Human-rice relatedness in Luang Prabang Lowlands

Rice has been grown in present-day Laos for more than six millennia. By the early 2000s, over eighty percent of the country’s cultivated land was being used to grow over 13,000 kinds of rice, including glutinous and non-glutinous, swidden (“dry”) and paddy (“wet”) varieties. Despite radical historical and ongoing socio-economic change, rice remains the source of sustenance for all of Laos’ fifty officially-recognized ethnicities.

For the ethnic Khmu, rice has particular significance. Autochthonous to the region, Khmu have likely been growing swidden rice in northern Laos since at least the Bronze Age, alongside taro, yams and other tubers. A plethora of glutinous rice varieties provide both the daily staple and feature(d) heavily in customary cosmology and kinship-based, more-than-human relations.

From the mid-twentieth century onwards, Khmu in many parts of northern Laos joined the “national liberation struggle” of the Pathet Lao, which culminated in the 1975 proclamation of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR). Today, Khmu continue to be key beneficiaries, agents and stalwarts of Laos’ (nominally) still Marxist-Leninist regime.

Following the failure of Soviet-style collectivization, the Lao PDR embarked on a “market-Leninist” path: combining firm one-party tutelage with (at times unfettered) frontier capitalism into an all-encompassing project of national development. This project has crucially included long-proclaimed (but still unrealized) efforts to eradicate “destructive” swiddening and, concomitantly, resettle upland minorities into flatland areas conducive to wet-rice cultivation. It has also included efforts to “liberate” the multiethnic Lao people from “superstitious” customs and the “vagaries of nature” via the mutually-reinforcing promotion of scientific materialism and increasingly globalized markets.

Paul-David’s research investigates the interplay of these dynamics in the agglomerated, roadside swidden- and wet-rice growing Khmu community of ‘Tongpiang” in northern Laos’ Luang Prabang province. Drawing on immersive participant observation and careful analysis of local oral history, Paul-David unpacks the impact of state-driven disenchantment, market socialist commodification, aspirational mobility and, not least, China’s rise on (once) vital Khmu-rice relations.

View profil — Paul-David Lutz