Projectland

Contributor: Holly High Holly High is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Sydney.

The success of the book arises not simply from how it traces success, but also from how it opens crucial questions around how Laos remains staunchly socialist. This view challenges a previously dominant view put forward by anthropologist Grant Evans (1998) that Laos had become postsocialist. . . . Projectland offers an important window into the lived realities of Lao state ideology, the politics of culture and socialism’s ongoing vitality. The book is an accessible entry point into Laos’s contemporary political culture with remarkable empirical depth, which would appeal to scholars and students interested in village life, socialism and Southeast Asia. --- In Projectland High destroys some simplistic assumptions concerning ethnic minorities and their relation to the (socialist) state. It takes individual subjectivities and desires seriously, and highlights the social fragmentation below the surface of village “unity.” The author provides a lucid analysis of the functioning of the Lao socialist party state at the margins, discussing the dialectic of transformation and resilience. High’s analysis goes beyond many village studies that mainly focus on livelihood and economic transformation. Unlike most studies that rely on socioeconomic data, Projectland touches the individual subjectivities of the villagers and the affective dimensions of the socialist state. More than forty years after the communist revolution, the author examines the ideological, biopolitical, and affective outcomes of the socialist “project” in the Lao PDR. --- This rich ethnographic study tells the story of how a Lao highland village community has successfully relocated to establish a new lowland village that is a ‘model’ in the eyes of the socialist state, but one that also expresses their own cultural values. The book breaks new methodological grounds in that it is not only a study of a village, but also a study from a village on important matters of general interest. Ten years in the making, the author’s vivid prose portrays the very human story of how people negotiate the conflicting demands of a socialist state, the market, kin, and the desires of different individuals to create a world that is meaningful to them. This book, a model of how ethnographic analysis should be done, will be of interest to scholars and students from all disciplines interested in understanding life in rural Southeast Asia today.