Customer Reviews

Politics of Ritual and Remembrance: Laos Since 1975

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I have to admit I had noticed this book in the book stores long before I ever bought it. I was looking for something that would bring Lao politics and cultural insights together (by "Lao" I mean all the people of Laos,) and this appeared to be a rather dry account of current Lao politics. How wrong I was. The book turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. It brings together insights about Lao culture and the thinking of Lao people from the whole spectrum of Lao society, Lao politics both before and after the revolution, and gives enormous insights into how the cultural and political landscape of Laos have influenced each other. For a book that claims to be about the politics of Laos, very deep cultural insights are given, yet remain relevant to the subject of the book as Mr. Evans illustrates how the revolution influenced the culture of Laos and (far more often) how Lao culture shaped the course of the Lao People's Democratic Republic in the past decade-and-a-half. Furthermore, he gives us a certain amount of insight into the royal Lao government.

The book does not contain the same wit and human interest as "Stalking the Elephant Kings," but there was never any suggestion that it would. Despite having fewer personal anecdotes (not that it didn't have a fair number,) I found this book even more insightful.

The book answered a number of questions I had always had about Laos that several other books, and three weeks in the country, could not answer. I recommend it to anyone interested in this mysterious country, even casual tourists or business people investing in Laos.

Mr. Evans' slight volume focuses narrowly on the extent of the Lao Communist party's efforts to transition from dogmatic socialist to quasi-dogmatic proto-capitalist state. He argues somewhat persuasively that the pre-revolution royal-Buddhist diad never left the public's consciousness and has been supplanted by rituals that bespeak of these roots, albeit in the absence of a functioning monarchy. He states that the influence of Thailand, and particularly the Thai royal family, has to a large extent made the ruling LPDR's social dictates irrelevant; Thailand is their larger, older, more experienced Buddhist brother and will lead the recalcitrant commies to the promised land, dogma or no, but in typically understated Asian fashion.

I would liked to have seen more attention paid to the efforts of the LPDR to transform Lao society, as Mr. Evans wrote of in his Lao Peasants Under Socialism, but admittedtly that was only peripheral (and ancient history) to the theme of this book.