3 - Cultural Order and Discipline: The Politics of National Culture

Summary

In 1975, the present regime proclaimed a break with a distasteful past and instead promised the beginning of a new socialist era. However, anticolonialist rhetoric is now no longer appropriate for rallying the population, and symbols of the past are being recalled in a distorted representation that equally fails to have broad appeal. The anxiety of the current Lao authorities over the preservation and strengthening of the country' national identity has many parallels with that of their predecessors (in fact, the newly reformulated national culture in post-socialist Laos borrows heavily from symbols of the former regime), but the perception of threat is no longer focused on hostile neighbours physically violating national boundaries, but rather on the dangers of social and cultural erosion by external forces. From a post-colonial perspective, the nationalist discourse is in search of “a difference with the ‘modular’ forms of the national society propagated by the modern West” (Chatterjee 1993b, p. 5, original stress). In the case of Laos, however, this desire to construct a distinctive model must first be analysed (at least as far as culture and history are concerned) in the light of Laos’ relationship with her neighbour, Thailand. This chapter therefore will demonstrate that the processes of inclusion and exclusion — that is, the politics of Majority/Minority representations — are not only induced by the necessity of constructing an encompassing and homogenized national culture, but are also subsumed within a search for cultural particularity.

Modelling Majority/Minority representations

The year 1999 was marked by the promotion of Visit Laos Year 1999–2000. To celebrate the event, a long parade was organized on the opening day of the That Luang festival in November in Vientiane. The procession was led by a group composed of young female and male students wearing their school uniform and waving the national flag. This first group was called “Lao Modern Time and Great Victory to the Century” [sic] (Brochure of the Lao National Tourist Authority, Opening Ceremony Visit Laos Year 1999–2000, 18 November 1999 [in English]). Strangely enough, at the tail end of the procession, the closing group, referred to by the nostalgic title, “Long Distance Friendship and the True Dream”, represented the past, embodied by men wearing red and green feudal fighters’ clothing. Some of them were perched on elephants, symbol of the former regime.