutionizing tendency, and the church made every effort to paralyze this situationally transcendent idea with all means at its command.

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