1893, When the French and the British Fought to Rule Southeast Asia

An amusing article about the bad old days of French and British Colonialism in Southeast Asia: https://medium.com/p/e9844c270f9d

I wrote this in about two-and-a-half days; the deadlines were very tight, and, as a result, the style is a bit bombastic.  However, the primary sources and subject-matter were bombastic to begin with, so… the results are an amusing mix.

Female Monks vs. Thailand

The news item here is only five minutes long (the second half of the tape is an unrelated story).  Although it may be difficult to endure the narrator's mispronunciation of each and every Pali word mentioned, I'd encourage you to make the effort to endure it.*

* ("I continue to meet Western PhD candidates who cannot pronounce 'Theravāda' correctly. I would imagine that if no-one in their PhD program has informed them that θɛrəvɑdə is wrong, their thesis examiner may owe them a refund." http://www.pali.pratyeka.org/#Phonology)

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".

Totalitarian by the Numbers

Totalitarian by the Numbers: The Quantification of Democracy and Despotism in Southeast Asia

      An essay from the early 1990s crossed my desk a few days ago, opening with a world-weary remark that now seems to have a very different tone in retrospect: "Democracy", it read, "is the legitimating myth of the 20th century".*¹  In surveying the prospects for democracy in Asia, the essay made repeated reference to the Freedom House rankings, a name that was familiar to me, but that I couldn't recall hearing much about since the early 1990s myself.  I rarely (if ever) see this statistic mentioned; it reminds me of the passing optimism of that era when even the most cynical of commentators looked forward from the baseline of 1989 with the expectation that we would be able to chart rapid political improvement in the years to follow.  I hesitate to write "improvement", as the term used at the time was "liberalization", and the meaning of the latter word has been very much in flux ever since.  1989 was a year marking both the demolition of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen square protests.
      Further removed from the headlines, but closer to the interest of this essay, 1989 also marked the year of the declared quittance of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia (though not quite their withdrawal, nor, indeed, anything like peace in the country).  It was the year that Myanmar (Burma) adopted its new name, in the prelude to the (quashed) elections of 1990.  The Communist government of Laos had resolved to adopt free market economics a few years earlier, in 1986, though the first effects of that change might have been felt around 1989, as Laos had just emerged from a brief but important war with with Thailand (1987–1988).  Thailand itself had elected a new Prime Minister in 1988, but this was to come to a violent end with a coup d'état and a counter-coup soon thereafter (1991–1992).  In mainland Southeast Asia, the year 1989 is a baseline pretty close to the base.
      In retrospect, both the cynicism and the optimism of the 1990s seem misplaced. 
      It is a measurement that is meaningless at its extremes: Cambodia's "Pol Pot" regime gets the worst possible rating (double sevens), but the government of occupation that replaced it continued to receive the same rating throughout the early 1980s.  The military government of Myanmar (Burma) earned the same rating again, and, at first glance, many would tend to dismiss the measure for creating this seeming-equivalence between such starkly different regimes. 
      The Freedom House ranking system has its merits, and these are, perhaps, easily forgotten because of its limitations; the statistic may be so rarely quoted because of its inapplicability to the stuff that newspaper headlines are made of. 
      At the opposite extreme, many Europeans would be baffled to find the highest possible rating (double ones) shared by countries as dissimilar as Estonia and the United States of America. 
      Does this invalidate the statistic?  Not at all.  Simply put, the Freedom House system does not measure the degrees of difference that separate one of these governments from another, but it does provide a useful set of indications for a middle range.  An ordinal measure calibrated for one spectrum of values will (inevitably) exclude all others.

      The chart shows that the island of Taiwan (a.k.a. the Republic of China) made a transition to a culture of political rights and civil liberties at a slower pace than South Korea (but with a somewhat smoother transition); meanwhile, in the People's Republic of China, political rights have merited the worst possible rating consistently since 1989.  Was there absolutely no improvement?  The faded green line diverging from 1994–1999 denotes the "loosening up" of civil liberties in mainland China during the same period, albeit without any relaxation of the state's political control.  On China's other frontier, I note, Mongolia (not shown on this chart) had the dreaded double-seven rating from 1979 to 1989, but then rapidly progressed to its current rating of double-twos, only a half-step behind Taiwan and South Korea (shown on figure 5, right-hand side).
      Figure 2, above, shows how this can be immediately useful in contrasting political changes over time.  At a glance, we can "see" a set of changing conditions in Asia that most researchers would be subjectively aware of over the last twenty years in the field, though, I think, most of us would lack the means to quantify such impressions.  The lines illustrate, for example, that there was a time (still very much in living memory) when Taiwan, South Korea and Communist China were all clustered together in the rankings (ca. 1984), but the decades thereafter show some clearly diverging trends.  Even if the numbers are somewhat abstract, this lets us illustrate and compare the changes of this chapter of recent history with reference to something more tangible than personal impressions, or citations of isolated political events.
      In Asia, the score that Freedom House assigns for civil liberties tends to correspond closely to the score for political rights (e.g., in fig. 2, above, the two scores are identical for the P.R.C. from 1979–1994, and thus the two separate lines are only visible for the years thereafter; similarly, Taiwan's score for civil liberties only diverges from its political rights by a single point for a few of the years shown, and is thus difficult to see on the chart).  Hong Kong is an interesting exception to this pattern: the numbers suggest that political rights moved a step closer to mainland China in the 1990s, whereas civil liberties hovered around relatively positive scores of 2 and 3 during the same period (1989–2009).  Currently, this gives Hong Kong an unusual gap between a score of 2 for civil liberties, but a dangerous 5 in political rights (the latter being a step up from mainland China, but a stark contrast to the Taiwanese and South Koreans, who have recently achieved the highest possible rankings in this category, cf. figure 5).

      In terms of year-by-year political changes, both Thailand and Cambodia's charts (below, figure 3) demonstrate a clear correlation to changes in government that the reader will hardly need to be reminded of.  Thailand's chart shows two self-evident "spikes" in the numbers, with the country's best scores (for both political rights and civil liberties) constrained to a clearly-defined period: 1998–2004.  Cambodia's year-by-year chart (shown in the same figure, below) similarly correlates to changes in government (both violent and peaceable) with the country's best score (relative to a very different benchmark) constrained to a period of just two years (1993–4, with no improvement in the elections thereafter).

     Some frustration may be inevitable with the reduction of political change to a single-digit number.  While Laos has undergone a complete transformation in the period described, the chart for the Lao P.D.R. (shown below, fig. 4) is nearly a flat line.  Similarly, there seemed to be no point in displaying a year-by-year chart for Myanmar (Burma) as their numbers remained resolutely unchanged for the entire period under consideration: the Burmese received the lowest possible ranking (double sevens) from 1989 through 2009, consistently.  For some readers, it might be interesting to place a wager on when this "losing streak" will end; for others, it would be frustrating that various upheavals during that time simply do not show up in the numbers at all (unlike the charts for countries that fall into the mid-range of values, as with Thailand, shown above).

      Anyone who reads the Freedom House methodology in detail could come up with a series of criticisms and suggestions for new approaches to the problem of the quantification of despotism.  The Freedom House seven-point scale is meaningless in isolation, but becomes more and more meaningful when it is applied consistently over many years, allowing comparison between examples in various contexts and between historical periods.  We can only work with the measurements we've got until someone is willing to sponsor the creation of something better (does anyone want to write up a proposal for the Toyota Foundation?).
      However abstract such numbers may be in isolation, the Freedom House ranking allows us to assign a number to what would otherwise be an unsubstantiated opinion, to then counterpose the figure to others generated with consistent assumptions.  For example, it is often enough said (as if it were a platitude) that Sri Lanka's long civil war resulted in an erosion of civil rights; although the chart above (figure 4) is certainly an abstract set of values, we can at least show an arc of declining civil liberties (in this period) with the Freedom House data.  In some ways, this is more useful than citing specific instances of abuses of power, or specific controversies in the court (although it is just an abstraction).  Likewise, if someone were to venture the opinion that Thailand had a stronger claim to democracy than Taiwan in 1989, but that Taiwan is significantly more democratic than Thailand today, the numbers would allow us to rapidly compare such a claim against a consistent standard (which is not the same thing as an objective standard, as it is, after all, just a normative checklist).  Of course, political conditions in all of the countries reduced to dots in these charts have been transformed in the last 20 years (in ways both big and small) and to encapsulate that political change requires a great deal of abstraction; but, for many practical purposes, a number will serve better than a platitude, and the number can be compared to politicians' platitudes.
      Change is empirical if we measure it empirically; progress is merely an ideology, no matter how we may measure it, propound it or critique it. 
      While daily life in Laos has been transformed in innumerable ways in recent years, the flat line of the Freedom House ranking (shown above) corresponds to the underlying fact that the structure of social control has hardly changed at all (in the same period of time).  A formerly isolated country with strict border controls has now become dependent on international tourism and foreign investment; however, the proliferation of hotels and casinos (even schools and doctors' offices) does not equate to any change in the scope of political rights, nor civil liberties (not as defined by Freedom House, that is).
      There remains a meaningful challenge for anyone who would create a ranking system that could accurately measure political change within countries such as Laos in the 20th and 21st centuries; indeed, it would be meaningful to see a competing system calibrated to reflect the vicissitudes of political change within contemporary Myanmar (Burma), Cambodia and mainland China as well. 
      Freedom House did not set out to create a research tool that would effectively measure contrasts between Burma, Laos and other political systems that are currently lumped together at "the bottom of the barrel" as they've defined it.  Instead, the design reflects an interest in particularizing the desiderata of what can be frankly called a bureaucratic capitalist democracy, i.e., setting out a checklist to articulate what is adequate and what is inadequate by that standard (all the while, "…not maintain[ing] a culture-bound view of freedom", in their own terms).³  The seven point scale is necessarily a blunt instrument, inasmuch as it was intended to be applicable to myriad cultures (without much adaptation to each instance) and to encompass at least some variety in forms of state power without too much prejudice (although they admit that the basic premise favors, "liberal democratic societies").³

      I was part of a generation that went through university when the professors didn't know what to do with Communism anymore, but, more pressing still, they didn't know what to teach without it.  The deletion of Cold War politics from the curriculum created an opportunity, but at the moment of my own studies it was encountered as a void: the custodians of education had responded to the challenge with an appalling lack of imagination --and had simply left it blank.

      There seemed to be very little interest in the politics of Cambodia as something that existed for Cambodians (and so on for Thai politics for the Thais, or any of the other countries mentioned).  Previously, countries on the periphery of Soviet and American influence had been treated as case-studies to illustrate critiques of Communism, American interventionism, and other themes very far removed from the rights and liberties of individuals, in practice, that Freedom House tries to measure.  Places like Laos and Nicaragua were presented as symbols that existed for no purpose other than to reveal forces at work within American politics, Soviet politics, and so on.

      Once the framework of Cold War diplomacy was removed from the equation, the study of such remote and exotic governments didn't seem like political science at all anymore (or, it wasn't what political science had come to expect itself to be).  If a government is studied as a phenomenon of its people (a thing perceived by, sustained by, and primarily existing for its own people, even if it be to their detriment) the entire undertaking starts to resemble cultural anthropology: the "case study" ceases to illustrate anything other than itself, and is instead revealed as a knot of unique cultural and historical conditions that neither support platitudes nor grand generalizations.  Alas, the facts that precede and follow politics are poorly suited to the format of the one hour lecture. 

      It is from anthropology that I would like to see some quantitative methods emerge to broach the problem under discussion: it would be interesting to design a system of evaluation that proceeds from the smallest localizable unit of the ethnos (such as a tribe or group of villages) to then establish the limits of how far certain generalizations about political conditions are applicable (through ethnography and other empirical methods).  Some political rights and civil liberties are uniform over huge territories, but others are (de facto) reserved to elites in the capital city only, or can be exercised by one ethnic group but not another, in one language but not another, and so on.  These informal "borders", demarcating degrees of liberty and of state power, could themselves be the subject of study (rather than proceeding from the abstraction of the national unit downward) to be established in the process of the quantification of social control, working from the ground up.
      There is an unexamined reverberation of American attitudes in accounting for ethnicity "last and least" in the Freedom House method: ethnic minority problems are set down as a matter to be subtracted from a national sum.

      In the case of any of the former British colonies (Canada included), we do not, in fact, come to an equation that depicts the conditions of the indigenous people by looking at an equation that first measures the privileges of the white colonists and then subtracts a penality for the mistreatment of minorities.  There seems to be a propaganda function implicit in such a sum, however it may be reduced for genocide, slavery, or apartheid, inasmuch as it still precludes the evaluation of the conditions of a plurality of indigenous peoples as units unto themselves (i.e., as something existing prior to the state). 
      Freedom House has a separate score for North Cyprus, but not for the Cree, Ojibwe or Navaho; for white Americans, this is not so much anathema as it is unimaginable (despite whatever the legal reality of sovereignty may be). 
      It is a misleading feature of newspaper writing that ethnicity is depicted primarily as a problem that exists for the state, as if the business of the state were to manage ethnic minorities, and as if state power itself had no ethnicity. 
      In general, each ethnic group would generate very different figures for how they are governed (even if the same Freedom House score were applied), and how the state exists for them, if we proceeded from the smallest unit up, instead of from the largest unit down (Burma-watchers will have myriad examples at their disposal). 
      Certainly, there are contrasts (in political rights and civil liberties) within the territory of China that are more striking than those found in comparing any two nations of Europe; these often correspond to declared but unofficial boundaries, that can be discovered through fieldwork (for example, that Burmese migrants are tolerated to come into Yunnan as far as Baoshan without paperwork, but can proceed no further).  Indeed, some significant contrasts can be found in pairs of villages along the same highway in Northern Laos, where the respective inhabitants do not share any common language, and deal with their government through very different intermediaries, with different results.  It would be a delightful task (even if nearly impossible) to try to put a number on such degrees of liberty, working from the ground up.

===== Endnotes =====
1. The event actually transpired in Phnom Penh in 2011.  The book that I discovered a copy of (in a restaurant) was: Chan Heng Chee (contributing author), 1993, Democracy and Capitalism, ISEAS: Singapore.  The remark I'm alluding to is found on page 1.
2. The most recent census data at my disposal for Laos is from 2005 (published in March, 2006, by the "Steering Committee for [the] Census of Population and Housing", Vientiane).  Average male life expectancy at birth was only 50 years as recently as 1995; it had increased to 59 in 2005.  Women's average life expectancy at birth had a corresponding increase from 52 to 63 years in the same period.  For the two genders together, we may say that life expectancy extended by roughly a decade.
3. I am quoting from the introduction to the methodology chapter of the 2010 report available from the Freedom House website (without pagination, i.e., I cannot provide a page number).  The paragraph in full reads: "Freedom House does not maintain a culture-bound view of freedom. The methodology of the survey is grounded in basic standards of political rights and civil liberties, derived in large measure from relevant portions of the [U.N.] Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These standards apply to all countries and territories, irrespective of geographical location, ethnic or religious composition, or level of economic development. The survey operates from the assumption that freedom for all peoples is best achieved in liberal democratic societies."

The Telakaṭāha-gāthā in Thailand

What if there were tangible evidence (written in stone) about the cultural contact between the ancient (pre-Thai) civilization of Dvāravatī and the island of Sri Lanka?  What if someone found a quotation from a uniquely Sinhalese text in a Dvāravatī inscription?  Well, maybe someone did, and maybe they didn't.

A scholar in Sri Lanka (M. Rohanadeera) published an interesting thesis on an inscription in Thailand in 2003.  In 2006 I wrote up a summary of of his thesis, and sent out a notice to the specialists then known to me (in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos) because I was aware that an article (in English) in an academic journal published in Sri Lanka would be "easily ignored" across the ocean to the east.

Of course, many of the replies that I received confirmed that the article had not only been ignored, but had been totally unknown to the specialists concerned.  People don't look for new studies of Thai epigraphy in Sri Lankan sources, and, sadly, both Asian scholars and Europeans often direct their attention solely toward European publications (ignoring whatever is produced on Asia within Asia).  However, I did receive one response from a scholar stating, on the contrary, that any real Pali scholar would read all of the major journals published in Sri Lanka on a regular basis; alas, this is another definition whereby the number of real Pali scholars would come very close to zero.

The contested stone is found in modern Prachinburi, Thailand; it is referred to as the Noen Sā Buā inscription; the date assigned to it is 761 A.D. (thus the term "pre-Thai"; various misconceptions about what the Dvāravatī era/civilization was still circulate, partly stirred by modern Thai propaganda, but partly just resulting from honest confusion and popular mythology).

Rohanadeera's claim is that the text of the inscription is substantially identical to three of the four opening verses of the Telakaṭāha-gāthā.  If true, this would have implications for the presumed date of authorship of the Telakaṭāha-gāthā itself, and also for the general subject of ancient transactions between mainland Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka.

In 2006, I wrote that, "…Rohanadeera's "eye-copy" of the inscription, provid[es] a very significant improvement (in terms of pure legibility) upon the reproductions of rubbings, or the Thai-script transliterations previously available."  Therein lies the problem.

I received a short notice (in reply to my own short notice) that the stone inscription concerned is genuinely illegible; this opinion came from a specialist in Cambodian inscriptions who had seen the original stone (and who did not rely on indirect renderings).

In other words, rumors of its legibility may have been grossly exaggerated.  Thailand has a bad reputation for making such exaggerations about its inscriptions (much discussed in the controversy over the Ram Kamhaeng stone) sometimes just resulting from a cultural assumption that it would be better to say something than for the stone to say nothing at all, and sometimes resulting from some particular scholarly agenda.

By definition, an "eye-copy" is a drawing.  It's an old-fashioned term, used in contrast to "hand-copy".  Rohanadeera's eye-copy is not a photocopy, nor a photograph, but a drawing that demonstrates his interpretation of what the text seems to say.

If the stone is truly illegible, it is possible that Rohanadeera's work has been inspired by the attempts of prior (Thai) scholars to render it legible; and it is also possible that some of his readings have been influenced by the same Thai transcriptions that he criticizes as faulty in his article.  If a series of scholars make (sequent) attempts to trace and re-trace the same set of outlines, something legible will inevitably emerge.

Conversely, there's the appealing possibility that Rohanadeera has looked at a stone inscription and simply read it more accurately than others have done before.  This appeals to human optimism in general, and also appeals to the general sense that a Sri Lankan scholar would bring a new perspective to a Dvāravatī inscription.  Alas, the year is now 2012, and I am unlikely to ever hear (or read) a further response to the controversy.

Thus the controversy is likely to end just where it began: with a single (interesting) article published in Sri Lanka, largely unknown in Thailand, and thus neither accepted nor refuted (although I've done my part to draw attention to this thesis for six years by now).

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Addendum, June 6th, 2012.  Contrary to my expectations, it seems that I posted this article at just the right time, and it received a considerate response from several of the salient experts in epigraphy.  Replies came in from Michael Vickery, Bora Touch and J.C. "Chris" Eade.  The extent to which anything else written on the stone may or may not be genuinely legible seems to be a matter of no clear consensus, but it is remarkable that this short notice article (posted to a hitherto-unknown blog) was able to spur a re-evaluation of the evidence.

Two of the outstanding complaints about the inscription seem to be (1) a general agreement with my warning that the text is less legible than has commonly been supposed, with the lines of text supposed to iterate the date of the inscription considered especially dubious and, (2) that the particular date assigned to the stone should be considered false, along with concerns about an anachronism in the manner of the date's (supposed) recording.  There is a third suggestion now bandied about openly that (3) the entire inscription could be a fraud.  Perhaps it is because of the reliance on poor quality illustrations (and even worse transcription) that the participants in the discussion have been reluctant to come to a rapid decision on the matter; it was for this same reason that my own approach was to more vaguely suggest that the original inscription was much less legible than had been supposed --and that it had been "rendered legible" by wishful thinking on the part of the interpreters.  That hypothesis isn't fraud, but, of course, it doesn't exclude the possibility of fraud, and the possibility should be tested.  The problem with an argument for fraud is that it requires intentional deception; although that's not uncommon, it is even more common to encounter self-deception (with consequences quite unintentional).

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A bibliography of just one entry: M. Rohanadeera, "Earliest evidence of cultural relations between Sri Lanka and Dvāravatī Kingdom in Thailand", Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka, New Series, Volume XLVIII, Special Number [in commemoration of the 250th anniversay of the restoration of the higher ordination, etc.], 2003, Columbo: Sri Lanka.

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.)