Writing the history of the upland area of mainland Southeast Asia is a challenge that continues to spark scholarly interest. Pierre Petit’s History, memory, and territorial cults in the highlands of Laos. The past inside the present invites the reader to a fascinating exploration of the ways in which more light can be shed on an allegedly peripheral place in "Zomia". In this monograph, Pierre Petit zooms in on the entanglements of past and present in Houay Yong, a Tai Vat village located in northeastern Laos. Highlighting the position of this village in the turbulent history of the area, the study does not shy away from the perennial problem of including micro-histories in the bigger picture and, thus, from aiming to reconcile event history with oral history, archival research with ethnographic methods. The outcome is a monograph which approaches the past of this valley, as well as the ways in which this past is enacted in the present, by various, including ritual and material, means.

In the first chapter, Petit begins with an ethnographic vignette that centres on a conversation about the history of the valley. This conversation between Petit, his assistants and a local interlocutor is presented to the reader with a transcript in Lao and in English and is accompanied by pictures of the scene and by contextualizing comments. The interview excerpts draw a picture of the successive occupation of this valley, and – as the author adds – also aim to legitimate the present state of affairs, in which the Tai Vat, as the residents of the valley refer to themselves, have replaced the former residents. That interlocutors do not merely recount history as remembered but also have a stake in this endeavour is one of the recurrent themes of this study.

Chapters 2 to 4 set the scene and present various perspectives on the history of the village of Houay Yong, its valley and the area of origin of its present-day residents. Petit states right at the beginning that the village and its valley are far from being detached, rural spaces – instead, they should be understood against the background of their inclusion in the Lao nation-state (p. 30). The village of Houay Yong, inhabited by 530 persons, received its name from the stream “Yong”. The residents present themselves as Tai Vat, a rare ethnonym in Laos that refers to their place of origin in neighbouring Vietnam. Approaching the history of Houay Yong, Petit begins with a comparative analysis of five recorded narrations of the origin of the Tai Vat, who fled from Yen Chau, Vietnam, to Laos in the period 1872–1879, in response to the invasion of the Chinese Black and Yellow Flags, rival armies that came after an unsuccessful rebellion from South China and operated then violently in the Chinese-Vietnamese borderlands.1

Based on archival research in the French National Overseas Archives in Aix-en-Provence, Petit shows that the main topics of interest to the French colonial officials were taxes and trade. Reminiscing of Tappe, Petit mentions that the French administrators were enmeshed in local ties but also in rivalries with other officials.2 The influx of Tai Vat migrants from Vietnam continued in the wake of the First Indochina War and its aftermath, enforced by the deteriorating living conditions, as Petit goes on to show with reference to Lentz.3 Houay Yong was also affected by the turmoil: residents had to cater to the conflicting demands of the French and of agents of the Lao Issara on the one hand, and Vietminh soldiers on the other, by becoming a “bird with two heads” (p. 103). During the Second Indochina War, Houay Yong was not directly affected by bombings; however, the conscription of young males to the revolutionary army is vividly memorized, as well as the need to hide in the forest in fear of fighting due to the presence of Vang Pao’s “secret army”. In the aftermath of the war, political restructuring, most notably with regard to local livelihoods, caused rising outmigration. While the number of residents decreased, the political success and status of Houay Yong increased: an impressive number of boards of achievement today adorns the village and gives evidence of the success of the village elite in relating to the state.

As early as in the preface, Petit states that “[h]istory and memory cannot be limited to their narrative dimension. Landscapes, material culture, rituals, bodily practices, and other non-discursive elements” (p. xiv) should be taken into consideration as well. In chapters 5 and 6 this is indeed done; there, the author moves to present-day ritual and material practices. Enhanced by several photographs, Petit presents the socioritual dynamics surrounding the ritual village post, the lak man, and the ritual houses of the village spirits (thiang seun), who are the spirits of the first settlers. Relating his interregional comparative analysis to the prominent theme of territorial and founders’ cults, it is shown that the rituals aim to bridge past and present, expressing both stability and mobility, and setting the village in the context of inter-village ties. The ways in which they aim to achieve this, are, however, subject to change: the village pillars, ritual wooden posts, presented by locals as unchanging, have been fixed with cement (which had, somewhat ironically, to be removed as it became brittle prematurely). Houses too are increasingly made in a “solid” way by including cement – and according to Petit’s interlocutors the spirits would also favour solid houses. This foreshadows a development that Petit sketches in the epilogue: there is a trend towards a new monumentalism with monumental architectures interestingly combining state ideology and the animist traditions of central pillars. The rituals and their artefacts, thus, not only deploy the past for present purposes, but they are also part of the imagination of the future.

Pierre Petit’s monograph makes novel contributions to the study of history in an understudied area. But this book is also a shining example of a thoroughly prepared monograph: the author meticulously lists not only the interviews that are quoted throughout the texts, but also fieldnote entries, as well as, of course, archival sources. A further helpful device is the dramatis personae section, in which key interlocutors are briefly introduced. This book is not only interesting for the results of Petit’s historical anthropological research, it also is invaluable for its reflexivity and methodological considerations. Petit’s monograph shows possible ways of solving the perennial problems of how to write a history of a remote, upland area, and at the same time, of how to illuminate the ways in which the past continues and is made to continue in the present and in the making of the future in upland mainland Southeast Asia.

Notes:
1 Bradley Camp Davis, Imperial Bandits. Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands, Seattle 2017.
2 Oliver Tappe, A frontier in the frontier: Sociopolitical dynamics and colonial administration in the Lao-Vietnamese borderlands, in: Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 16 (2015) 4, pp. 368–387.
3 Christian Lentz, Contested Territory. Điện Biên Phu and the Making of Northwest Vietnam, New Haven 2019.