Religious Resurgence, Authoritarianism, and “Ritual Governance”:BaciRituals, Village Meetings, and the Developmental State in Rural Laos

Abstract

Much productive scholarship across Asia has considered the links between religious resurgence and authoritarian governance. However, limitations persist in conceptualizations of state authority, which I examine in the literature on Southeast Asia. Noteworthy are the assumptions that central institutions are definitive of authoritarian states, and divides between study of the sacred and secular. I propose the notion of “ritual governance” to address these conceptual issues and illustrate this with an ethnographic case study from a major development project in Laos, the Nam Theun 2 hydropower scheme. I show how Lao government officials working with ethnic minority villagers used a baci ritual and village meeting to combine a persuasive sense of unity with coercive use of hierarchy. Significantly, the baci and other Buddhist rituals were suppressed by the early socialist state, but regained prominence with ideological shifts from socialism to modern developmentalism. This case study demonstrates the contemporary significance of state-sponsored ritual for development in Laos as well as the need for more nuanced conceptions of the state in discussions of religiosity and authoritarianism across Asia.

Rural Schooling and Good Life in Late Socialist Laos

“…This was formally explained as necessary for protecting his security, but more plausibly it was to enable the Lao state to keep a close eye on this foreign-funded research project conducted in an upland area populated by mostly non-Lao ethnic groups (Creak and Barney 2018, 696). The advantage of this arrangement was that we were in a privileged position to observe the working of state-society relations at this very local level and across the various social divides in which these are embedded (Singh 2014).…”

“…Laos can be described as a 'development context' , which in the words of Jakimow (2016, 11) is a locale that is 'thick with the discourses, practices and institutions of international development' . The inclusiveness of rural life in primary school textbooks presents a subtle nuancing to dominant development discourse in Laos, which is urban-centric and revolves around the idea of prosperity (chaleun) and progress (khaonaa) (Singh 2014). The inclusion of rural scenes in primary school textbooks is no doubt also influenced by the neotraditional arts genre promoted by the Lao state.…”

“…In her analysis of the role of the baci ceremony in district-level governance in rural Laos, Singh (2014) notes the ambiguity in the practice of state-society relations. She explains that the levelling of inequalities enacted through the baci ceremony co-exists with hierarchical, secular village meetings that are also part of these visits by district-level officials to rural villages.…”

Safe migration and the politics of brokered safety in Southeast Asia

“…This means that people gravitate towards the state apparatus for jobs and prestige. Indeed, a central argument that has been made in Lao studies in recent years, is how Laotians seek (as opposed to resist) the state (Creak and Barney 2018;High and Petit 2013;Singh 2014).…”

Understanding Farmer Decision Making in Northern Lao PDR

“…After the 1975 revolution, it became the People's Democratic Republic of Lao, now an authoritarian one‐party state (Stuart‐Fox :64). In 1986, the centrally planned economy began the transformation into a market economy, accompanied by a shift in political ideology from socialism to modern developmentalism (Singh ).…”