6 - Ethnic Classification and Mapping Nationhood

Summary

The modern State, in the Foucaldian sense, is that hegemonic apparatus whose raison d’être is to control and administer the body of the population through a series of discourses that together form the “regime of truth”, which Foucault defined as follows:

Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true

(Foucault 1977, p. 131).

Truth is not transcendental, “out there”: it is produced here and now. Indeed, modern states, among other agents, participate in a continuous and uninterrupted process of generating “truth” through the use of “technologies of power” in order to legitimate and naturalize their authority. They transform innovations into everyday practice “by constant reiteration of [their] power through what have become accepted as natural (rational and normal) state functions, of certifying, counting, reporting, registering, classifying, and identifying”(Cohn and Dirks 1988, p. 225). My intention in this chapter is thus to show the determinant role that administration in general, and population censuses in particular, play in the modelling of Lao society in the image of a national community. In other words, the State in modern Laos has operated the census as a vector of ethnicity (through the manipulation of ethnic boundaries) in order to fashion an imaginary nationhood out of real heterogeneity.

Description and interpretation of the early censuses

Insightful works have shown the long-lasting impact of the knowledge produced by colonial administrations on the independent states they once governed.