4 - The Origins of the Lao People: In Search of an Autonomous History

Summary

About Writing an Autonomous History (of Laos)

Post-colonial historiographers share an obsession with origins. As Paul Connerton points out, the politics of tabula rasa paradoxically engender even greater reference to the past (Connerton 1995, p. 61). Nations need a foundation, a mythical past so as to enforce a longue durée — an essential component for consolidating a collective memory and identity. Horizontal homogeneity must be accomplished along an uninterrupted span of time: “we are what you were, we will be what you are” famously wrote once Ernest Renan (Renan 1997 [1982], p. 32). Patricia Pelley remarks likewise with respect to post-1945 Vietnamese historiography that “[o]nly by determining when it began, they [Vietnamese historiographers] reckoned, could they narrate it in a meaningful way. Only after they had a clear sense of origins could they clarify the trajectory of the past and divide it into meaningful segments” (Pelley 2002, p. 8). History textbooks, as is well known, are the main vehicle for disseminating such a history, particularly in countries where dissonant voices are repressed and alternative perspectives discouraged. In that context, school textbooks merely tend to be “ideological, repetitive and mantra-like” (Talib and Tan 2003, p. xiii). The narrative of origins in modern Lao-language history books and textbooks, instead of depicting a master version of a pacified history representing “idealized images of a harmonious, pre-colonial social order imbued of nostalgia” (Alonso 1994, p. 388), is, on the contrary, divided between three interpretations of the origins of the Lao, each situated in divergent geopolitical, political and ideological perspectives. The first and most popular reading is the “Ai-Lao” version that is dominated by the trope of migration and is an implicit response to the Thai nationalist historiography. The second historiography, with a Marxist-Leninist orientation, bears by contrast a resemblance to the Vietnamese communist narration. I suggest below that the (re)writing of the origins of the Lao nation epitomizes the fragmentary state of Lao historiography and, more precisely, its struggle to deal with competing ideologies.