Laos: Endangered Languages, Education, International Aid, 21st Century Communism and Buddhism

Yeah, this post has a long title, and everything mentioned in it is covered in this relatively brief article that I've posted via Medium.com, for those of you who aren't regular subscribers to Ogmois (the slightly obscure journal of the Foundation for Endangered Languages).

https://medium.com/p/1e7232a1e3a4

I'll try to relay news of any other articles (formal or informal) that I've got coming out, both here (on this blog) and via my rarely-used twitter account: twitter.com/eiselmazard

Interview with 東蓮覺苑 (Tung Lin Kok Yuen) in Hong Kong

I provided an interview to the Hong Kong publication of the Tung Lin Kok Yuen foundation (東蓮覺苑).

http://newlotus.buddhistdoor.com/en/news/d/31356

The questions (and the illustrations) largely concern the situation of Theravāda Buddhism within Yunnan (云南) but the answers cover a great deal of ground, both about my own research into Pali, about the historical and current situation of the religion in Southeast Asia, and so on.  Politics are not omitted from the discussion.


It is credit to the editor that this was published (in a conservative, Buddhist newsletter) without censorship.  This is another interesting example of an openly-religious publication being more willing to print both criticism and controversy than "secular Buddhist" publications are, in my experience.

The Opposite of Nostalgia (Laos, Cambodia, Thailand)

I never wake up and wish I was back in Laos.  Never.

I had a conversation in Lao a few weeks ago --the first conversation I'd had in the language for several years.  The man I spoke with asked when I planned to go back, where I most desired to go back to, and so on.

Although I was limited (and out-of-practice) in the answer that I could offer, one of the first things I said was along the lines of, "Everywhere in the world, people have problems; everywhere you go, life is a struggle".  He was astonished at this answer (perhaps because it was a ponderous contrast to how poorly I was able to communicate in the language).  He pressed further, asking about specific towns in both Laos and Isan.  I confirmed that I had been to these places he named, but that I didn't expect to return, and I didn't particularly want to see any of them again.

It is interesting that the guy speaking to me expected me to feel this type of homesickness at all.  I suppose his expectation might be the result of having so many conversations (in his own language) with Lao expatriates and exiles here in Canada, yearning to go home, even if it is politically impossible for them to do so.  Of course, one of the first subjects of conversation was my attempt to explain that for me, also, it is politically impossible to return to the country.  I suppose he may have previously met a small number of white men who learned Lao as a language and who regard the place as paradise, or who at least recall it wistfully.

I'm neither Lao nor an expatriate, but I was exiled from Laos.  I never did regard the place as paradise --neither when I lived and worked there, nor in retrospect.

My years in Asia were a large percentage of my adult life, but they don't add up to all that much, from the perspective of someone born and raised in the region.  Still, the lack of stability that I found elsewhere (from Cambodia to Canada) makes the comparison very clear.  Although it was by accident rather than by design, Laos really was the only home that I ever had.  Still today, it is the only home that I've ever known.

I remember visiting a colleague's apartment in Cambodia, and remarking on a set of jars he had arranged along a wall: small efforts like that had become alien to me (to decorate one's own home, to settle down or settle in) because I had lived for so long out of a backpack, never expecting to stay in the same apartment (nor the same country) for any length of time.

That kind of chronic uncertainty surrounded me from the day that I was exiled from Laos.  My situation within Laos had been so bad that it seemed inevitable that I could find more stability thereafter in China, Thailand, or Cambodia.  That proved to be untrue.  I was in China during the Olympic terror (an especially hard time to be a foreigner doing paperwork in the P.R.C.) --and, of course, I arrived there as a sort of refugee (speaking only Lao, and not knowing one word of Chinese).  Subsequently, things didn't get any easier in Thailand or Cambodia.

The exile itself is a funny story, if told in a funny way, but the bare facts are grim: I was exiled with nothing but my backpack and a bicycle, after receiving death threats from a Communist Party official.  The threats were followed by my formal condemnation as a thought-criminal at a meeting (held with the big portraits of Marx and Lenin on the walls).  At this meeting, my former co-workers (at a Belgian-government-funded charity) were each required to read a statement aloud apologizing for not having denounced me earlier.

I was told that I would never be allowed to re-enter the country --but I was forced to test the veracity of this threat (eventually) because the only money I had was in a bank account inside Laos.

I received an array of responses from my contemporaries (both Lao and foreign).  For the most part, people were indifferent, often justifying this with reference to past examples of people whom they had heard of in similar straits.  Everyone had a story about someone being kicked out of the country for no good reason at all (sometimes, the story told was about themselves, and their eventual "rehabilitation" within the government).  They said these things to make my circumstances seem commonplace, but the comparisons were always facile.  The purpose of these stories was, for the most part, to dismiss me (and whatever my situation might really be).

In general, people wanted to believe that I was secretly wealthy (despite my obvious poverty) or else secretly powerful (despite my obvious powerlessness) --and, as a sub-set, several people said to my face that they believed I was working for the C.I.A.  I don't know if others believed this without announcing it.

Conversely, one Lao woman who had formerly believed that I was a C.I.A. agent interpreted the circumstances of my exile as proof that I had never been working for the agency.  Perhaps this was because nobody had come to my aid.  Perhaps, in her eyes, the whole mess demonstrated that I really was a hapless Pali scholar, trying to examine stone inscriptions and palm-leaf manuscripts, while volunteering for humanitarian work, and so on.

Although both perspectives (on my supposed C.I.A. status) were simply stupid, I thought there was something slightly ingenious on the part of the woman who reversed her opinion in light of the facts.  I suppose there must be some strange optimism amongst people who believe that the C.I.A. would employ someone to study Pali, and so on.

My lack of nostalgia for Laos doesn't have much to do with the circumstances of my exile (nor with what happened after that).

I adored the language, especially the written language, and I cherished the opportunity to pursue (i) philology, (ii) fieldwork, and (iii) humanitarian work of some kind, simultaneously, in a setting where each of the three inspired more of the other two.

My own education (so much mired in Cold War politics) was useful in the Communist setting in a way that it couldn't be anywhere else (except, perhaps, North Korea, etc.).  Although other people regard the place as exotic, I found it easier to understand Laos than Hong Kong, Bangkok, or Taiwan --perhaps easier than anywhere I had lived before.  The combination of political science and Pali that I brought to Laos seemed tremendously useful in that cultural setting --and I gorged myself on the history and politics of the place.  However, my time was spent at the libraries: I never drank alcohol nor ate meat, and these were simple but insuperable barriers between myself and the people around me.  I didn't pretend to have anything in common with the culture I was studying.

Most of what I liked about the country couldn't be described as "good" --and much of it is tragic.  The potential to do good in a place where it was needed was inspiring, but the reality of that need is nothing to be nostalgic about.  My agency handed out sacks of rice to people who really were suffering from "seasonal starvation" and malnutrition; although memorable, it would be impossible to be wistful about the experience.  Likewise, the situation for scholarship of any kind (Pali included) was parlous; I enjoyed decoding the mix of propaganda and misinformation that surrounded me, but I can't glorify that experience in retrospect, either.

All the while, the basics of food, shelter, and finding enough silence to sleep in were very hard to manage.  Everywhere I went it was very, very difficult to get a full night's sleep: natural sources of noise pollution (roosters, dogs, etc.) were competing with unnatural ones (loud music at all hours, etc.).

My official identity card as a "foreign expert" in the employ of the Lao government was issued to me on the same day that I was informed of my denunciation and deportation (i.e., exile) from the place.  Likewise, my ability to really communicate in spoken Lao had only started to amount to something useful during my last few months in the country --and then, suddenly, I was gone, and I could never expect to return.

I never wake up and wish I was back in Laos.

I never wake up and wish that I was in Cambodia or Thailand, either.

I miss the opportunity to do meaningful work, but, aside from that, there's nothing for me to miss there.

I don't think there's anyone in Laos who misses me, either.  There may still be some memory that there once was a man who came to study Pali in Laos --and that he ended up being exiled by the Lao government, on the same day that they issued his paperwork to certify him as a "foreign expert".

When Buddhist Monks Arm International Terrorists

 [The Rights to the Photograph Above Belong to Gary Jones]

The immortal Ian Baird has published an article on the subject that "everybody" knows about, but nobody ever talks about: Buddhist monks who raise money to support international terrorism.  Yeah, I said it.  The following quotation involves exotic locales that may be unfamiliar to my readers such as Edmonton (埃德蒙顿) and Winnipeg (温尼伯) --thus I've added links throughout to avoid confusion.


The 65-year-old abbot of the Lao Buddhist temple in Edmonton, Canada, and I sat on the floor. […]  [After fleeing Laos in 1975] Achan Sounthone stayed at a temple in Kalasin province, northeastern Thailand, for the next five years. […] After being regularly hassled by Thai government officials, however, the monk decided to register as a Lao refugee and enter the Lao refugee camp in Ubon Ratchathani province in 1979.  But he soon found himself disgusted with the corruption in the camp, and he became increasingly convinced that the cause of the insurgents was just.  So in 1980 he moved to a village in Thailand on the edge of the Mekong river where one of the main "white Lao" groups […] was headquartered. […]  He spent over eight years treating injured insurgents […] and training medics. […]  In 1988 when the Chat[i]chai Choonhavan government announced its policy to transform "battlefields to marketplaces," making it difficult for insurgents opposed to the Lao government to continue operating from bases in Thailand, he entered the Lao refugee camp at Napho.  From there, he ended up being sponsored by the Lao Buddhist temple in Winnipeg, Canada, where he arrived in December 1990. […] [The monk stated:] "Since 1995 I have been sending money to an insurgent group that still lives in the forest in Southern Laos," […] [After discussing the monk's moral justification for this, Baird comments:] A thought came to mind.  Wasn't the monk's justification for providing insurgent groups with money similar to the legitimization that many monks give for consuming meat even if they are not allowed to kill animals? […]

[Source:] The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 71, No. 3, August 2012, p. 655 et seq., "Lao Buddhst Monks' Involvement in Political and Military Resistance to the Lao People's Democratic Republic Government Since 1975", by Ian G. Baird.

Robert Jay Lifton and the self-directed cult

Robert Jay Lifton has researched a remarkable diversity of cults, with an enduring focus on methods of mind control, from the techniques used in the universities of Communist China in the 1950s, to the methods of the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo (Youtube has immortalized a lecture of his on this subject).  That, in itself, is interesting to me: my own work has dealt with both Buddhism and Communism, but I can't say that I have (yet) devoted much attention to the cult aspects of either one.

Lifton's approach has made the central question of cult analysis the paradox of how it is (procedurally) that sane adults lose their own powers of decision-making.  I do not say this as a criticism, but merely to point out that the centrality of brainwashing reflects Lifton's professional interest in the witness to history as a patient in recovery thereafter.  In contrast to an historian examining the same phenomena, Lifton is naturally more interested in changes that transpire when people escape from these cults, and regain their powers of decision-making, and reflect back on the prior events.  In terms of the history of politics and/or/as religion, this puts an unusual emphasis on personal motivations, and subjective perceptions of institutional goals (as opposed to outcomes).  Lifton is a psychiatrist, not an archivist, and, accordingly, he deals with a separate set of questions in looking at the history of China than, say, Frank Dikötter (in Mao's Great Famine).

That isn't a problem, but it is something interesting for me to reflect on, precisely because my own approach to history (having variously fallen under the headings of political science, philology, or otherwise) would naturally tend to marginalize the most blatantly cultic aspects.  I also do not interview people in the status of patients, nor in a process of recovery; in almost any other setting, people who are critical of Communism in the present tense are likely to describe themselves (and the history they witnessed) as if they had been critics all along.  Likewise, people disillusioned with Buddhist cults (or Buddhism in general) will tend to retrospectively insert critical attitudes into their narratives.  In this way, the true-believer disappears from the recollection of history, although, in fact, the mentality of the true-believer is often something of decisive importance in understanding why the events happened in the first place.

For cultural outsiders (such as myself) discussing the history of the Khmer Rouge (formally writ Democratic Kampuchea) the last thing on anyone's mind would be the mentality of the true-believers (i.e., the attitudes or beliefs of the people who sincerely subscribed to the cult of Pol Pot, and who really believed that the regime would deliver on its promised goals).  There is a natural tendency to either focus on the suffering of the great majority of the people, or else to give voice to the sorrows of the enemies of the regime who were persecuted.  The minority (be it large or small) who really believed in the doctrine of the cult are marginalized by every approach to the history except for Lifton's school of cult-analysis.  In many contexts, it would seem startling and perverse if someone were to approach the same chapter of history in terms of the suffering of the true-believers --and in terms of their psychological recovery after leaving the cult (i.e., their sorrows in losing their faith in Pol Pot).

The study of cult methods does have some significant applications to Buddhism in the 21st century, but there are also limitations that result from the (natural and inevitable) preoccupation of the discipline with apocalyptic cults in particular, and with cults that exercise a great deal of hierarchical control over their members (both in terms of suasion and coercion) rather than those that allow followers a high degree of self-direction.

I do not think that the concept of a self-directed cult is contradictory; it seems to be one of the principle refinements of the religious mentality, i.e., that the devotee takes responsibility for their own devotions.  Perhaps this aspect is clearer in various forms of Buddhism that do not shift responsibility onto a monotheistic deity (nor a magical agent of fate, etc.) and more clearly burden the practitioner with doing the work of their own salvation.  What is perhaps most sad (and most significant) about the cult mentality is that it can arise in the absence of  coercion: people can (and do) lose the ability to make their own decisions without someone else taking it from them.

One of the more obvious elements of Lifton's influence is the direct imitation of his numbered lists (iterating "criteria" for the cult mentality, often linked to concepts that are important for treatment and recovery therafter).  I have now seen several authors propose their own lists of the distinctive aspects of cult mentality (often as observed amongst the members of a specific cult) in contrast to (or expanding upon) Lifton's list in his 1961 tome, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism.  One of the things that is (prima facie) remarkable about this influence of Lifton's earliest work is that the psychology of Maoism (perhaps a uniquely 20th century "religion"?) has become a template for the analysis of fundamentally different cults (some claiming ancient origins, others based on new revelations, and so on).  I'm not complaining: I genuinely do see common elements to Communist and Religious authoritarianism in the 20th and 21st centuries --and their common ground may derive from the scientism of the era (and not from commonalities in the specific soteriological content of the competing doctrines).  However, while Lifton's analysis may have broad applicability (and his definitions of terms, categories, etc., have provided the vocabulary for a sort of miniature social science specialized in this subject) there is an inevitable incommensurability of the things being analyzed.  The loss of the individual's capacity to make decisions may be an important phenomenon in many different religious settings; however, it may also be the only thing that various cults have in common.

My ulterior motive in writing this article, I note, is that I may inspire a few of my colleagues to send me recommended reading on this subject (as I have seen very little analysis of 21st century Buddhism along these lines).  As I was reading more and more of the analysis of the cult mentality, I started to sketch out what I thought were the aspects that were absent in the approaches I've seen so far (but that are significant to the world as I've known it).  Obviously, this is not a rebuttal of any of the works I've been reading (and, thus, I don't cite them) but just reflects the real differences in the religions that the respective authors have been studying --and, perhaps, differences in the historical periods concerned, even if they are only separated by a few decades.

(1) One of the broadest assumptions I've noticed is that cults operate through active recruitment and conversion rather than the passive attraction of people who already agree with the cult's doctrine.  The growth of communications technology has massively expanded the scope of the latter mode of operation: any group (political or religious) can now create a crossroads for people who are already like-minded or who already agree with some portion of whatever the doctrine may be.  In the 1960s, such a passive approach would have hardly connected strangers within a single city or university campus; today, it can connect people across continents.  The increasing ease of finding people who are already sympathetic to a cult's cause may well result in a decreasing effort to make any kind of convincing (or even coherent) account of what the doctrine is supposed to be for an audience of unsympathetic or skeptical outsiders.

As simple as it may sound, there is a world of difference between a group that presumes its members will sign up (by e-mail or telephone) to attend a conference in advance, and a group that has to actively invite strangers and skeptics to attend its rituals, lectures, and so on.  The latter was a ubiquitous part of American campus life in the 1960s (everyone from the Communist Party to Satanists were actively seeking converts) but this is obviously an exhausting and frustrating experience for the true-believers themselves, and it often resulted in an asymmetry between the "public doctrine" used by the cult to recruit outsiders, and the "private reality" of what was believed and practiced amongst longstanding members.  As with many other forms of marketing, we may now see the decline of the "cold call", simply because it has become easier to create a crossroads for people to meet at who have at least some interest in (or some prior agreement with) whatever the cult is offering.

The function of "conversion" may not involve convincing anyone of things they don't already believe, but merely of organizing people who are already disgruntled with other religious/political movements, and who are attracted to the cult on the basis of whatever common ground they perceive themselves to have with it (prior to contact).

(2) I find that the cult mentality is signaled by the refusal to admit of any distinction between expert and amateur opinion, and this may be of increasing significance in the 21st century context, with the increasing ease of consulting reference books, looking up scientific facts of various kinds, and so on.  There was a time, simply, when it was much easier for the believers in a miracle cure to ignore the facts of medicine; those facts have become embarrassingly easy to check; ingredients with complex Latin names have become much easier to decode.

Real devotees of Communism regard economics as the "magical science" of dialectical materialism; and yet, for that same reason, they cannot cope very well with the unmagical facts of economics (that occupy so much newsprint from day to day).  Either the experts must be demonized (as believers in crackpot therapies will vilify the entire medical establishment as a conspiracy against their own cult, etc.) or else the distinction between expert and amateur must disappear.  The latter is a slippery slope, and it goes a long way down: it is fairly easy for someone to convince themselves that they know more about economics than the opinion pieces in the local newspaper, but, soon enough, they have come to imagine themselves as knowing more than all the most respected authors in the history of the subject --and, of course, the cult rewards and re-enforces this mentality.

Francis Bacon would remind us that we should measure knowledge in terms of "operation" (our ability to do things for ourselves, and to discover things for ourselves), rather than in terms of quoted dogma.  Although the convert to Communism may be convinced that they understand the economy much more profoundly than the editors of the Financial Times, they cannot, in fact, do the math themselves.  Within the cult mentality, the fact that the true believer cannot read a simple chart (nor interpret the statistics and facts offered by the detractors of the cult) are things that are easily dismissed; outside of the cult mentality, they are impossible to ignore.

I think there is an important distinction to be made between the Communist who believes merely that Communism has its own science of economics somewhere (i.e., that someone in an office in Moscow knows better than the Financial Times, or that the ghost of Lenin knows things that mere mortals cannot fully know) and the Communist who has come to regard himself (or herself) as being at no disadvantage to the experts.  What I encounter, in our era, is that the believer convinces himself that he understands the only true science of economics, and refuses to recognize himself as a mere amateur (in contrast to experts of any kind, be they sympathetic or antithetical to the cult).  The Christian Creationists memorize factoids about geology and physics that (supposedly) favor their case, and the Communists memorize factoids about fractional reserve banking; in both cases, the effect on the believer is not that they regard the researchers who discovered these things as extremely intelligent, but that they feel very intelligent themselves.  The conceit is not that someone like Lenin knows better than the experts, but that the followers individually know better than the experts (and, thus, debunking Lenin has no effect on their faith in their own expertise).  Although I won't digress into the application to Buddhism: it isn't difficult to find people in Taiwan who are convinced that a very casual acquaintance with one short text by Nāgārjuna makes them equal to any or all specialists who draw their knowledge from the prolix literature extant in Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit and Pali.  I think this is a crucial aspect of the self-directed cult: the reliance on authority of any kind diminishes, as the follower becomes more and more convinced of their own infallibility, in their unmediated relationship with the invisible forces that they believe define the world around them.

This attitude seems to have been facilitated by the transition to the internet, as it allows people to censor their own reading more than ever before, and to selectively engage only with sources that will re-enforce their own delusions.  By contrast, if you take a series of economics textbooks off of a library shelf, and glance through them to select the one you prefer, the vast majority of what you're looking at may challenge your preconceptions, and may challenge your sense of your own expertise.  The latter experience is, quite rightly, humbling, and it is not humbling for the science of economics only.

(3) Another signal of cult mentality that is not new but is perhaps exacerbated by the same changes in the technology of learning is the refusal to admit distinctions of scale in social phenomena.  Modes of reasoning that create categories of "everyone" and "no-one" have always existed, but the erasure of the distinction between a few hundred people and a few hundred million is made easier through the same cycle of self-selected information alluded to.  It seems to me noteworthy that Western Communism in the 1960s and 1970s offered complex justifications as to why a cult-like organization of just a few hundred members could have the significance of millions, but this was still predicated on an awareness of the fact that they were a tiny minority, and that they needed to offer some justification for this fact, and for their self-perceived historical significance.  This is a different thing from the delusion that the hundreds really are millions, or the delusion that a movement existing only in a few odd places actually occupies the entire world.  Although some people will tell me that I'm reporting nothing new here, please keep in mind that cult members can now see short film-clips sent in by followers all over the world (via Youtube, etc.).  This is a mode of auto-propaganda that did not exist a few decades ago, and a few dozen followers scattered around various continents can give the impression of a mass movement where there is really none at all.

I don't have much to say about this, except that it is a delusion that I meet "face to face" often enough.  When I have spoken to true-believers in cults of various kinds, I have been able to address this type of belief through the most simple sort of Socratic method: I would simply ask about exceptions to their dogmatic assertions, and allow them to answer in their own terms.  For Buddhists, in general, it is extremely painful for them to admit (or, perhaps, to realize) that the very sect they would dogmatically assert to be helping the poorest of the poor everywhere is, in fact, only seeking out a small number of the wealthiest overseas Chinese communities (in California, etc.).  I recall a long (and not at all confrontational) dialogue with a true-believer of this kind, who had this realization after I asked him some very simple questions, such as "What about Haiti?"  He had apparently never questioned his organization's own claims about their geographic extent (and priorities) before, and he had never reflected on the fact that they had never even made any attempt to help (or speak to) the black population within the cities of the United States they were headquartered in.

(4) Following the same pattern is the refusal to admit the sources of knowledge, which is, likewise, an aspect of cult mentality exacerbated by the fact that sources can now be checked so rapidly and easily.  This, also, is very different from former generations who would openly admit that they only knew something because their grandparents explained it to them in that way, and they might be satisfied to say that they can provide no account of their grandparents' reasons for having such confidence.  Perhaps the collapse of traditional authority (or the belief in tradition simply because it is tradition) is more fundamental than technological change in this case, but the ease of checking facts and comparing alternative explanations is certainly a significant catalyst.

I should clarify that by "sources of knowledge" I do not mean published works only: the refusal to admit the source of something known includes (e.g.) the refusal to admit that something was revealed in a hallucinatory experience (even if this was part of the original doctrine of the cult).  It may be a refusal to admit that one doctrine was set down as a substitute for another that failed to get results, or any other disavowal of the process of discovery (magical or otherwise) that produced the thing now known.

Of course, Lifton's enduring idea of the thought-terminating cliché comes to mind in this context: routinely, some catchphrase is offered to settle the matter, so that the question of how we know what we are all supposed to know does not emerge.

However, I do think there is a generational difference in this pattern: part of the refusal to admit or examine the sources of doctrines is an embarrassment that surrounds their revelation.  The problem is one of believing in a doctrine, but not believing (sufficiently) in the conditions that produced the doctrine (be it secular or sacred).

I have met people who live on a sort of religious tightrope, because they believe in the doctrines that were revealed through hallucinations, and yet they do not believe that hallucination is a reliable source of doctrines (and I think they do not trust their own hallucinatory or meditative experiences, while still wanting to believe in the given doctrine).  This tension is no less true for the Communists, who may want to believe in the doctrines of dialectical materialism (as isolated tenets) but who are deeply embarrassed by the origins of those doctrines (that are neither scientifically valid, nor marked by any religious miracle to set them above the scrutiny of science), and even more embarrassed by the committees that redefined them as time went on (Karl Popper caused a great deal of this embarrassment in his books The Open Society and its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism, precisely by drawing attention to the "sources of knowledge" that Communism relied upon).

The generational change, I think, is precisely the reluctance to propound hallucination simply as hallucination, and, as I have already said, the reluctance to rely on tradition simply as tradition.  There is no longer a pervasive (cultural) sense that hallucinations couldn't possibly be deceptive, nor that one's ancestors would be inerrant in setting down principles for the next generation.  Historically, the belief in things seen and heard is very much of the opposite tendency: if you're willing to believe in what people have seen, then you're willing to believe in ghosts (the refusal to believe in ghosts requires criteria that are quite a bit more complicated than validating what is merely seen).  The assumption that elaborate hallucinations are a source of real knowledge is not incompatible with bare empiricism, because people really do see the things that they hallucinate; by contrast, an awareness of epilepsy as a medical condition (that has produced hallucinations in every era of history) profoundly erodes anyone's willingness to rely on such testimony, no matter how honest it may be.

(5) Bundled up with all of the above, I think there's a coeval refusal to admit the distinction between a principle and its outcome.  Although some might say there's nothing new about this minor paradox, I do think this has been changing with the passage of generations: a crypto-religious group like Alcoholics Anonymous now must assert that their principles are good unto themselves (as if the principle itself were the product) precisely because there are no measurable outcomes that would validate their practice (and, on the contrary, statistics show the method to be a failure).  Likewise, of course, Communists now attempt to dodge the question of the outcomes of their revolutions by arguing that (somehow) revolution itself is good in principle (and so on for a long list of other Communist principles that had terrible outcomes in actual fact, but that they can still seek to glorify in the abstract, as if the goodness of the principle itself were the only valid question).

I had a long discussion (in which I did very little talking) with a Sinhalese man who wanted to convince me that his practice of a certain form of Buddhist meditation had resulted in mosquitoes refusing to bite him.  He explained the principle of the thing at length, to which I responded simply, and with a smile, "Yes, but mosquitoes still bite you."  He then presented a synopsis of all the same principles, insisting on how pious and good the theory of the thing is, and that people should refrain from killing mosquitoes, with the confidence that the mosquitoes will reciprocate these sentiments.  I replied by saying in almost the same words again, "Yes, but if we go into the forest now, mosquitoes will still bite you."  I think the friendliness of my manner melted his resolve somewhat: he offered me a third defense of the thesis, with rather less emphasis on his former claim that the efficacy of this meditation was verified by the refusal of mosquitoes to bite him, memorably claiming "…and the mosquitoes never, ever bite me, except only sometimes…".  Alas, I'll never know how different my career might have been if I had spent more time in Sri Lanka than in Laos.

Although this is a lighthearted example, the same matter extends to matters of life and death, most obviously when medical care is refused on account of such a principle.

If the question should arise as to whether or not a particular practice of meditation produces the supposed (medical or psychological) outcomes that are promised, the cult mentality is signaled by a refusal to examine what the outcomes are, to instead return to insisting on the goodness of the principle being taught.  The principle itself is the product: the outcome cannot be thought of as a separate category in the mind's eye of the believer.

The generational change I would infer here is, simply, the greater accessibility of social science methods (that are, after all, a commonplace source of newspaper column fodder, even if it is in an extremely simplified form).  Although not all claims can be verified so simply as sleeping in the woods without a mosquito net, there is now a broad understanding that medical claims can be measured against the outcomes for people who undergo the treatment, and even psychological "benefits" (such as those claimed by Alcoholics Anonymous) can be compared to measured outcomes of some kind.  There is a sort of preclusion of skepticism in just asserting that the principle of the thing is valid unto itself, and admitting of no distinction between it and its outcome.

All five of the concepts I've sketched out have applicability to 21st century Buddhism, and are worth inquiring about in religious orders that have not reached the (headline-grabbing) extremes of Aum Shinrikyo.  Although each of the five may seem rather mild if examined in isolation, they are rolled together in the cult mentality.  In combination, they're an intoxicating full-time program of self-delusion.

As with the person who thinks of themselves as an expert in economics who can't interpret a simple graph, there are remarkably obvious limitations to the ability of these laypeople who now both lead and follow religious movements.  I meet devotees (at all levels of education, including PhDs) who refuse to admit that anyone knows more than they do (even if they cannot read or understand the language of the sacred texts their practice is based upon, etc. etc.) while at the same time refusing to admit what their sources of sacred wisdom really are (what is text vs. revelation, and even what texts are Chinese vs. Indian in origin, etc. etc.) and also refusing to admit that their practices may be evaluated relative to their real outcomes, and so on.

Although I have seen writing about the (so-called) "secularization" of instruction in meditation, these articles have generally been interested in the alienation of the usual role of the monks, and the diminishing status of ritual (relative to meditation, lecturing, etc.).  The mentality of the people who actually believe they are equal (or superior) to senior monks is worth examining in itself, along with their attitude toward scholarship as such (regardless of the monastic or secular status of the scholar).  There is, I think, an important need to apply Lifton's approach to the mentality of these meditation leaders, even though the groups they are members of may never do anything violent or infamous enough to make newspaper headlines.

In my experience of speaking to such people face-to-face, their attitude is not merely one of disrespect to senior monks or scholars who may have more objective knowledge and experience than themselves --instead, it reflects a very real delusion (so to speak) that the experts do not know anything that they do not know themselves.  Even in the total absence of coercion, this all adds up to a sort of sort of self-directed cult mentality.  I cannot honestly say to what extent this marks a change over the attitudes of Buddhists just 200 years ago (i.e., 1812) but it seems difficult to believe that this level of chutzpah was so widespread in societies that still valued the contribution of the scribe in reproducing texts by hand, and of the monk in memorizing and reciting texts aloud, even if intellectuals interested in debating the content of the texts were as tiny a minority then as now.

Socratically enough, I have asked lay meditation leaders questions such as, "Is there really no monk alive that you respect enough to invite to speak at your meetings?  Have you never met a monk who you thought was more advanced in meditation than yourself?  Is there really no specialist whom you would want to consult before offering these philosophical lectures of your own invention?"  The answer is that there can be no answer: any answer would admit that there's a hierarchy of knowledge, and that we only know things in reliance upon particular sources, etc. --all of which is very much antithetical to the disaggregated and self-directed ego-trip of 21st century Buddhism.  I'm not insinuating that previous centuries did not have ego-trips of their own, but only that there are some features that seem to me distinctive to our own era.

I have heard (and read) devotees openly disrespecting (and insulting) the very same western scholars whose translations they rely upon as the source of their knowledge of doctrine.  Although there is a bit more self-censorship when the translator is a monk, the dismissive comments are not all that much different.  There is a tremendous sense of entitlement among the current generation of Buddhist meditation instructors (and even meditation followers) to dismiss anyone and everyone as not knowing what they're talking about --comparable at least in style (and certainty) to the ease with which so many people in my generation dismiss the entire corpus of knowledge published about the history of economics (in claiming that fiat currency and fractional reserve banking are some kind of conspiracy that nobody is brilliant enough to understand aside from those who denounce it a conspiracy).

The delusion of one's own infallibility is made much more powerful by my first point in the numbered list: there is less and less of an incentive to provide a coherent (or convincing) account to outsiders, because religious groups (at any scale) can passively attract like-minded people who already agree with them.  I do not think I have ever met anyone alive (monk or layperson) who had ever attempted to convert a total outsider to Buddhism; at most, they had tried to convince people who were partly in agreement with their particular form of Buddhism to become fully in agreement.  Whereas the Buddhism of just 100 years ago (in both East and West) was reasonably obsessed with providing an eminently rational, defensible account of the religion to outsiders (including the administrators of the British Empire in Asia) the 21st century tendency to operate the religion as a crossroads for the meeting of like-minded individuals is at the opposite extreme.

So the practitioner becomes an unquestioned authority in his or her own eyes.  The reader may ask, is this really so bad?  Well, one of the features of cult mentality as defined by Lifton is that it can be cured: in fact, compared to an addiction, recovery is relatively rapid, easy, and irreversible, even in cases of state-sponsored brainwashing.  What I find very sad about the type of self-directed cult that I have seen myself (and that I am here, with a few sketches, describing) is that it is very difficult for anyone to become disillusioned with it: once people are convinced that they have nothing to learn from anyone else, it is very difficult for them to ever recover.  The loss of curiosity is just as pernicious as the loss of liberty; no matter how gratifying the confidence of faith may seem, losing the capacity to thus ask questions, and to regard the world as full of things as-yet-unknown, is a first step on the road to losing the power to make one's own decisions --and it should be watched as carefully as the last step.

On Learning Lao (Fascicle 1)

 (1) This is an article with a few remarks on learning the Lao language in a political, cultural and textual context that is rapidly changing, and a few illustrations that may be of practical use for people learning the language (or considering whether or not they should do so).

When I first started studying the interaction between Lao and Pali (i.e., between the modern vernacular and the ancient, dead language) a colleague remarked to me in an e-mail that Lao was probably the weakest of all the literary traditions that I could study, but perhaps, he thought, I preferred it for that reason; just a few years later, a German-funded project at the Lao National Library made this formerly-marginal tradition the best-digitized, best-indexed, most accessible and most legible manuscript tradition in the Theravāda world.

Although a tiny minority of the (extant) literary corpus in Laos is composed in "monolingual Pali" (as David Wharton would say) that minority of manuscripts is now legible (and instantly accessible) in a way that no other collection ever has been.  Plenty of people can look at that website and think, "Sri Lanka should have done this decades ago" --but they didn't.  You could say that European agencies with major collections should have done this decades ago (e.g., the EFEO or JRULM) --but they didn't.

In the few years that I worked on Lao, the language made the transition from being "under-resourced" to relatively "over-resourced".  For the first time, just last week, a professor complained to me that Laos is now "over-researched", so crowded is the tiny country with anthropologists hunting down PhD theses, in comparison to Yunnan or Vietnam, where conditions are harder.  I attribute this to the "pizza and coffee" theory of anthropology: western authors will seek out those research opportunities that are new, exotic, strange, and yet conveniently located within a few minutes of restaurants serving pizza and coffee.  In many ways, the last 20 years witnessed an upsurge of research (of all kinds) as Lao cities like Vientiane and Luang Phabang raced to catch up with Northern Thailand's Chiang Mai in providing amenities of exactly this kind (that are the subconscious prerequisites for many a researcher and journalist living "in the field", but, in fact, working in an air conditioned office).

(2) The awkward phrase "under-resourced" is part of the technical vocabulary I used to see in Unicode proposals (attempting to standardize computing in Lao and many other languages).  Many of the old resources I used for Lao (like Cambodian) were produced by the U.S. military (with emphasis on vocabulary related to ammunition, airplanes, and haggling over cigarettes); others were produced by the French Empire, and the newest (of that era) were produced by Christian missionaries, and the then-new generation of missionary-run schools.

Some of the most memorable language resources that I laid eyes upon were hand-made textbooks produced for use on refugee camps (some of them looked more like they were mimeographed than photocopied).  These often had very simple pencil-line illustrations, and tried to reproduce what was basically an American notion of what education was supposed to be: Isaac Newton sees the apple fall under a tree, and so on.  Those resources can still be found in libraries, but they have no ISBN, no stated author, and present a puzzle to both archivists and students of the languages in question.

What was the next generation of resources that followed this?  Symptomatically enough of glasnost in Southeast Asia, they were the textbooks produced under the patronage of the Australian government (although one Lao-German dictionary emerged from work completed in former East Germany).  More immediately visible were the language resources produced for the new economy of international tourism (in some cases, these were made by tourists for tourists).  What had been one of the most isolated countries in the world was suddenly becoming a highway to link China, Vietnam, and Thailand; while I was there, Cambodia and Burma remained distant places in the Lao imagination (in several contexts in Vientiane, I asked if anyone had heard of a Lao student learning Burmese or Cambodian, and I was uniformly told "no", although the people I asked about this would reflect at once that the country would need people with such skills in the future).

(3) What about the internet and the advent of digital literacy?  One of the peculiar dynamics of Lao (as a language) is that the majority of people who speak it do not read and write in Lao: their written language is instead Thai, and they generally find Lao orthography incomprehensible, living with a kind of day-to-day diglossia (reading Thai but speaking Lao).  Foreigners tend to massively over-estimate the similarity of Thai and Lao as languages; what they are observing is not, in fact, the similarity of the languages, but the skill of so many locals in switching between the two.

As Nick Enfield put it (back in the days when he was one of the only linguists in the field), "The high level of ethnic and linguistic diversity in Laos means that there is a complex web of linguistic and cultural contact, by which members of different cultural groups and societies will be multilingual and multicultural to various degrees."*¹

Numerically, there are more speakers of Lao (as a first language) living in Thailand than in the republic of Laos; part of the reason for this is the ethnic diversity that exists within Laos (more on that below, but, for those of you running to check Wikipedia, the basic warning that you should take from this is simply that you can't look at the total population of Laos and presume it to be ethnically Lao, nor can you even presume that the non-Lao can understand Lao as a second language).  Although it isn't the subject of this article, I should also mention, of course, that the region has had a long history of devastating warfare with ongoing ramifications as to which language is now spoken where (and, of course, for who has been able to survive here, there, and everywhere).

One result of this situation is that the language has vastly more resources than a tiny (and impoverished) country like Laos could create or support for itself, but that many of these are transcribed in Thai script, and are neither packaged nor sold to foreigners as Lao language resources.

The huge "literature" of Isan music-videos and comedy films (produced in Thailand, but spoken in various dialects of Lao) that a researcher might first encounter as unwanted noise during a bus trip are a major resource for students of the language at every level (although you won't be able to get them subtitled in Lao).  I have met just one Thai who admitted that she became fluent in Lao almost entirely through singing Isan karaoke; however, this type of language practice would not teach reading comprehension of either language.  Even so (and even if Isan pop culture doesn't suit your tastes) this can be compared to the dire situation of language resources for Cree, Ojibwe, or even Pali, none of which have karaoke or comedy films available for students to practice with.

On the literary end of the spectrum, I have visited a number of manuscript projects in Isan, most of which were devoted to traditional literature in the local vernacular (variously referred to as "Tai Noi", "Old Lao", or, often enough, the dialect found in local manuscripts is referred to by the name of the nearest river, or a former dukedom/principality); there is remarkably little interest in Pali manuscripts, and the universities that I visited throughout Thailand or Laos had neither students nor professors learning reading comprehension of Pali.

For Lao, all of these resources have crowded onto the internet in a disorganized fashion (and no standardized transcription), with the early impetus coming from (i) overseas Lao, living in France, the U.S., etc., and (ii) the Lao of Isan, Thailand.  In the next decade, it seems inevitable that the Lao within Laos will have a greater portion of the online presence of their language; however, when I lived in Laos, the obvious barriers to such a presence remained in place, namely, (i) illiteracy, (ii) poverty, and (iii) lack of access to electricity.

It also deserves to be said that the Lao literati are consumers of books produced in languages other than Lao: apart from the obvious saturation of Thai in the country, the Vietnamese language still has tremendous importance (as a language of learning), and the remnants of French and German are now being replaced by English and Chinese as international secondary languages.  The one and only study of literacy in Vientiane that I read (in its uncensored form) stated that in the Lao capital more books were read in Vietnamese than in any other language (including Lao!).  When asked what language they had read a book in (during the last year), 56% of respondents who had read a book at all stated Vietnamese; only 28% stated Lao, with English (10%) and Thai (6%) following thereafter.*²  Thus, while Thai has such prominence on television screens in the country, it is not a language that books are (commonly) read in, although there's a limited extent to which we can say books are commonly read at all.  That statistic dates from 1997–8, and while I'm certain the response would now be different, it would be hard to place bets on the direction of the change, partly because the statistic measures a small elite in the capital, and a self-selecting minority who choose to read books: only 5.5% of the respondents to the survey said that they had "read or looked at" a book during the prior year.

When I was in Vientiane, a technician (such as an electrical engineer) was very likely to rely on manuals written in either (i) Vietnamese, or else, more rarely (ii) German, and, much more rarely still, (iii) Russian (this reflects the program of technical assistance that linked Laos with East Germany under Communism; the Lao-German Technical College is one legacy of this, and, despite rumors linking it to France, the national beer of Laos is another such legacy).  It seems difficult to believe that this hierarchy of languages will remain unchanged: digitally, it should become easier and easier to translate (or at least transcribe) Thai resources into Lao, and, as aforementioned, it seems inevitable that both Chinese and English will play an increasing role as reference languages (e.g., as the languages now found on the packaging of medicines and chemicals, if not in the manuals that people refer to in technical professions).

I remember that it seemed to be a shockingly original suggestion when I suggested to a Lao official that, in the future, the Lao government would replace its (then-struggling) French-language newspaper with one in Chinese, Japanese, or both.  The official whom I stated this to was stunned, thought about it for a moment, and then agreed that it seemed inevitable, given the mix of charity and commerce that was then coming from the countries in question.

(4) Lao officials insisted to me a number of times that the term "ethnic minority" should never be used (nor "minority language") as the sum of all the minorities in Laos added up to the majority; conversely, you would never hear the lowland Lao refer to themselves as a minority in their own country, and the notion of who qualifies as "Lao" was somewhat in flux at that time (in Vientiane I would typically hear remarks along the lines of, "Everyone in Laos is Lao… except for the Hmong, I suppose…").

Some of the illustrations on Laos's paper currency (the Kip) continue to depict three ethnic strata in the country corresponding to altitude; this is a theory that originates, unbelievably enough, with third-rate research conducted by Edmund Leach in Burma, and not with the Lao Communist Party.  Of course, as in so many nations around the world, the printed currency expresses successive stages of propaganda, and at any given moment always seem slightly out of date with the government's mandate:

"During the rule of the [pre-Communist] RLG the political elite stressed the relation between kingship and Buddhism. Icons representing economical and technological development, which appeared at the end of RLG rule, became dominant after the [Communist] revolution of 1975. Socialist iconography replaced the Buddhist icons—a new national ideology based on the socialist transformation of the society was established. However, the revival of Buddhist iconography during the 90s demonstrated the importance of traditional cultural values for the constitution of a national identity. The process of nation-building in Laos as a discourse now includes clear cultural references by connecting the revolutionary struggle to the Lao Buddhist heritage."*³

Although Oliver Tappe (quoted above) does not mention the (European) origin of the "three altitudes" theory of ethnicity, he does draw attention to the fact that this appeared (emblematically) on the bills produced in 1991, but then did not reappear on the new banknotes designed thereafter until 2008 ("The multi-ethnic national community displayed on the 1000 Kip note from 1991 appears as a short episode even though it is still highlighted in official party rhetoric." ibid.).

1991 was also the year when the image of a Buddhist temple quite literally replaced the hammer-and-sickle at the centre of the national insignia/coat-of-arms (appearing on the currency, and seen on official buildings, publications, etc. etc.); however, Tappe does not mention that the particular Buddhist temple in question (generally transliterated as the "That Luang") is an entirely modern construction, built by the French, with an architectural shape and style that did not exist in Laos prior to French occupation.  Both examples reflect a struggle to construct a pluralistic "nationalism" out of components that were created by Europeans with Eurocentric assumptions (and I would remind the reader that Communism itself is a European and Eurocentric "component" in this analogy, although I've met plenty of Lao who were unclear on the ethnicity of "Lenin-Marx", whom they thought of as a single person with a hyphenated name).

Overall, the era of the new (Australian-funded) curriculum is a retreat to reliance upon lowland Lao as the sole language of education; I say "retreat" as I really do not regard the government as acting in positive pursuit of an ideal, but rather as having given up on its former ideals, embarking on an era of muddling by with an ersatz pragmatism, responding to the impetus of various foreign-donor projects and overseas partnerships.  When I discussed this face-to-face with a small group of both Australian and Lao officials (who were then implementing the final stages of the project that produced and distributed the textbooks that are now ubiquitous in the country) I remember that they said to me that all former efforts to produce lessons in local languages had been abandoned, but they assumed that by hiring local people to teach the Lao material, some degree of translation would take place spontaneously in the classroom; of course, it is easy to find case studies where the opposite has transpired, and where there is a clear ethnic (and lingual) division between the teacher and the pupils, with predicable results, and open complaints about the pressure for everyone to assimilate to one standard of being "lowland Lao".

Although I've seen a variety of academic papers on the subject (with a variety of vitriol and histrionics) nobody can deny that the day-to-day reality is merely the government's management of a system that is in a state of dire dysfunction, and the root of many evils is the lack of funds generally, and the abysmally low wages paid to the teachers specifically; my point here is that any effect that a critic may claim the education system has upon the people (good or bad) would be limited simply by the education system's overall lack of effectiveness.  I note, also, that these critiques seem to ignore the fact that (in 2006) 35% of Lao students are educated in the monastic system (not 35% of male students, but 35% of all enrolled students, and, thus, the number will represent a much higher proportion of male students).  Monasticism, military service, and agricultural labor are the larger part of education for a very large part of the male population; and I have often wondered if the work of westerners on the subject of education ignores this, because they only observe a small number of schools in the capital city that are starkly different from the surrounding reality.

I worked in one remote village where the community's single television (showing Thai soap operas, and powered by a "micro-hydro" generator, the size of a boat-motor) was having a tremendous effect on the youth (who gathered in the house of the mayor [or "headman"] to watch these broadcasts nightly) whereas the empty wooden schoolhouse was evidently having no effect at all.  The semester had already started, but the teacher had not arrived; I was given various suggestions as to why this might be, the most probable being that the teacher could be effectively "on strike" until an official paid for his or her transportation to the village, as the salary was so low that teachers could not afford their own bus fare.  In another village, I later witnessed this same phenomenon in reverse: the government officials all went "on strike" until the local governor agreed to provide them with free transportation to their respective home-towns at the start of the annual holiday.  At that time the government employees in question were paid US$15 per month (always described in Lao as "$45 per season"), and would forage for food (in the river and woods) as soon as their day's work at the office ceased.

I'm not saying this to make excuses for anyone in the equation, but merely suggesting that phrases like "assimilationist language policy" conjure up an image of an omnipotent bureaucracy that is actively designing a future society.  Such a critique could only be directed at elite institutions serving a tiny minority of the wealthiest people in Laos.  This is not to say that a critique of elite education would be of zero importance, but rather indicates that it has little contact with the reality of the village school-teachers (who work in wooden-shuttered schoolhouses, with neither mosquito nets on the windows, nor electricity).

(5) The ideological and institutional weakness of Lao (as a language) is experienced by the foreign student as a kind of cultural strength: the language diversity (and internal inconsistency) of Lao entails that the people of Laos have a remarkable capacity to understand their own language when it is spoken very badly.  This is a considerable contrast even to central Thai: almost without exception, the Lao are accustomed to listening across considerable gaps of dialect, and understanding their own language as adapted by native speakers of a remarkable variety of first languages; thus, they are remarkably receptive to all the errors a student will make, and a relatively large portion of them are keen observers of fine distinctions that exist within the language family.

In sitting with a crowd of Isan and Thai speakers, I once complained that a particularly useful verb was understood in Northern Isan, but regarded with complete incomprehension when I got as far south as Lopburi.  A man younger than myself who had been working as a traveling salesman for some years then nodded appreciatively, and then listed off (province by province) exactly where the word was in common use, and where it was not known.  He regarded his own level of knowledge as nothing more than cocktail chatter, but he had a sensitivity for differences of dialect in the region that many a career linguist would envy.  I remember another young man (who was a somewhat lackadaisical law student at the time) who liked the sound of my Lao sobriquet, and then proceeded to demonstrate the small differences in the pronunciation of the name that I would encounter in each of the provinces of Laos (followed, somewhat less confidently, by an attempt at mimicking the non-Lao accents of the Hmong, Akha, and so on).  Although comparisons are odious, I never encountered anyone who had such a familiarity with the differences that exist within dialects of German when I was in Germany (nor of English in England, etc.), and I think that very few cultures have this level of linguistic self-awareness.

In the case of Lao, however, this awareness (in the current generation) has arisen in a post-war context of dislocation (including internal and external migration), generalized illiteracy and aliteracy.  That situation is neither ancient in origin nor mysterious in nature, and, on the contrary, it is a direct contrast to the local literary culture that existed only a few generations ago (a past culture that is evident if only in the corpus of Lao manuscripts aforementioned, writ in an array of dialects, now the domain of a very small number curators, with the last generation of scribes already deceased, and the continuum transmission already broken; this was once the popular literature, drama and entertainment of an array of small principalities, that were both producers and consumers of such manuscripts).  It also deserves to be said that this intense awareness of minor differences in spoken language correlates to shifting standards of snobbery, racism and exclusion, that shift from one context to another; in general, people are constantly judging one-another (and are aware that they are being judged themselves) by a thousand shibboleths.  Even as an unassimilated foreigner, I experienced the greatest diversity of responses imaginable both in speaking Lao as well as I could, and from speaking Thai with a heavy Lao accent, when in Thailand.  Some of the most negative responses were from Thai citizens who were themselves ethnically Lao, but who considered it politically offensive that I would speak Lao in Thailand; evidently, these were the ones who had accepted the attitudes of their own schoolmasters, while others whom I met had rejected the same sanction, and were instead elated to meet a foreigner who had chosen to learn the local language (rather than the official language of the state).

(6) The reformed orthography of Lao is described as "phonetic" (as standardized by the Communist government, with only minor changes in contrast to the former French empire standard, the latter in turn being a relatively minor set of changes when contrasted to "Tai Noi" longhand of the same era) and it is much more phonetically lucid than the writing systems of Thai or Cambodian; however, it reflects a kind of phonetic ideal that may very indirectly correspond to how the language is spoken wherever you happen to stand.  The sounds of the consonants can be considerably different from whatever the standardized textbooks and tables may say (in a way that is obvious to outsiders), and the vowel sounds can be different in a manner that is more subtle (sometimes invisible to outsiders) but that locals care about intensely (the elocution of vowel sounds is tremendously important, and the distinctions between many of these vowels is alien to European languages).


However, the greatest gap between pedagogy and praxis is in tonality.  Phinnarat Akharawatthanakun wrote a number of studies on tonality, contrasting the systems (recorded and tested empirically) from village to village (I am thinking of a paper presented at the 2005 FICLS, but I assume that the same material has been more formally published elsewhere by now).*⁴  This is a study that attempts to quantify (and display in a dizzying series of graphs) the differences between the tones as spoken in "around 65 varieties" of Lao dialect (including Isan and other borderland areas of Thailand).

In this context, I would not draw attention to the specific conclusions of that paper, but to the general conclusion that a student must draw from it: if you go to 27 different villages, you can encounter 27 different tone "systems", as the researchers in this project did (and the total could be 65 or more… depending on how precisely you measure the differences between dialects).  Every textbook will attempt to convince you of a single system of tones for Lao, but, with time, you will either need to subscribe to a philosophy that tonality is unsystematic, or else that the system is so intensely linked to individual villages that generalizations (about a single system) are misleading or useless.

I recall meeting one American graduate student who had learned Thai in a classroom setting, and who strictly imitated an artificial system of tonality that managed to be comprehensible while sounding nothing like Thai.  When she started learning Lao (in Laos) her teachers seemed to lack words to express what was wrong with her use of the language; she was told to "smooth over" her tones, and to stop pronouncing a different tone with each word.  My own remark on this was that she had ended up with something like "newsreader Thai", akin to the unnatural pronunciation of French radio announcers (especially when they read out the time or a formal political bulletin in French, they use a "dialect" that exists nowhere except in French broadcasting).

At the opposite extreme, it is very common to meet westerners who have learned Lao tonality through direct imitation and who do speak the language "flawlessly", even if their pronunciation is an unsystematic hybrid of the accents of their informants (or their adoptive family as the case may be).  I remember a waitress who spoke briefly with a white man as a customer, and then could identify the white man's wife's village of origin (although she was not present at the restaurant), because of this peculiar imprint of tonality; he had been (passively or actively) taking on some of the cultural cues of his wife's village-specific linguistic identity.

(7) This essay (rightly called a "fascicle", as it is a bundle of anecdotes) should answer last what many people would demand first: why learn Lao?  In these reflections on the politics of the language, some will find strong reasons to study Lao and some will find strong reasons to look elsewhere for a mountain to climb.

The context for learning Lao has changed remarkably in the space of a few years, and in the next few years it will change again.  Progress is an ideology; change is an objective fact; I don't believe in progress, but change is inevitable, especially where people lack the strength to resist it.

Everything I've written above seems to be from a very distant past, as I already know how dramatically the landscape of the country has changed: mountain roads that were formerly impassible have now been paved, and the forests laid flat.  The last of the wild elephant herds have been driven to extinction, and the myriad cultures that depended on the forests have been replaced by mass monocrop agriculture, with both centrifugal and centrifocal effects for the population (pushed off of the land in one place, gathered together in another, etc.).

When I was last in Laos, there was already a shortage of able-bodied labor for the rubber-tapping industry (with the first-planted trees gradually reaching their maturity for tapping, and a delay of many years before the bulk of the crop would require such labor) and it was widely supposed that they would be dependent upon Burmese refugees to provide the labor in future, as even the poorest of the Lao could not be compelled to do the work for the wages offered.  I had myself lived in villages where the locals told me, bluntly, that the entire population of the district had been (re-)constituted from migrants crossing over the border (from Burma) within a single generation (following after the long-term depopulation of the area that took place in the American wars).  At that time, it seemed that the slow-motion civil war in Burma would never end, and so Laos would be able to draw on this demographic dividend indefinitely.  Only now (in 2012) it seems as if that, too, might change.  Laos continues to be both a source of migrants and a destination for migrants; it both generates refugees and absorbs them from neighboring countries; in a value-neutral sense, the situation is "dynamic", although I think that all witnesses to the change are leery of the extent to which this dynamism is both destructive and self-destructive.

Various strands of Lao propaganda have been mentioned in passing in my remarks above, but I feel that I should add the simple note that much of this propaganda was (for a period of about 15 years) really very effective, both inside Laos, and in its international relations.  The Lao government said they were making a transition to parliamentary democracy and, to a large extent, even the most cynical of commentators and donor-agencies believed that this was underway.  Whenever the government spoke of saving the forests, or saving the elephants, a great many people were convinced of this, not least of all because of the long list of international agencies aiding and abetting the effort (whose idiom and imprimatur the Lao government borrowed from freely).  When the Lao government said it was going to conserve the marsh just north of the capital city, it seems that everyone believed it up until the very day that demolition was underway; when they said that they would pave over it and conserve it simultaneously, there were still a few who managed to agree with them.

For myself, the change of the symbol on the 1000 kip bill really did mean something, even if we regard it now as an act of propaganda: it was a tangible reassurance that I wasn't living in a country that would stack up Buddhist manuscripts and burn them, and that I wasn't living in a country that would smash the stone inscriptions and try to destroy its feudal past in the name of Communism.  As overtly paradoxical as it may be (in contrast to the history of Maoism to the north, or the Khmer Rouge to the south) Laos had invented a path of state patronage for Buddhism, while remaining a one party state of the "free-market Communist" variety.

I can't say that I was a victim of that propaganda, but I can say that it affected my own decision to learn Lao (and to devote years of my life to Laos, although the number of years was cut short by factors I had no control over); although I come from a political science background, and I was aware of the propaganda as a subject of study unto itself from the outset, nevertheless, it affected me both in ways that were shallow and in ways that were profound.

I recall asking a colleague who had switched from being a Cambodian specialist to working only on Laos why he had made that decision (as I was tempted to do the opposite myself).  After some sighing and a moment of reflection, he said that his main reason was the discrepancy between the two languages.  After years of speaking Cambodian, he told me, he felt that there was "nothing refined" about the language.  To me, this was a remarkable answer because, at that time, my own work on all of the languages of the area dominated by their written form, and especially the record of stone inscriptions, and other links to the ancient past; it seemed to me much easier to imagine someone complaining that Lao lacked the "refinement" of written Cambodian (but, as I say, this was not based on conversational experience in either language at the time).

The motivation and the reward for me (in learning Lao) had to do with its tenuous connection to Pali; the viability of my continuing to live in the country relied on the politically-tenuous connection between the Lao government and Theravāda Buddhism.  In studying the language, from day to day, I would stumble upon fragments of various ancient words, often cobbled together with vernacular ones, sometimes retaining their original meaning, and sometimes wildly different from it.  (See the notes to the second illustration, above, with the jocular title about the practical use of knowing Pali in daily life; various simple examples are also found on my old website, bhāsā → pāsā (ພາສາ), padesa → ƀatet (ປະເທດ), etc. etc.)  I realized fully at the time how unusual this was: I never learned the vocabulary of bars and nightclubs that tourists normally do, but my days were brightened up with the strange etymologies that are everywhere ignored, by native speakers and outsiders alike.

The idea of Laos in the 21st century, as the propaganda was presented to me, was of a country that had decided to transition from Marxist-Leninism to Buddhism, and to transition from a revolutionary dictatorship to some kind of elected government, with some scope for public dissent.  I think that a more productive way to think of the underlying reality (in that era) is that no such decision was ever made: instead, there was a continuity, inasmuch as Laos has tried to generate the propaganda messages that its donors have demanded of it, in one epoch after another.  When the donors demanded to hear about ecology, they set their minds to this message just the same as they had done with any other message before, from Soviet-style potemkin villages, to killing all the ducks in a given province to impress the U.N. agencies with their zeal to prevent the H5N1 virus.  In this sense, deforestation is compatible with ecology, and one-party totalitarianism is compatible with democracy: they are different acts set forth on the same stage, in a theatre that all the players must believe in (almost as if it were real), until the curtain falls.

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Endnotes
¹ N.J. Enfield.  2008.  "Lao Linguistics in the 20th Century and Since."  In Y. Goudineau, & M. Lorrillard (Eds.), Recherches nouvelles sur le Laos (pp. 435-452). Paris: EFEO.
² Grant Evans.  1997-8 Vientiane Social Survey Project.  Lao Ministry of Information and Culture: Institute for Cultural Research.  (This is a government publication, but I read the "draft" version, informally published by Evans prior to editing (if any) by the government and/or donor agencies.)
³ This is quoted from an informal conference paper on the "iconography" of Lao banknotes written by Oliver Tappe, titled, "A New Banknote in the People’s Republic – The Iconography of the Kip as a Representation of Ideological Transformations in Laos (1957-2006)."  I do not know if it was ever formally published.  Tappe does not mention Edmund Leach, but does draw attention to the three strata of ethnicity
⁴ Phinnarat Akharawatthanakun, 2005, "Tones in Proto-Lao, Modern Lao, and Future Lao", presented at the First International Conference on Lao Studies, May 20-22, 2005. Northern Illinois University. DeKalb: USA.  (Distributed digitally after the conference.)