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Author: Joseph J. Zasloff
Publisher: Springer
Published: 1991-06-18
Total Pages: 361
ISBN-13: 1349112143
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis work contains papers presented at a conference called "Current Developments in Laos" in Washington DC in 1988. The topics covered range from Lao nationalism and American policy, 1954-1959, to Laotian refugees in Thailand.
Author: Joseph J. Zasloff
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2014-01-14
Total Pages: 348
ISBN-13: 9781349112166
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis work contains papers presented at a conference called "Current Developments in Laos" in Washington DC in 1988. The topics covered range from Lao nationalism and American policy, 1954-1959, to Laotian refugees in Thailand.
Author: Grant Evans
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Published: 1998-01-01
Total Pages: 244
ISBN-13: 9780824820541
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCommunist revolutions in this century have suppressed existing ritual and symbolic structures and invented new ones. Armed with new flags, new national celebrations, or new school textbooks, they have attempted to reconstruct social memory. This fascinating work of political anthropology examines the case of Laos from the heady days of the 1975 revolution to the more sober "post-socialist" present. Grant Evans traces the attempt at ritual and symbolic change in Laos, and the recent reemergence of older and deeper cultural structures, while identifying what has perhaps been irretrievably lost. In this challenging study of the cultural consequences of failed total revolution, Evans reaches some striking conclusions concerning the nature of social memory, cultural possibilities foregone, and the need for cultural continuity.
Author: Christopher Kremmer
Publisher:
Published: 1997
Total Pages: 244
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Holly High
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Published: 2021-05-31
Total Pages: 265
ISBN-13: 0824886658
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Projectland, anthropologist Holly High combines an engaging first-person narrative of her fieldwork with a political ethnography of Laos, more than forty years after the establishment of the Lao PDR and more than seven decades since socialist ideologues first “liberated” parts of upland country. In a remote village of Kandon, High finds that although socialism has declined significantly as an economic model, it is ascendant and thriving in the culture of politics and the politics of culture. Kandon is remarkable by any account. The villagers are ethnic Kantu (Katu), an ethnicity associated by early ethnographers above all with human sacrifice. They had repelled French control, and as the war went on, the revolutionary forces of Sekong were headquartered in Kandon territories. In 1996, Kandon village moved and resettled in a plateau area. “New Kandon” has become Sekong Province’s first certified “Culture Village,” the nation’s very first “Open Defecation Free and Model Health Village,” and the president of Laos personally granted the village a Labor Flag and Medal. High provides a unique and timely assessment of the Lao Party-state’s resettlement politics, and she recounts with skillful nuance the stories that are often cast into shadows by the usual focus on New Kandon as a success. Her book follows the lives of a small group of villagers who returned to the old village in the mountains, effectively defying policy but, in their words, obeying the presence that animates the land there. Revealing her sensibility with tremendous composure, High tells the experiences of women who, bound by steep bride-prices to often violent marriages, have tasted little of the socialist project of equality, unity, and independence. These women spoke to the author of “necessities” as a limit to their own lives. In a context where the state has defined the legitimate forms of success and agency, “necessity” emerged as a means of framing one’s life as nonconforming but also nonagentive.
Author: Joshua Kurlantzick
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2017-01-24
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 1451667892
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe untold story of how America’s secret war in Laos in the 1960s transformed the CIA from a loose collection of spies into a military operation and a key player in American foreign policy. January, 1961: Laos, a tiny nation few Americans have heard of, is at risk of falling to communism and triggering a domino effect throughout Southeast Asia. This is what President Eisenhower believed when he approved the CIA’s Operation Momentum, creating an army of ethnic Hmong to fight communist forces there. Largely hidden from the American public—and most of Congress—Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the history of the United States. The brutal war lasted more than a decade, left the ground littered with thousands of unexploded bombs, and changed the nature of the CIA forever. With “revelatory reporting” and “lucid prose” (The Economist), Kurlantzick provides the definitive account of the Laos war, focusing on the four key people who led the operation: the CIA operative whose idea it was, the Hmong general who led the proxy army in the field, the paramilitary specialist who trained the Hmong forces, and the State Department careerist who took control over the war as it grew. Using recently declassified records and extensive interviews, Kurlantzick shows for the first time how the CIA’s clandestine adventures in one small, Southeast Asian country became the template for how the United States has conducted war ever since—all the way to today’s war on terrorism.
Author: Vanina Bouté
Publisher: NUS Press
Published: 2017-04-21
Total Pages: 473
ISBN-13: 981472226X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKChanges in the character of the political regime in Laos after 2000, a massive influx of foreign investment, and disruptions to rural life arising from improved communications and new forms of mobility within and across the borders have produced a major transformation. Alongside these changes, a group of young scholars carried out studies that document the rise of a new social, cultural and economic order. The contributions to this volume draw on original fieldwork materials and unpublished sources, and provide fresh analyses of topics ranging from the structures of power to the politics of territoriality and new forms of sociability in emerging urban spaces.
Author: Charles F. Keyes
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-18
Total Pages: 325
ISBN-13: 1136827250
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book explores social memory in the context of cultural crises of modernity in Thailand and Laos. It explicates the ways in which social memory constructed by the people enters modernity, and how this in turn causes fundamental ruptures with their past, as well as the various ways cultural crises are experienced in their lives. The essays in this book consider how in these crises the people constitute their cultural, social, or individual identities, particularly focusing on the theoretical issues of identifications and their relevance to distinct historical processes in Thailand and Laos. Both countries, particularly in the two decades since the 1970s, have been undergoing radical social and economic changes. Whilst Thailand has travelled down the road to industrialization, neighbouring Laos experienced a communist revolution in 1975 and only since the late 1980s has attempted to follow a reformist path to development. Increasingly influenced by globalised economic and social institutions, both countries have come to face crises that have made people insecure in the present and anxious about the future.
Author: Desley Goldston
Publisher: Nias Studies in Asian Topics
Published: 2019
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9788776942540
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLong regarded as a peripheral state in mainland Southeast Asia, Laos has attracted far less scholarly attention than richer and more powerful neighbours like Thailand and Vietnam. This has meant, however, that in Lao studies there is a greater potential for individual scholars to make significant contributions to their field. One such scholar is Australia's Martin Stuart-Fox, in honour of whom this festschrift has been produced with contributions from colleagues, former doctoral students and friends. The volume is more than a hagiography, however. Its chapters on Laos all make significant contributions to Lao studies. These range from the writing of Lao prehistory in Laos, to early Lao-Thai relations, from French colonial archaeology to medical practices and gun-boat diplomacy, from the 'invention' of Laos as a modern state to its revolutionary transformation and present politics. Though the main focus is on the history, politics and national identity of Laos, essays also point 'beyond' Laos, both geographically and metaphorically. In the first instance, the volume provides a welcome comparative perspective, from precolonial relations between Southeast Asian polities and European courts to colonial policies within French Indochina, to the structure of communist power in Vietnam. Three concluding essays point beyond Laos in a metaphorical sense in directions indicated by Professor Stuart-Fox's wider intellectual interests - to cultural legitimation and identity, to Buddhism and Buddhist meditation, and to how the principles of Darwinian evolution apply to historical change. Engaging Asia is thus a volume that will stimulate and satisfy, while at the same time honouring a scholar whose unusual career took him from marine biologist to war correspondent to respected scholar of Southeast Asian politics and history.
Author: Rob Cramb
Publisher: Springer Nature
Published: 2020-01-03
Total Pages: 462
ISBN-13: 9811509980
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis open access book is about understanding the processes involved in the transformation of smallholder rice farming in the Lower Mekong Basin from a low-yielding subsistence activity to one producing the surpluses needed for national self-sufficiency and a high-value export industry. For centuries, farmers in the Basin have regarded rice as “white gold”, reflecting its centrality to their food security and well-being. In the past four decades, rice has also become a commercial crop of great importance to Mekong farmers, augmenting but not replacing its role in securing their subsistence. This book is based on collaborative research to (a) compare the current situation and trajectories of rice farmers within and between different regions of the Lower Mekong, (b) explore the value chains linking rice farmers with new technologies and input and output markets within and across national borders, and (c) understand the changing role of government policies in facilitating the on-going evolution of commercial rice farming. An introductory section places the research in geographical and historical context. Four major sections deal in turn with studies of rice farming, value chains, and policies in Northeast Thailand, Central Laos, Southeastern Cambodia, and the Mekong Delta. The final section examines the implications for rice policy in the region as a whole.
