European Journal of East Asian Studies 20 (2021) 83–106 European Journal of East Asian Studies brill.com/ejea Staying or Moving Government Compliance and Agency in Post-Zomian Laos Guido Sprenger | orcid: 0000-0003-2027-6779 Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany sprenger@eth.uni-heidelberg.de Abstract James C. Scott claimed that upland Southeast Asians consider their good life as dependent on their autonomy from the state. Given that the state today is present in various forms in the uplands, current uplanders can be considered as post-Zomian. Staying and moving represent two contrastive values in this region whose realisation serves to make a good life possible. This article considers these values through the issue of resettlement in Laos, a situation in which local values intersect with or contradict government planning. Even in situations in which the state demonstrates its hegemony and force, ethnic Rmeet uplanders tend to stress their own agency. Therefore, resettlement and its avoidance may both appear as the realisation of local values, sometimes in the shape of ‘village agency’, as the good life is seen as life in a community. Keywords Laos – Rmeet – resettlement – housebuilding – Zomia 1 Introduction The question of the good life in the Southeast Asian uplands has gained increasing attention since the publication of James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed (2009). Scott interpreted features of everyday life in the uplands, such as swidden farming and egalitarianism, as indicators of particular values that people pursue, sometimes more and sometimes less explicitly. These aim to realise a life at the margins of, but with considerable autonomy from, the central states of the lowlands. The uplanders’ good life, according to Scott, thus consists pri- © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/15700615-20211007 84 sprenger marily of freedom from state coercion, even if some features of state societies are worth copying. This last domain of an anarchist way of life disappeared, he argues, after World War ii. Scott’s account has caused considerable debate that is of immediate relevance for the study of cultural diversity in Laos, the only country that Scott includes almost in its entirety in ‘Zomia’, the upland zone that van Schendel (2004) had first established as a region. With only about half of Laos’ inhabitants being ethnic Lao, the country exemplifies the distinction between historical galactic polities in the lowlands and a great ethnic diversity in its uplands. Also, the dynamics of lowland and upland, centre and periphery, as in other countries of the area, did not cease either after World War ii or after 1975, when the country became a socialist one-party state after a prolonged war. While the state is present in virtually every village in the form of headmen, mass organisations and party representatives, policies of relocation and infrastructure betray ongoing concerns with security and control. In this sense, the situation of Laos continues to speak immediately to the issues that Scott has raised. The upland people I have been studying since my initial anthropological fieldwork in 20001 can thus be called post-Zomian, in so far as the Lao state has entered and now largely controls the uplands. Following Petit (2015), I consider stability and mobility, staying or moving as contrasting values that inform uplanders’ ideas of the good life. Values are concepts that motivate action and allow for judgements in any social setting. The good life primarily appears as the realisation of values that are articulated on various scales: individuals, households, villages, ethnic groups, nations and humanity. Not only do different people have different expectations regarding the future they are trying to realise, but the values they attach to different levels often do not match. Thus, there are lateral and lineal frictions of values both between and within these scales. Values of staying and moving therefore articulate in different ways when they intersect with state demands and policies. Accounts of resettlement in Laos, however, are strikingly different. The more dominant ones accord with wider studies of resettlement, in particular on land grabbing in recent years (Oberlack et al. 2016). They tell of the dispossession and marginalisation of rural populations, many among them ethnic minorities who have to move to new places, often under dire conditions. Évrard and Goudineau (2004), Kenney-Lazar (2017) and Baird (2013) report how such reset1 Ethnographic fieldwork among the Rmeet was conducted for over two years from 2000 to 2018, with one year in 2000 to 2001 and stays ranging from two weeks to two and a half months since then, mainly in three villages in Luang Nam Tha and Bokeo provinces. I conduct interviews in the Rmeet language. European Journal of East Asian Studies 20 (2021) 83–106 staying or moving 85 tlements occur in two forms. In some cases, the state takes the initiative to move villages out of inaccessible areas and closer to traffic arteries and state administration. Here, state control and security concerns are driving forces (Baird and Shoemaker 2007: 871). While resettlement for security concerns was dominant in the early years of the socialist government until the 1980s, it was later largely, but not entirely, replaced by resettlement in the name of economic development (Évrard and Baird 2017). In the latter cases, land is needed for often internationally funded projects and land concessions, such as mining and hydroelectric dams. In some cases, both forms of resettlement overlap (Dwyer 2014). As these studies show, villages rarely achieve any of the promised gains from the move. Their lands are insufficient to feed them, promises of education and well-paid employment hardly materialise, and state agents or investors do not heed their problems (Baird and Shoemaker 2007; Delang and Toro 2011). Besides this pattern, there are also accounts of how rural people resist, sometimes successfully, the encroachment of their land and resettlement (Baird 2017; Baird and Le Billon 2012; McAllister 2015). Baird and Le Billon (2012) argue that successful resistance depends on specific historical and local conditions. There is, however, an increasing awareness that dichotomies such as resistance and compliance do not serve analysis particularly well (Baird 2017: 2). Rather, and often with reference to Foucauldian notions of the shaping of desires in fields of power relations (Foucault 1994), studies observe how locals accommodate state requests, even though they do so for their own specific reasons. In some cases, government-induced changes may match local aspirations for the good life (High 2014; see also High 2008; Baird et al. 2009; High 2009a). In this paper, this picture will be unsettled in two respects. First, a case study will be presented that challenges what we know about the conditions of resistance, for instance, previous allegiance with the revolutionary movement; and second, a resettlement situation will be depicted from the point of view of villagers who may hold diverse assessments of their situation. The stress is, however, much less on the geopolitical and historical dynamics behind resettlement but on the values that villagers attempt to realise. While staying and moving are complementary values for villagers, they do not agree on how these values relate to the resettlement situation. The focus is thus on the ways in which government initiatives are seen as supporting or impeding local ideas of the pursuit of a good life. The example comes from villagers who identify as Rmeet (also Lamed or Lamet), an ethnic category in northern Laos, and their response to resettlement. The ideas and practices reported here are presumably not so much distinctive of Rmeet ‘culture’, but rather an aspect of their post-Zomian situation. This situation is characterised by a number of features: the presence of the modern nation-state European Journal of East Asian Studies 20 (2021) 83–106 86 sprenger and its laws and representatives; a greater degree of village autonomy in living memory; the continuity of this autonomy in aspects of village habitus, including subsistence economy and choices when to engage in wage labour; a sense of cultural difference with the state; a sense of the negotiability of one’s position towards the state. For the present argument, it is thus less important that people say they are Rmeet than that this suggests a difference from Lao or Thai. Despite the diversity of villagers’ views, certain factors unite their positions. First is their stress of what is often called agency, a sense of making their own decisions and being in control of their fate; second, their ability to negotiate with the administration, that is, with a government that often appears as authoritarian and coercive in the literature; and third, the achievement of the negotiations through what is tentatively called ‘village agency’, a non-exclusive sense of the realisation of values as a community, through their leadership. Village agency requires an understanding of agency that expands beyond the common definition above. Graeber (2001) has argued that the realisation of values may shift from individual to communal levels, for instance in times of crisis. Sax (2010) has termed one of these levels ‘village agency’. Village agency, he argues, may articulate through particular leaders and ritual specialists who shape public opinion and action. Yet they are unable to do so simply as individuals. Rather, the condition of this agency is their fellow villagers’ recognition that they act as representations of the community—not just representatives, but embodiments of the difference of their community from others. This distinction does not need to be expressed in terms of culture or ethnicity, but location, history, economy, etc. Also, village agency has nothing to do directly with equality, solidarity or participation. Its representations, like a guardian spirit or village leader, do not subordinate individual villagers’ agency, but simply provide opportunities for marking action as ‘communal’. Thereby, they create a dynamic of shared action. The village appears as a point of reference for belonging and integration where relationships accumulate in a way that differentiates their sum from their parts. Village agency is thus never given, but needs shared enactment and recognition. In the present context, it is an important aspect of post-Zomian agency. Below, this is illustrated by an instance of this communal realisation of the good life in Laos. The example concerns the building of a road in the village of Takheung in Nalae district, Luang Nam Tha province, between 2002 and 2008. As my research focused on different matters at the time, my data are not complete, but they form part of a larger picture in which migrations of various kinds and relationships with states play a crucial role. European Journal of East Asian Studies 20 (2021) 83–106 staying or moving 2 87 Moving The Lao government today recognises fifty ethnic groups, the largest of which, the Lao, accounts for only a little more than half of the population. One issue that has driven Laotian nation building since independence in 1954 has been the accommodation of cultural diversity under the concept of a single nation. This became all the more pressing after the socialist revolution in 1975, which was brought about with significant help from non-Lao, especially those disadvantaged, marginalised and oppressed during the French colonial regime and under the Royal Lao government after independence. These groups were drawn to the socialist project with its promises of equality for everyone. The current position of non-Lao is thus rather contradictory. On the one hand, there is an official discourse of equality and multi-ethnic brotherhood that contrasts with ethnically defined nationalism, for instance in neighbouring Thailand. On the other, earlier lowland Lao images of barbarian and slavelike people in the uplands have been transformed into a modernist discourse that stresses the underdevelopment of these groups and their need of guidance (Tappe 2011). In everyday life, minority experiences are mixed. Some see a real chance of upward social mobility, partially achieved in the time of war and after the revolution, while majority prejudice is still rampant (Faming 2019; Pholsena 2018, 2020). According to Pholsena (2006), many minority people committed to the struggle found themselves in disadvantaged positions afterwards and felt betrayed by the government. In certain respects, they conceived of the government in terms of a patron–client relationship in which the mutual acknowledgment of hierarchy was more important than equality (see High 2014). Aspirations and expectations of a desirable future are thus tightly bound to historical and political circumstances for people of non-Lao background. This background also applies to the Rmeet and other groups in Luang Nam Tha—although, in this province, non-Lao form the majority of the population and top administrative positions are often held by them. Still, central government policies apply to this region as well. The Rmeet number about 21,000 in all of Laos, mostly concentrated in Luang Nam Tha, Bokeo and Udomsay provinces. Culturally and linguistically, they are closely related to the Khmu and in many respects can be considered ‘archetypal Zomians’. The majority of them live in upland villages, where they grow rice on shifting fields. They are not Buddhists but have been travelling to Buddhist areas for labour for many generations. The village of Takheung is a case in point. It is situated on a mountain slope some eight kilometres from the Nam Tha river as the crow flies. When I started European Journal of East Asian Studies 20 (2021) 83–106 88 sprenger field research there in the year 2000, the closest village on its banks was about three hours’ walk away. A trip in a narrow wooden boat to the next town on a road took another three to four hours. Takheung thus seemed like an example of a remote mountain village, surrounded by forests, hills and dry rice fields. At least in certain respects, the impression was deceptive. Only a few minutes’ walk from the village, I was told, there had been an US airfield during the war, staffed with Lao personnel. After the revolution of 1975, villages on the right bank of the river, like Takheung, found themselves on the losing side (Goudineau 1997: 23, quoted from Dwyer 2014: 391–392). Takheung villagers were thus doubly disadvantaged, both as non-Lao and as former allies of the ‘enemy’ (Lao: satou). Takheung and a number of other Rmeet villages were targeted by government resettlement efforts in the 1990s. While some cases of resettlement in Laos are clearly related to development projects like hydropower, in many instances the motif is a kind of reverse infrastructuring—instead of linking remote areas by roads, they are depopulated (Évrard and Goudineau 2004). The Lao government appears to reverse the relationship posited by Scott (2009: 54): when the state cannot climb mountains, the people of the mountains have to come down to the state (Dwyer 2017). The Lao state thus appears as the heir of an older centripetal dynamic. Moving the ‘slaves’ (kha) into the galactic polity (müang) is a common momentum in the history of the fiefdoms on mainland Southeast Asia, in particular Laos and Thailand (Turton 2000: 16). The required control over the uplands, however, was not in place earlier in the twentieth century (Scott 2009: 10). This makes the Rmeet today ‘internal Zomians’, to borrow a term from Frédéric Bourdier et al. (2015): people who live out their somewhat strained relationship with the state as part of their citizenship but who still define themselves by cultural, local and geographic differences (see Sprenger 2017a). In particular, aspects of livelihood that have been constrained and illegalised by the government, including swiddening, hunting and some forms of labour migration, are highly contested. The local ritual system, which I identify as animism, is considered backward and superstitious by the government. This brings in a sense of agency, of being in control of the decisions shaping their lives. Even when external forces like the government demand changes, this does not rule out options to realise the good life in local terms. My Rmeet informants certainly conveyed this impression when they talked about the negotiation of resettlement that occurred early in the 2000s. According to the headman of the time in Takheung, he foresaw that the government would demand the village move down from the mountains, closer to a road or river. This request was made to neighbouring villages as well, and some of them complied. The villages of Kha’aang and Mbling, situated somewhat closer to the European Journal of East Asian Studies 20 (2021) 83–106 staying or moving 89 Nam Tha, moved to its banks entirely in 2000 to 2001, the latter being joined by about ten families (of sixty) from Takheung. It took me a long time before I realised that this move came about at the instigation of the government. Everyone I asked stressed their own will and decision on these matters. There was more water available on the river banks; going to the market, accessing goods and travelling to Thailand became easier, I was told. Nobody explained the move in terms of government pressure. I received these answers even years into trustful relationships with the Rmeet, and during informal conversations conducted in their own language. Therefore, it seems unlikely that I fell victim to the kind of fake compliance shown outsiders that some external researchers have experienced in Laos (Baird et al. 2009: 612). It was only in 2016, when the villages that had moved to the riverbank faced another resettlement (see below) that I brought up the subject once more and learned about the government initiative. Thus, here is a case in which the ambiguity of voluntary and involuntary migration Baird and Shoemaker (2007) observed on the state level is mirrored at the village level. Moving villages is not alien to Rmeet society. While there are indications that present-day villages have been close to their current sites for centuries (Évrard et al. 2016), splitting and moving villages, especially for seeking new fields or because villages had become too dirty, was rather common in the twentieth century (Izikowitz 1979: 81–84). Given that swidden cultivators are often quite mobile, the Rmeet value what Petit (2015: 417) has called a ‘pioneer ethos’ (see also High 2008). Like the Tai Vat he describes, the Rmeet translated government policies of resettlement into their own value system. Thus, the government’s demands as such were not completely outside the framework of Rmeet decision-making. When narrating the history of the move, my interlocutors were able to stress the reasons they would have had for making it. Specifically, labour migration was eased by resettlement and, as in many parts of the world, it has been a source of ideas about the good life for a long time. Labour migration works through aspirations that are shaped by both local and translocal influences: local, insofar as the money earned is supposed to be spent at the origin of migration, and translocal, as the inspiration for what a good life might look like is often derived from the lifestyle of the wealthier places where the money is earned. Therefore, values of moving influenced ideas of staying. As Schewel (2020) has pointed out, staying demands agency as well, and the following analysis will show that retain factors (Schewel 2020), like building permanent houses, contribute to its valorisation. Temporary movement for labour provides input on how to realise its contrasting value of staying, in the form of housing. European Journal of East Asian Studies 20 (2021) 83–106 90 3 sprenger Staying by the River Virtually every household in Takheung had a member who worked in the Lao lowlands or in Thailand for more or less extended periods of time, and this experience strongly shaped people’s idea of a good life. This cultural input presumably dates back at least to the late nineteenth century (Izikowitz 1979: 347). Khmu from Laos formed the major workforce in the teak business of northern Siam in the late nineteenth century (Amnuayvit 2017). The Rmeet were always close to the Khmu (Izikowitz 1979: 20) and sometimes identify as such when working in Thailand today. It is likely that they were among these teak workers from early on. This has significantly shaped their ideas of a proper and good life, for instance regarding clothing (Izikowitz 1979: 111). I speculate that their skill in handling large woodsaws originates from this occupation. This may have opened later opportunities to work on construction sites and in house building closer to home, in the Lao lowlands, one of the main sources of work for able-bodied men. The expertise people gained in the process, but also their ideas of what constitutes a desirable house, was probably strongly shaped by these experiences (for a parallel development among neighbouring Khmu, see Stolz 2019). In the past, people reported—and earlier ethnography from the 1930s corroborates this (Izikowitz 1979)—that most houses were constructed of bamboo, with floors on short poles. Wooden boards were rare, as making them with axes was laborious. The introduction of long saws made processing wood much easier, and the changes this brought about made Rmeet vernacular architecture more similar to Lao architecture: the poles on which the houses rested became higher, the roofs flatter, verandahs larger.2 These changes, however, could still be realised without roads. This was also the case with zinc sheets and other kinds of roofing bought on the market that have almost entirely replaced roofs made of leaf bundles on houses.3 However, the introduction of concrete and bricks was only possible in villages close to traffic arteries. Thus, when Mbling and Kha’aang moved to the Nam Tha, some of their inhabitants started building houses with these mate- 2 This comes from descriptions by informants, comparison with a few houses identified to me as old-style, and pictures in Izikowitz (1979: 149–160; 2004). In one respect, the introduction of saws supported Rmeet vernacular architecture. Rmeet granaries often bear elegant ornamental carvings on their fronts, depicting buffalo horns. These were exceedingly rare when boards had to be made with axes, but have become common, almost standard, today. The Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre in Luang Prabang uses this Rmeet ornament as its emblem. 3 Workshops, granaries and field huts still have leaf bundles as seen in Izikowitz (1979: 159–160). European Journal of East Asian Studies 20 (2021) 83–106 staying or moving 91 rials for the first time. Like lowlanders, they would mostly use them only for certain parts of their buildings, while the rest was made of wood. Overall, there are three types of house with brick and concrete. The first type has only the house posts and their foundations made of cement, leaving an open space of some two metres height below the wooden body of the house, similar to the preceding style of wooden buildings. A second type consists of a ground-floor, single-storey building made of bricks, often with a wooden kitchen building attached. The third type is a variety of the first type and effected the most significant change for the interactions in the house: the space surrounded by poles is walled in with bricks, thus creating a new kind of lower room in a two-storey building. Instead of being a storage space, as in previous buildings, this closed space has become the place where visitors are received. A parallel development occurred in Lao and Khmu architecture, as well as in the Lao-speaking northeastern region of Thailand (Clément-Charpentier and Clément 1990; Keyes 2014: 154; Stolz 2019: 6–7). Rooms for receiving guests and for sleeping, often identical before, became distinct, as the former were located on the ground floor and the latter above. Therefore, it seems that the change from wooden houses on posts with a storage space underneath to stone buildings with a ground-floor living room began among lowlanders and is currently being picked up by uplanders—an observation I also made among Jru’ (Loven) uplanders in southern Laos. Thus, there is a tendency towards a national standard, dominated by Lao, in many places in Laos. At the same time, those Rmeet who built cement and brick houses for themselves were able to apply the skills learned on lowland construction sites. The shift also emphasised the work of men, as women were mostly responsible for the leaf bundle roofing of previous house styles and have no experience on lowland construction sites. More importantly for the question of staying and moving, the Rmeet built houses from very durable materials for the first time in their history. The bamboo huts of the early twentieth century would deteriorate quickly but could be easily rebuilt. The wooden boards of the houses that replaced them could still be reused, and it is quite common to build new houses out of old boards when a family moves to another village close by. Concrete and bricks, however, are a long-term investment into staying, and these new buildings are often slow to become complete, as material needs to be bought on the market rather than drawn from the forest. Concrete and brick buildings also absorb a significant amount of money earned over an extended period of time, as villagers’ income is irregular. Here, government policies aimed at sedentarising swidden farmers matched farmers’ own desires for a good life. While the government did not support building permanent houses in these villages, people themEuropean Journal of East Asian Studies 20 (2021) 83–106 92 sprenger selves did not want to abandon swidden farming, and the cumulative effect of these asymmetric agencies resulted in settlements that were more permanent in their layout than ever before. Swiddening continued but, by moving to the river, people made a significant step towards integration into labour markets, in terms of both production and consumption. However, these developments realised only some aspects of a good life. Life on the riverbank was decidedly more crowded, and there were a few conflicts over arable land. Also, neighbours that once lived at a safe distance now became closer, for better or worse. While relations between neighbouring villages, including culturally different ones like those of the Lao, were amiable overall, there were some instances of conflict that people kept talking about. In one case, a group of allegedly drugged young men from one of the resettled villages killed a cow from another settlement, which was just a few minutes’ walk away. The potential for conflict between members of neighbouring villages, previously subdued by distance, now became more prominent in people’s awareness. 4 Staying in the Mountains However, not all villages complied with the government’s demand for resettlement. Takheung managed to stay put. This resilience was not fed by a general aversion to migration in the village. On the contrary: Takheung had a reputation for being comparatively wealthy due to the number of men and women who went on labour trips to lowland Laos and to Thailand. Rather, the impression was that it was their intense involvement in migration that fuelled their will to maintain their village where it used to be. As argued below, experience in the lowlands, through contrast, reinforces local notions of communally shared love and caring. In the late 1990s, when the resettlement of Kha’aang, Mbling and other villages in the vicinity was planned, the administration’s initial idea had been to move Takheung to a different province, far from the original site. Villagers complained, however, as they feared that the government would not help them, so they would become poor and not able to see their relatives again, as one of my main informants explained. Instead of moving, the village headman told me in 2002 that he had the idea the villagers should build a road themselves. This was, he claimed, even before the district administration demanded the village should resettle. The idea was only made a reality at a time when Kha’aang and Mbling had already moved. In spring 2002, the people of Takheung, in cooperation with their neighbouring villages to the east and west, began building European Journal of East Asian Studies 20 (2021) 83–106 staying or moving 93 a road, employing the same technique as for levelling the ground for a new house—hoes and boards dragged across the ground with ropes. Both men and women worked on the road. When I visited the place in April 2002, work had not proceeded very far. Yet the village proudly sported a used Chinese-made tractor that all the families had bought jointly. The heavy piece of equipment had been transported by boat, disassembled and carried along the narrow footpaths up the mountains. One of the younger men knew how to drive it, and another had learned how to repair it—again, skills acquired during labour trips. Even before having a road, the village leadership had designed an incentive to join the effort. As everybody was driven to join these efforts, village agency became apparent and exerted a visible effect on its inhabitants. However, the plan was not made without the administration’s involvement. Sometime after its onset, the road building became part of a food-for-work programme in which each man-day was paid with five kilos of rice.4 According to the headman, money would have been even better, as there was no shortage of rice. At some point—before the road had reached the next village, I was told— the German Society for Technical Cooperation (then gtz, now giz) became involved in the process, and from this time onwards money was distributed instead of rice.5 The plan was to connect the road to the village of Ban Mo on the Nam Tha to the southeast and to Tafa, a larger settlement that had been a trading hub since at least the early twentieth century (Izikowitz 1979: 31–32), thus joining six villages. A few of these villages moved from their original sites to a place on the road, but they did not need to abandon their lands for this. The road was completed in about 2008. It thus connected to the national road system in Tafa and, since late in 2015, to a new road leading from Ban Mo along the Nam Tha. By the time of completion, the road was regularly used by villagers with motorcycles and the occasional tractor. For Takheung, it was a success. The village received a health station staffed with two Lao medical workers and a new school building. It attracted a few newcomers from other villages in the area, and at least one family returned after having moved to Mbling in 2002. When I visited the village again in 2016, I noticed a number of brick and concrete houses. The road, even though it is bad and hardly passable during the rainy 4 I could not find out how this programme was financed and whether international organisations were involved. 5 A reverse example of government-instigated road building that failed due to passive resistance among Phounoy is documented by Ducourtieux (2013: 457). European Journal of East Asian Studies 20 (2021) 83–106 94 sprenger season, had enabled access to materials that had been the prerogative of river dwellers before. This is all the more surprising as Takheung did not have much bargaining power. As some scholars observe (Baird and Le Billon 2012; Kenney-Lazar 2016: 148; Kenney-Lazar et al. 2018), villages that manage to connect to Laos’ revolutionary history—as homes of revolutionary heroes or long-time allies of the communist movement—are in a much better position to negotiate government measures. Takheung, with its history of involvement with US forces, had nothing like this to muster. However, as Baird (2017) notes, there is a broad range of means to accomplish such negotiations, and the case of Takheung is not simply about resistance but about compromise. According to Pholsena (2006), former allies of the revolutionary movement feel that the government is indebted to them and thus are disappointed when the good life promised by socialism does not materialise. I believe that Takheung villagers knew they had nothing to expect in this regard. This may explain why they rallied behind the headman’s plan to resist the government’s demands for resettlement but to comply with its spirit of developmentalism. Instead of moving to a traffic artery, they built their own. This account seems to suggest that ideas of the good life among Southeast Asian uplanders closely resemble a developmentalist—even capitalist— notion of increased consumption, and there is some truth to this. Development, modernity and market integration have been prominent aims for the Lao government and have increasingly shaped local perceptions of a good life (Rigg 2009). The comparative wealth of Laos’ neighbours, Thailand in particular for the Rmeet, has provided further models of a desirable future. However, there are other values less visible that are more in tune with a Zomian mindset. 5 Post-Zomian Agency In his The Art of Not Being Governed (2009), James C. Scott is not very explicit about the kind of agency behind Zomian anarchism. Often, he seems to talk about a conscious agenda of state avoidance, resulting from bad experiences with violent and exploitative states. He describes matters as if ‘freedom’ was an explicit value that uplanders take as guidance for their decisions (Scott 2009: 178–179, 244). Insofar as he suggests this, Jonsson (2012) is correct when he detects a projection of specifically American values on to Southeast Asia in Scott’s work. However, there are other notions of agency that Scott documents without explicating the differences between their implicit and explicit forms. In these European Journal of East Asian Studies 20 (2021) 83–106 staying or moving 95 instances, he speaks of upland autonomy as an effect of state–periphery relationships and thus as more structural than purposeful (Scott 2009: 28, 155). Agency, then, unfolds through habits that do not look like decisions but are like traditions to those performing them, as well as through decisions that apparently have little to do with communal values. Shifting agriculture, for instance, has prevented upland subsistence from becoming measurable and predictable for the lowland state (Scott 2009: 75–78). It enabled villages to move quickly, but this did not need to be explained as escape from the state; the necessities of shifting cultivation would do the job just as efficiently. Avoiding dangerous spirits used to be another reason for moving villages. While Scott deals with millenarianism—a historically common but not at all comprehensive form of cosmological politics in Zomia—he underestimates the power of what is usually called animism (Sprenger forthcoming). Spirits— most of them ancestral or territorial—are highly relational beings specific to particular places and kin groups (Tannenbaum and Kammerer 2003). While there is a certain body of ritual knowledge for addressing them, dealing with them usually requires rather explicit negotiations. Thus, animism is not so much a matter of fixed rules that work everywhere but rather one of experience, as well as the personality and knowledge of individual ritualists. Differences in ritual between families, villages and ethnic categories do not violate standards of cosmological uniformity but, on the contrary, are to be expected (Sprenger 2016, 2017b). These officially backward customs contrast with most state-sponsored religions like Buddhism. In its current form, Buddhism makes conformity expectable, a similarity of rituals and texts across different villages, provinces and states.6 The close relationship between this religion and the state in Thailand and Laos therefore brings a kind of ritual expertise to Buddhist villages that is more hierarchical and more externally controlled than animism ever could be (for example, Bouté 2018). The ranking of monks and the hierarchy of temples developed in parallel to state control in mainland Southeast Asia (Stuart-Fox 1999: 157, 163; see also Swearer 1999). Not becoming Buddhist, as the Rmeet have done, is thus one practice that keeps the state at bay. Therefore, in their negotiations with powerful spirits, uplanders find themselves in situations of contested subordination that compare to their relationship with state administrations (for example, N. Århem 2016). Like spirits, visiting state officials need to be hosted and feasted, but the reverence shown to 6 Scholars on Buddhism in this region have repeatedly stressed its flexible and non-doctrinal features (for example, Terwiel 2012; McDaniel 2011), but probably because they expected faithfulness to doctrine. European Journal of East Asian Studies 20 (2021) 83–106 96 sprenger them on these occasions does not guarantee that all their demands are to be followed up on. While I was unable to witness actual negotiations between officials and village headmen, their accounts of past incidents conveyed a sense of leeway similar to the one shamans expressed in their relations with spirits. They never said they did something just because the administration asked for it, but considered such demands as the basis of an exchange of interests. Similarly, spirits usually desire buffalo sacrifices and need to be talked into accepting something less, like a chicken. The realisation of a life at the margins of state control is thus not just a matter of explicit values but also one of practices that realise these values in more implicit ways. A notion of agency appropriate to this is thus less defined by intention but rather by effect (Fuller 1994). This notion has been prominently developed by Bruno Latour (2008), in order to account for the effects that nonhuman beings have on networks of relationships. Both intentional and nonintentional acts as well as material features of beings have comparable effects on relationships. This allows aligning intentional acts of state evasion—like lying about taxable resources—with non-intentional aspects of habitus—like swidden agriculture and animism. This, of course, does not exclude the possibility of articulating these ideas more explicitly. Two examples from Takheung will serve, both from conversations with men who had extensive experience with labour migration and with outsiders. The first comes from a man who is one of the most curious people in Takheung when it comes to strangers. He was among the first villagers to seek my company and regularly makes friends with travelling salesmen passing through the village. Thanks to his skills with his power saw, he made more money in the lowlands than many others, using this to build the first two-storey stone houses in the village. By the standards of modern state and market, he would seem a particularly entrepreneurial character, driven by values of material accumulation. I was thus surprised when he revealed to me, in 2016, that he was looking forward to not working for money any more. He was then around forty and appeared satisfied with what he had. His idea of the good life consisted of working his fields and caring for his animals, while having a little more than most others with his new house, a tv and some income from lending out his equipment. This contrasts with a record of uplanders who despise working the fields and aspire to their own offspring becoming something other than farmers (for example, Bouté 2018: 213).7 This attitude is quite common among rural dwellers and 7 Bouté’s example of the Phu Noy in Phongsaly differs from the Rmeet in important respects. European Journal of East Asian Studies 20 (2021) 83–106 staying or moving 97 people with agrarian roots even in the lowlands (Baird, personal communication). It may thus be less specific to uplanders than to settings that are somewhat peripheral to modern states in general. However, a certain post-Zomian resilience can be seen here, set against a capitalist promise of ever-expanding consumption and the sacrifices necessary for attaining it. Post-Zomian agency does not evade the state in any obvious way, by moving out of the state’s grip. However, it refuses to accept the state as the sole provider of values and maker of definite decisions, even in a late socialist regime such as Laos, where the party–state claims to lead the people to the good life. Even if my informant were to have second thoughts sometime in the future, it is a remarkable expression of an alternative. The second example comes from a family father who had spent several periods of time in Thailand. In a conversation in 2001, he explained the difference between Thailand and Rmeet villages in these terms: ‘In Thailand, you have to be afraid of robbers; in the village, you have to be afraid of spirits.’ By this, he referred to a value expressed by the verb kho am po, ‘to love and care for each other’. kho am is ‘to love’ in the manner that family members or couples feel for each other, expressing compassionate attention to the other’s needs and emotions. po means ‘together’. kho am po suggests a group of closely related people who would not harm each other (see Petit 2015: 420). With kho am po, the Rmeet presuppose a kind of familiarity and intimacy that may equally reference households, villages or their entire ethnicity—for example, when they invoke kho am po as a quality of the Rmeet in contradistinction to the Thai or Lao, who are considered selfish. This relationship also includes the village guardian spirit who loves the villagers and is much less dangerous than the external spirits to which my informant referred. This way, kho am po also implies its opposite, social situations of mistrust, structured in similar scales of ethnicity, village, etc. For people making these comparisons, like the migration-savvy father, it represents a notion of the good life that has nothing to do with consumption or property. Kho am po conceptually encompasses village agency. This is a kind of agency in the aforementioned sense of being mostly present in its effects even when represented by persons. Villages emerge as agentive beings when there are effects and actions that can be attributed neither to individuals and households nor to forces like the state. Rather, events in Takheung and Mbling suggest an intermediate level with its own internal dynamics of persuasion and Soils in Phongsaly seem worse than in Luang Nam Tha, and a wave of outmigration has emptied the villages. European Journal of East Asian Studies 20 (2021) 83–106 98 sprenger value realisation that is still not identical with modern concepts of democratic representation.8 This also implies, however, that the village as the level of solidarity and kho am po cannot be taken for granted. Rmeet society resembles Lao and other Southeast Asian societies in that village agency appears in specific contexts while, in others, the solidarity and interest of households and kinship networks prevail (High 2014; Petit 2008). Communal rituals provide one such context (High 2009b), but so does village leadership, under the condition that villagers differentiate between personal and village-oriented actions of leaders. A leader who seems selfish thus loses his claim to be representative of the values and aims that people locate at the community level (Robbins 2018; Sax 2010). In the early twentieth century, Rmeet village agency was embodied by the village priest, who managed relationships with the guardian spirit—also said to be the spirit who loves the villagers—thus directly linking the loving togetherness of humans and spirit in his leadership. In the sense of de Coppet (1992: 65), he represented—made present anew—the reality of the village-as-entity in relationship with the spirit.9 Today, the diarchy of village priest and headman may articulate village agency in its external, administrative and internal, ritual dimensions. Headmen are elected but require state approval. Often, they come from families of earlier headmen and stay in office for several terms, even decades. The headman of Takheung at the time of the contested resettlement was the wealthiest man in the village, but seemed to me genuinely protective of the villagers. He had been in office for a number of terms but was removed early in the 2010s, allegedly for corruption. I do not know the substance of these claims or if his resistance to government measures had anything to do with his removal (see Baird and Shoemaker 2007: 881). The headman of Mbling who advocated the resettlement to the Nam Tha was equally well regarded, the son of an earlier headman and a well-known shaman. He realised a different value for his community by supporting its move to the river, successfully enough to attract families from Takheung as well. It is possible that his ability to align government policy and community interests helped him become the party secretary of the village after he left his office as headman. Both men, however, were successful leaders because they realised 8 There is nothing specifically post-Zomian, Asian or ‘non-modern’ about this. It is assumed here that communal agency is common to human sociality, ‘modern’ or ‘non-modern’. 9 Compare Nikolas Århem (2015: 206) on Katu: When a villager violates a moral proscription, the mountain spirit overseeing village morality may punish any villager. From the spirit’s point of view, the transgression is village agency, not personal agency. European Journal of East Asian Studies 20 (2021) 83–106 staying or moving 99 the values of staying in the mountains or moving to new opportunities that are both inherent in post-Zomian society. They were able to make these values relevant for the village as such—a community that only converges and emerges when the pressure to realise it arises (Graeber 2001, 2013; Robbins 2018). This is, of course, not always the case and, often enough, headmen clearly act against their community’s interests (for example, Baird 2017: 9; for the importance of leadership in resettlement, also see Katus et al. 2016). In all these cases, the difference villagers make between personal and communal interests acknowledges the village as a level of agency. All of this allows determining the elements of a post-Zomian agency. Both Zomia and post-Zomia are situated near the limits of state control, but while Zomia is just outside them, post-Zomia is already inside. The administration, both in terms of persons like elected headmen, party representatives or visiting officials and in terms of laws and regulations, is always present. However, local habitus still contains memories of a greater autonomy in the past, enshrined in subsistence practices that are common but opposed by the government, like swiddening and hunting, and in non-doctrinal animism. This is combined with a sense of distance from markets and wage labour that allows people to decide for themselves when they own enough and when they need to work for money. This latter trait is exclusive neither to the Rmeet nor to uplanders, but may be shared by rural dwellers elsewhere. However, the distance is enhanced in postZomia by an awareness of cultural difference understood not only in terms of centre–periphery relations and the ritual system (animism), but also in those of wealth, language, looks, etc. Ultimately, the feature of post-Zomianism highlighted here is a local stress on autonomy when dealing with authorities, even if this is exaggerated and local power is limited. However, examples such as the road building in Takheung demonstrate that the refusal to see themselves as victims may yield tangible advantages for uplanders on occasion. 6 Moving Again When I revisited my field sites in late summer 2018, Kha’aang and Mbling had moved again, and this time the forced character of resettlement was indisputable. Their previous site on the Nam Tha—and that of over thirty other villages—had disappeared under the surface of the reservoir of the Nam Tha 1 hydroelectric dam. For a number of villages, this meant moving higher up the slope of the riverbank, but the Rmeet villages on the right bank were relocated to a place much further away, on one of the tributaries of the Nam Tha and a fairly good road that is nevertheless quite some distance away from the European Journal of East Asian Studies 20 (2021) 83–106 100 sprenger next town. Here, seven villages are clustered in a row along the road, on land mostly used by two Khmu villages that had moved there some twenty years earlier. People seemed to appreciate the houses provided by the part Chinese, part Lao company, with ground floors made of stone and upper floors of wood, and connected to electricity, unlike their former village. However, there was not sufficient access to land for fields, and the water supply did not work at the time of my visit. Subsistence was thus difficult, and due to the remoteness of the place regular paid labour was not available—overall, conditions not unusual for resettlements in this area (Évrard and Goudineau 2004). Some people expressed their readiness to give up their newly provided houses and move again, thus resisting the pull of permanent buildings. Everyone I talked to during my rather brief stay was ready to discuss his or her difficulties, but they hardly conveyed the sense of broken promises and unfulfilled obligations recorded by Pholsena (2006) or High (2014: 40) elsewhere in Laos. I surmise that the Rmeet of the right bank, as former allies of the ‘enemy’, grew up knowing that the state owes them nothing. Paradoxically, this may lead to a sense, not of abandonment, but of empowerment: what they have they have through their own achievements. Still, the two ways of pursuing the good life, staying or moving, remained different. In 2018, I talked about Takheung’s remaining in the mountains with one of my main informants, who had joined Mbling when it moved to the river in 2001. Although he found himself in rather unfortunate circumstances after the forced resettlement in 2017, he still defended the idea of moving. Yes, he agreed, today Takheung does have brick and concrete houses as well; however, building them was much more expensive than here, close to a river and a much better road. A bag of sand would cost up to 12,000 kip when brought up to the mountains; here, he said, you fetch it from the riverbank. Complaining would have been an easy option for him; instead, he chose to stress that his decision to move out of Takheung was the right one. Certainly, he may have been only trying to save face when he said this. But he was doing so by claiming agency for himself, not victimhood and thereby making the state or the company responsible for his situation, as uplanders elsewhere in Laos have done (Petit 2008). 7 Conclusion The realisation of values that constitute a good life among Rmeet villagers in northern Laos unfolds in relationship to the demands of the state, whose developmentalist and socialist agenda allows resettling villages in the name of national development. Still, in the accounts of the Rmeet I talked to, the European Journal of East Asian Studies 20 (2021) 83–106 staying or moving 101 state does not appear as an irresistible and violent force, even though it may be experienced as such. Rather, people situated themselves in a broad field of what Baird has called ‘contingent contestation’ (2017). All along, they conveyed a sense of making their own decisions, in contrast to seeing themselves as victims at the hand of forces out of their control. This demonstrates a kind of post-Zomian agency in their dealings with state administration. While village leaders significantly enacted this agency, they could not do so without realising a level of village agency that was oriented towards values villagers saw as communal. Future research may reveal that the role of state administration in this particular case study is greater than I am able to figure out at this point, and the role of village agency less pronounced. But my argument remains that those Rmeet I talked to emphasised their own communal decision-making and that this agency was constructed along ideas of what a village is. This, by itself, is a contingent and specific feature of the situation, as contrasting studies from other parts of Laos have shown. Therefore, I argue that the way the good life is realised is not just a matter of personal imagination but equally a communal effort. The concept of village agency makes it possible to rewrite a history told in terms of manipulative individuals striving for power as one in which single persons only share in structural opportunities (Sahlins 1992). In the case of Takheung, this agency is quite conspicuous, but even those villages that complied with the government’s call to relocation in the early 2000s demonstrated this faculty. After all, their initial replies to my inquiry stressed their own decision-making; this was particularly pronounced among those who had decided to move from Takheung to the river. Village agency is thus not a binding or determining force for all its members, but something that emerges through action that realises values at the level of the community. Both types of decision, however, realise the complementary values of staying and moving. These values are at once local and designed to interact with the state. I am thus not trying to downplay the indisputable negative impacts of resettlement in Laos (see High 2008; Baird et al. 2009). Rather, I attempt to grasp why villagers would say that they made their own decisions about staying and moving even in the face of government measures. Wherever people locate the ability to make decisions—at the individual, household or village level, for instance—it constitutes a central value for uplanders I talked to. My findings thus offer a qualification of Scott’s concept of Zomia that puts too much stress on state avoidance. Both in the past and in the present, upland villagers have not been shy of engaging with the state, but valorised doing so on their own terms. What has changed over the past century is the disappearance of their independence from the state—this makes upland villages post-Zomian. European Journal of East Asian Studies 20 (2021) 83–106 102 sprenger Rmeet villagers thus demonstrate the unity of what would, in other contexts, appear as a contradiction. On the one hand, relationships to the outside are highly valued—as demonstrated here by the many Rmeet who adapt their ideas of a good life to observations made during labour migration. On the other hand, they see such changes in their way of life predominantly as the result of negotiated decisions they made themselves. 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