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This book is an account of Peter and Sanda Simms' travels in the Kingdom of Laos, way back in 1955. It captures the culture, tradition and the atmosphere of a time when the people there were still fully immersed in their centuries of colourful customs, folklore and rituals.The outside world had left the kingdom on their own for centuries, but there were already signs of profound and destructive changes to come.The book brings to life the every-day world of the Laotians and their attitude of helpful curiosity towards the authors. The landscape that they travelled through described vividly, comes to life as they walk, ride horses or are given lifts by the Royal Laotian army. Their eye for humour added many light-hearted moments during their journey, but these were also interleaved with some more serious episodes. Much of the danger was in trying to avoid the Pathet Lao and Vietminh forces who were very trigger happy.Reading the book, you will feel like you are there; experiencing the excitement, joy and a few tribulations too.Peter and Sanda were journalists and their publications, jointly and singly, have been well-known for many years. Their astute knowledge of the politics of Southeast Asia will add background understanding to the turmoil that followed in later years.
This authoritative and wide-ranging 1997 history traces events in this little-known country from ancient monarchy, through its establishment as a French colony, to independence in 1953, the People's Democratic Republic, and the present one-party authoritarianism. The book highlights Laos' complex and shifting political alliances. The struggle for independence from France was followed by a struggle for unity and neutrality in the face of persistent foreign intervention, as the country was drawn into the war in Vietnam. Only with the end of the Cold War and the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops has Laos been able to reassert its neutral foreign policy and develop a market economy. This book is an impressive political, social, cultural and economic history. It will be essential for anyone wanting to understand Laos as it joins ASEAN, faces great economic challenges and struggles to maintain its cultural identity.
Karen Coates and Jerry Redfern spent more than seven years traveling in Laos, talking to farmers, scrap-metal hunters, people who make and use tools from UXO, people who hunt for death beneath the earth and render it harmless. With their words and photographs, they reveal the beauty of Laos, the strength of Laotians, and the commitment of bomb-disposal teams. People take precedence in this account, which is deeply personal without ever becoming a polemic.
More than a quarter of century after the end of the war in 1975, the Lao leadership is still in search for a compelling nationalist narration. Its politics of culture and representation appear to be caught between the rhetoric of preservation and the desire for modernity. Meanwhile, originating from the periphery where ethnic minorities had hitherto been symbolically, politically and administratively confined, the participation of some of their members in the Indochina Wars (1945-75) exposed these individuals to socialization and politicization processes.This rigorously researched and cogently argued book is a fine-grained analysis of substantial ethnographic material, showing the politics of identity, the geographies of memory and the power of narratives of some members of ethnic minority groups who fought during the Vietnam War in the Lao People's Liberation Army and/or were educated within the revolutionary administration. No study has ever been conducted on the latter's views on the national(ist) project of the late socialist era. Their own perceptions of their membership of the nation have been overlooked.Post-War Laos is a set to be a landmark study, and an original contribution which refines established theories of nationalism, such as Anderson's 'imagined community', by addressing a common weakness: namely, their tendency to deny agency to individuals, who in fact interpret their relationship to, and place within, the nation in a variety of ways that may change according to time and circumstance.
Chronicles the history of Laos, discussing such topics as its early kingdoms, French rule, the Royal Lao Government, and the impact of the Vietnam War.
The 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.
Describes the changes in society over 600 years as Lan Xang was gradually dismembered and became a French colony. Most importantly, it shows the essence of the Lao and why, despite all that has happened, they possess their own social and cultural values that mark them as distinctive.
Laos's emergence as a modern nation-state in the 20th century owed much to a complex interplay of internal and external forces. Arguing that the historiography of Laos needs to be understood in this wider context, this study considers how the Lao have written their own nationalist and revolutionary history "on the inside," while others-the French, Vietnamese, and Thais-have attempted to write the history of Laos "from the outside" for their own political ends. As nationalist historiography, like the formation of the nation-state, does not emerge within a nationalist vacuum but rather is created and contested from inside and out, this incisive volume's approach has applications and implications far beyond Laos.
This book examines the process through which Laos came into existence under French colonial rule through to the end of World War II. Here, Laos's position at the intersection of two conflicting spatial layouts of "Thailand" and "Indochina" made its national form a particularly contested process. Rather than analyze this process in terms of administrative and political structures, the book discusses how a specific idea about a separate "Lao space" and its culture was formed.
Three decades after the conclusion of the civil war that brought the communist Pathet Lao to power, the leaders of the Lao People's Democratic Republic are still searching for a compelling and unifying national identity. As detailed in Postwar Laos--a rigorously researched, cogently argued, and pathbreaking book--Laotian nationalism is caught between the rhetoric of preservation and the desire for modernity. Using fine-grained analysis of substantial ethnographic and archival material, Vatthana Pholsena sheds light on the politics of identity, the geographies of memory, and the power of historical narrative in contemporary Laos.Pholsena pays particular attention to the country's ethnic minorities, who had been marginalized--politically, administratively, and symbolically--by the French colonial government, which ruled for fifty years, and by its Royal Lao successor. Many members of these minorities fought for the Lao People's Liberation Army in the country's civil war (1960-1975), though, and were thus exposed to the processes of modern politics. The first book to examine the impact of such forces on Laos's ethnic minorities and their perception of Laotian nationalism, Postwar Laos also refines established theories of nationalism. Pholsena addresses a weakness common to all: the tendency to deny agency to individuals, who may in fact interpret their relationship to, and place within, the nation in a variety of ways that change according to time and circumstance.Postwar Laos offers a new perspective on the history of Southeast Asia and, more broadly, on the formation of national identity that will be welcomed by historians, political scientists, sociologists, ethnographers, and cultural anthropologists alike.