This post is part of a series of essays highlighting the work of emerging scholars of Southeast Asia published with the support of the Australian National University College of Asia and the Pacific.

• • • • • • • •

It was a dry November evening in 2018 when Sith, a man in his twenties, invited me to drink with his friends in Banmai. “What are you studying here in Banmai Resettlement, Ay [brother]?” Sith asked me as we headed toward his family’s house after buying a case of beer. I told him I was there to study electricity.“Are you an engineer?” he asked. “I also studied electrical engineering after secondary school, but I failed to finish it.”

“No, I’m studying social science. I’m studying resettled villagers’ experiences of new electricity,” I said.

“Experiences of new electricity, [bo]? Before moving here, we only had a small solar panel. We could turn on our light bulbs for two to three hours only. It was lesser during rainy days. We usually used oil lamps. We had to sleep early, because it’s very dark at night. We just stayed at home, because we’re afraid of accidents or malevolent spirits [phihay].  Here, people are more productive at night because of new electricity. People can now use all types of electric appliances and devices. Electricity has made us ‘modern’ [thansamai]. Electricity has given us ‘comfortable bodies’ [sabaygay]. If you have money here, you can now live like urbanites [khônnaimuang].”

Many scholars have examined how dams on the Mekong mainstream and tributaries have impinged upon local communities who rely on the river system for food and livelihoods. However, there has been less scholarship devoted to how consumption of hydroelectricity in these communities has transformed the lives of the displaced.

I wanted to bridge this gap in the literature via my doctoral research, by conducting ethnographic research for a year in Banmai Resettlement, the largest relocation community of the Nam Nua 1 (NNua1) Hydropower Project located in Bokeo Province. The project is considered by its developer as the flagship hydroelectric investment in Laos under China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). While in Banmai, I examined the ways whereby local communities, who have become consumers of the electricity produced by the dam that displaced them, perceive the impact of that process of consumption on them.

Hydroelectric production—consumption

In November 2014, a few months after the start of construction, the NNua1 displaced more than 1,750 households—10,000 individuals from 10 and 27 villages in Bokeo and Louangnamtha Province, respectively. Over 3,100 villagers, or approximately 560 households, were resettled in Banmai.

I conducted oral history interviews with 128 of these Banmai households. They told me that in the years preceding resettlement, between 2010 and 2016, almost all families were using non-grid electricity generation sources, with the majority using solar panels. These sources of electricity, however, were unstable and provided power for only two to three hours per day. Stability suffered during the rainy season in particular. Since their relocation, all households have been connected to the grid, one of the entitlements promised and provided by the NNua1 and the Lao state.

My interlocutor Sith’s experiences mirror those of many villagers I interviewed about their new grid connection. To consume 24/7 hydroelectricity is already a paradoxical experience for the resettled, after all, its generation is what forced them to leave their homes. But this electricity has also helped them adjust to their new environment. In my research, I wanted to examine the other paradoxes posed by this new consumption of electricity in Banmai: between darkness and light, modernity and memories, productivity and laziness, indigence and affluence, and “comfortable body” (sabaygay) and “poor heart” (thouk chai).

Banmai residents experience an increased sense of modernity related to grid connection while reminiscing about more traditional social practices or activities that electricity has rendered obsolete Residents feel that 24/7 hydroelectricity makes the resettled somehow both productive and lazy. The new grid connection illuminates differences in wealth between the villagers of relative affluence and indigence. And finally, the new grid connection has given many of the resettled “comfortable bodies” (sabaygay) but not “happy hearts” (sabaychai).

The goal of examining these paradoxes is not to sugar-coat the relocation process, but rather to present a more nuanced analysis of hydroelectric development. Unpacking these paradoxical experiences can account for the narratives of villagers who enjoyed the benefits of new electric consumption, without ignoring the inequality and impoverishment created by hydropower projects. Like any profit-driven physical infrastructure, hydroelectric infrastructure can simultaneously dispossess its end-users while providing them with real benefits.

Modernity—memories

We arrived at Sith’s home around 19:00, and saw Chan, a friend in his late twenties, carrying a duck whose feet were bound. Chan told Sith to grill it and prepare Luatpèng, a dish using duck’s blood. Other friends in their early twenties, Ton and Mek, joined us. Ton had brought his Bluetooth speaker and played Thai and Lao songs from his smartphone. Mek refused to drink beer on an empty stomach, so Sith told him to get vegetable soup from the refrigerator and reheat it on the electric hotpot (mosouki).

The food warmed up in less than ten minutes and as Mek slurped his soup, the community megaphones (thôlakhông) produced a loud buzzing sound. The voice of the village headman came over the megaphones, apologising for the late announcement and reminding the villagers to attend a seminar the next morning on combating mosquito-borne diseases organised by the district government.

After the announcement, Sith told me: “You see, electricity has really made us thansamai [modern], ay. Now, we can live like people in naimuang [urban areas].”

Most of my participants expressed this new sense of urbanity thanks to 24/7 electricity consumption. Thansamai (modern/high-tech), samaimai (new era/generation), phatthana (developed), chaleunhounghuangkouaa (more prosperous), and sivilaikouaa (more civilised) were the adjectives used by many to describe how their grid connection has transformed their lifestyle practices from bannok (rural) into naimuang (urban). Within this transformation, however, there are apparent differences in perception regarding what has been gained and lost in the process.

The grid connection, for instance, has brought modern entertainment to Banmai. In the past, only a few affluent households owned televisions and speakers, which they used for less than an hour a day because of the unstable electric supply. Now, many participants, particularly the youth, can play online videos, music, and mobile games. This has also exposed the resettled to global news, trends, and information.

Many of my interlocutors, however, lamented the impact that new electric lights, televisions, and mobile phones had on one beloved pastime: they now seldom, if ever, gather together around a bonfire. Prior to their relocation, the bonfire served as a light source, a body heater, a mosquito repellent, a tool for cooking, and importantly, as a central gathering space for socialisation at night. People recalled that while they huddled close to the fire, they heard life stories and folktales from their parents and the elderly. They also learned to sing traditional Lao songs and play musical instruments, such as the khèn (a traditional Lao flute) and guitar. Before leaving their former homes, family members and neighbours felt closer and more connected because they gathered around the fire almost every night. Several participants, especially the elderly, bewailed how modern life in Banmai has led to a decline in such social connections.

Electrification, however, has not meant a complete loss of traditional beliefs. Villagers I spoke to still situated their access to electricity within their traditional spiritual worldviews. Households spoke of the ways whereby stable and brighter electric lights might disempower spiritual beings, for instance. Many thought that the new light sources blocked the vision of (e.g., phi phong and phi pao) and warded off evil spirits (e.g., Khmu’s rôy kreun, Lamet’s proong, Lao Loum’s phi phong and phi pao). Brightness could also lay bare the identities and modus operandi of some malevolent ghosts (e.g., proong, phi ka, and phi kongkoy).

Electricity consumption has also modernised how the resettled villagers store, prepare, and consume food and drinks in refrigerators, electric hotpots, and rice cookers. For many participants, especially youngsters, using an electric hotpot to prepare their meals was more comfortable, faster, and more modern than cooking with firewood/charcoal.

Most elderly participants, however, preferred cooking meat over a fire or charcoal because it makes the meat tender and gives it a “smoky aroma” and “natural taste”. These relatively older participants discussed how the speed of cooking with electricity could ruin these qualities of the meat. Many younger participants, however, felt that this “natural taste” of food cooked with fire was just the older villagers’ “accustomed taste” (lotxat thi kheuy xin). Younger people admitted that perhaps they had become accustomed to eating food cooked with electricity, so they already lost the ability to recognise the “natural taste” mentioned by the elderly.

These contrasts—modern entertainment v. bonfire gatherings, speedy food preparation v. time- and flavour-intensive cooking—show how different people disagree over which aspects of electrification feel like a benefit, and which feel limiting.

Productivity—laziness

When Chan, Ton, and Mek learned from Sith that I was studying the grid connection in Banmai, they told me their opinions over beers.

“If the villagers had remained in their former villages without electricity, they would not have been able to run new businesses like the ice factory, furniture shops, and retail shops,” Chan told us. Ton added, “Here, some villagers can now make more Lao skirts, circular rattan meal bases, bamboo chairs, and chicken cages. They can now work at night because of new electric lights.”

Mek, however, countered, “Electricity has also made the villagers lazy. Ton, for example, always wakes up so late, because he always plays Mobile Legends [a mobile game] and watches YouTube videos until dawn.”

This conversation captures how 24/7 electricity simultaneously induces both a sense of economic productivity and indolence in Banmai. In terms of productivity, some villagers running “retail shops” (hankhaykhuang) in Banmai can now sell their merchandise after dark. Electric lights in chicken coops help poultry farmers protect chickens from potential predators. Refrigerators and freezers are crucial to some new businesses.

Stable electric lights in Banmai have boosted productivity for local artisans. Women told me of increased output of Lao textiles, and men noted a rise in bamboo and rattan handicraft production. Before resettlement, these activities were just hobbies. After relocation, these crafts have become sources of income as an unfortunate corollary of the lack of employment opportunities in Banmai.

Several participants thought their mobile phones powered by 24/7 electricity have made their work more productive. Those who farm use their smartphones to learn about agricultural techniques, crop and pest management, fertiliser application, or animal husbandry. Many also listened to Thai and Lao songs or radio on their phones while planting rice, hunting game, collecting forest products, or working in Chinese banana plantations near Banmai. They claimed their phones helped them feel good and stay motivated to do arduous work.

Conversely, however, other participants told me that using smartphones excessively has had detrimental effects on their productivity. Several mused about how the large amount of time they dedicated to swiping their smartphone screens precluded them from concentrating on fulfilling their household or work duties. Rather than focusing on their studies, young people have been engrossed in mobile games. Many, like Mek, surmised that spending too much time scrolling on smartphones at night also interrupts their sleep patterns, making them lethargic and lazy (khikhan).

People say they have become khikhan not only in engaging in physical activities but also in socialising. A confidant from Banmai also disclosed that his sex life with his significant other was curtailed due to smartphone-induced indolence. Although some mentioned the importance of social media in connecting with people they know who live and work in other towns or abroad, many, especially parents, bemoaned how smartphones contributed to feelings of disconnection within their families. Smartphone-induced indolence, one of the unexpected consequences of new electric consumption, has made the resettled globally integrated yet locally disconnected.

Indigence—affluence

Around 20:15, the grilled duck and Luatpèng were finally cooked. While eating and drinking, Sith and his friends shared more of their memories of their former villages with me.

Sith suddenly asked me, “Ay, are you going to study the experiences of electricity of poor villagers in Banmai?”

“Yes. Now they also have electricity. I want to learn about their new experiences,” I replied.

“But they don’t have electric appliances. They only have electric lights given by the hydropower company.”

The proponents of the NNua1 Project—NNua1 staff and officials, as well as Lao state actors involved in the relocation process—have lauded efforts to modernise the villagers who were formerly disconnected from the grid.

Although almost all houses are now connected to the grid, the reach of this distributed modernity has been uneven because not everyone can afford to purchase electric appliances. Examining the electricity consumption of the resettled serves as a prism through which to understand disparities in accessing the modernity conferred by grid connection. Probing this uneven access also illuminates the continuities of past inequalities in the new settlement.

This differential access is evident when comparing the lightscapes of the living rooms of wealthy and low-income families in the new settlement. I opted to focus on the living room because this part of the house lies within the reach of outsiders, and it serves as the place where the resettled perform their social identities.

Households that ran profitable businesses in the older villages had big houses in Banmai. They also had cars, new lucrative businesses, and relatives working for the government. These families took advantage of both the practical and symbolic value of their new light sources to present something “beautiful” (ngam) and “modern” (thansamai) to their guests.

In comparison to the aesthetic-oriented lighting of the affluent, the majority of families in Banmai used new electric lights mainly for practical reasons. Some indigent families had no electricity or electric lights at all in their living rooms during my fieldwork. These poorer families struggled to confront their new lives in the relocation site. Inauspiciously, they also failed to pay their electricity bill owing to the lack of livelihood opportunities and grazing and swidden areas in Banmai. When several indigent households went to the mountain to do shifting cultivation, unidentified burglars ransacked their houses and stole their few possessions, including their new electric lights given by the project.

I also investigated the huge differences in the villagers’ kitchen and dining areas. The resettled who owned kitchen appliances mentioned their modernity in storing, preparing, and consuming food and cold drinks. Villagers who did not own kitchen appliances, by contrast, had remarkably limited capacity to pay close attention to the quality of their food. In fact, these villagers claimed that their experience of hunger in the new settlement was higher than in the past.

The stories of the resettled who failed to experience the new electricity-induced modernity bear testimony to two facts. First, the NNua1 Project’s and its political goal of distributing “modern” experiences to all households in Banmai has failed to materialise. Second, experiences of poverty and modernity are possible at the same time. The experiences of the resettled challenge the claims of mainstream development practitioners and exponents of modernisation theory, who tend to equate modernity with development. When people feel they are becoming modern owing to infrastructure projects, it does not mean that their impoverishment is being addressed. Development is more complicated because it is multi-faceted; being modern is just one of its many facets.

Comfortable body—poor heart

Chan, Ton, and Mek agreed with Ton that the experiences of new electricity varied between the poor and the rich. They all agreed that it was easier for the affluent villagers to live like urbanites (khônnaimuang), and that their new access to the grid had made their “bodies comfortable” (sabaygay) but had failed to give the resettled “happy hearts” (sabaychai). As Sith put it:

The project gave us electricity, but we don’t earn enough money here, because we lost our livelihoods here. Electricity has made us modern because it has reduced the time required for some of our activities. But it could not give us food to eat when we’re hungry; it could not give us medicine when we’re sick. Electricity has made our “bodies comfortable” [sabaygay]; moving here has made our “hearts poor” [thoukchai].

On many occasions, the more prosperous villagers, notably those with substantial pre-relocation savings or pre-existing successful businesses, pointed out how their new electric consumption had made them feel sabaygay and sabaychai (literally: “comfortable/happy heart”). By sabaygay, they usually referred to how their grid connection and other physical infrastructure in Banmai meant less physical work. Their feelings of sabaychai also allude to the ways their electricity consumption and economic activities allow them to be closer to their family and to feel comfortable staying and retiring in Banmai. These claims of sabaygay and sabaychai show that some resettled express greater happiness living in Banmai than in their previous settlements.

Concentrating solely on these affluent villagers’ experience gives us the impression that NNua1’s resettlement programs have been successfully implemented. But most of my participants explained to me that the success of these comparatively wealthy villagers could not be attributed merely to the newly built electric infrastructure and other benefits received from the hydropower project, nor to their self-perception of being “hardworking.” The wealthy have leveraged their past resources to operate profitable enterprises and to successfully integrate themselves into the market. These participants, who have both “comfortable/happy bodies and hearts” after relocation, represent a very small minority.

The majority of my household interview participants, like Sith, associated their new grid connection with the experience of being modern and having comfortable bodies (sabaygay), but not the happiness of the heart (thoukchai). They explained that their hearts had become poor since they moved to Banmai due to three principal factors: the disappearance of their prior food and livelihood sources, the project’s inadequate financial compensation and unfulfilled promises, and the perceived corruption and preferential treatment exhibited by some Lao staff of the NNua1 Company, its outsourced companies, and some local state officials. Their new coping strategies developed in response to their challenging economic conditions in Banmai further evoke feelings of thoukchai.  Examples of their precarious survival strategies include walking long distances to scavenge for wild edibles, eating their pets during food shortages, and resorting to amphetamine abuse as a means of mitigating the physical fatigue of new labor conditions in Chinese plantations.

And not all villagers associated the sense of urbanity and modernity brought about by the new grid connection with physical comfort. About a quarter of the villagers I spoke with candidly stated that since relocation, their hearts and bodies had both become poorer (thoukchai, thoukgay). Among them were those who could not sell their labour to the market due to their age, disability, or gender, as well as ethnic minorities who had illegally returned to their former villages. These participants believed that their lives would have been better if the government had permitted them to remain in their original settlements. Their negative views of the relocation demonstrate how the infrastructure-centric approach to development of the NNual1, the Lao state, and the BRI is being challenged on the ground.

The paradoxes of electricity I discussed demonstrate how rural electrification reshapes life in both enabling and estranging ways. Round-the-clock electricity can amplify not only modern and convenient living, but importantly, socioeconomic inequalities and disrupted traditional rhythms and relations. Wading across the pleasure, pain, and promise of electric power, this ethnographic analysis illuminates the political nature of Chinese infrastructure, not the spectacular but the intimate and inconspicuous.

Enjoyed this article? Subscribe to New Mandala

Keep up to date with opinionated, informed and accessible commentary on Southeast Asia from leading researchers. Leave your email address in the field below and you’ll receive new posts in your inbox as they are published.

Email Address

Subscribe

The post From flickers to full power: when reliable electricity arrived in Banmai appeared first on New Mandala.

This post was originally published on New Mandala.

On 10 February 2025, my friend Lom (pseudonym) sends me a video clip she took on the street in Attapeu, in the far south of Laos. The video shows a large truck driving past a crowd gathered along the main road of town. I can see mainly women in formal dress: the traditional Lao sin skirt and a shawl worn usually for Buddhist ceremonies. The truck is dressed up, too: waves of white and golden cloth hang along the vehicle’s sides and reflect the sunlight. A red carpet covers the truck’s tray. Five men stand on top; one is resting his hands on a large rock in the middle. Many cone-shaped offerings (ton dok mai) made from rolled banana leaves and marigold flowers surround the rock. Another man on the truck takes pictures of the crowd. Behind the truck rolls a ute with giant speaker boxes that expel Lao instrumental music, announcing the arrival of the rock from afar to the people of Attapeu town.

My friend turns her phone camera to show the destination of the truck: the recently finished City Pillar Park. The City Pillar Shrine, or hall (ho lak muang), will be the new home of this rock, or rather, of the giant gemstone hidden within. The gem will be carved out of its grey coat, lifted up the staircase and past the golden naga (mythical serpent) sculptures that typically guard Buddhist temples.

A few weeks later, over lunch with Lom, I ask her why she thinks this stone is used in the City Pillar. She says that it was “given” by a Chinese company, three large pieces, to three significant places in town. She thinks this occurred so that in the future, when all  the stone has been taken, the next generations can still come and see it here. She calls this “kananoulak”, conservation. Another Attapeu friend who I asked told me this was hin on, the Lao term for Pagodite, also known as soap stone which is used in stone carvings and figurines often in religious contexts in China, Japan and Southeast Asia (its name is derived from “pagoda”’). It was found in Phouvong district, Attapeu province, and it is “more expensive than gold!”, my friend says. I ask whether people in Phouvong like to use or sell this stone? She answers: “Yes, people did in the past, but now the government has given all rights to take the stone to international companies. Now it is illegal for Attapeu people to take it.”

Corporate mineral extraction in Attapeu province has rapidly increased over the past few years. In 2022, the Lao government granted ten companies land concessions and mining rights for an area equivalent to a quarter of the province’s land area. A contract to survey for Pagodite in the Phouvong area was signed in February 2023 by the Attapeu provincial government with a Chinese construction company (China is the largest trading partner and investor in Laos). Across the country, investments in mineral production of over US$2.47 billion were made in 2024, and sales of minerals and mineral products yielded more than US$3.2 billion, making minerals the most exported good from Laos. When announcing these numbers in 2025, the Director-General of the Department of Mines Management highlighted the importance of expanding the mineral sector to support Laos’ economic development goals.

At the time Lom’s video reached me, I was at the Paksong agricultural festival, a coffee hub on the Bolaven plateau. Perhaps, what coffee is to the Bolaven, minerals like Pagodite are to Attapeu: a resource that some local people have put their hopes and work in to earn a living, perhaps even gain a slice of wealth. International investors try to make profit from both and have larger bargaining power with the government than farmers. But while coffee trees re-grow, and can support people’s livelihoods ongoingly, Attapeu’s mineral resources are only extracted once, mainly for export. The huge gemstone that travelled into town that day in February, accompanied by traditional music and everyday people’s astonished looks, was perhaps chosen to become part of the new city pillar because of this transience that adds to its material and symbolic value.

In this article, I explore how the stone is wrapped up in stories of spiritual, political and economic powers at play in this province and beyond, which became symbolically “enshrined” in the new Attapeu city pillar. I approach “power” in the sense of power to—that is, generative energies to set things in motion and move people to act—and trace what activities around the Attapeu City Pillar inauguration can tell us about some current flows of power in Laos.

Rather than cast in stone, any spiritual, political and economic powers require ongoing re-generation. Aware of this, the Lao government uses the City Pillar as a vehicle: it revives an ancient practice intended to establish and emplace a spiritual protective power to serve its own contemporary political and economic efforts. A beautiful gemstone is transported from a rural hinterland to the city centre, monks travel to the pillar inauguration event, worshippers gather to show their respect and direct some power towards their own desires, and images feature in government news and on social media—activities the government mobilises to bond citizens to projects of national development and sociocultural integration. Since in the end, as Holly High and Pierre Petit stress, the “state” is made up of people—some of whom we will meet here around the city pillar.

Observations from a city pillar ceremony

Sunday, 27 March 2025. Duan, a hospital nurse in her twenties, picks me up at six in the morning. She is disappointed when she sees the treats I bought, a package of coffee-flavoured lollies: “They are too small for the sai bat (alms-giving ceremony)! And your kathip (rice basket) is too large.” Duan wears a white long-sleeved jacket with delicate stitching, a sin, beige-golden heeled slippers, and a peacock broach holds her long, silky hair together. I feel under-dressed in my Ta Oi (ethnic minority group) sin and cotton shirt. I sense this is a big occasion for her.

We drive the short distance to the City Pillar Park. Attapeu town was busy in the last three days: people from all over the province and further afield travelled to join the inauguration or “worship” ceremony of the Attapeu City Pillar (phithi bouang souang ho lak muang). As the Attapeu Online News writes, it is held to “worship the sacred things and thank the benefactors of the village, city, and nation”.

The construction of the City Pillar Park and shrine took over three years. The celebratory events of the past two days included evening dances and music performances, but the highlight of the festival occurred last night: som phot pha, the night when the Buddha statue of the city pillar is endowed with spiritual powers. This powerful act requires an entourage of senior monks to meditate through the night, alongside laypeople. This morning, scattered rubbish across the park is testimony to the presence of many people who spent the last night here mediating, dressed all in white, and in need of nourishment.

We are here this early morning to join the alms-giving ceremony. Duan points me to a stall at the entry of the park to buy bigger treats: “There will be 55 monks, I heard, you need to buy enough!” I choose biscuit packages, return to Duan and she places the biscuits in her silver offering vessel. She has spread out our mat next to some other women, but we are moved by a man who says: “Not here, this is where the monks will walk.” Our final spot on the Western side is already illuminated by the sun that rises behind the pillar shrine. I feel hot and see sweat beads on Duan’s face. I worry I will get sunburnt, “My face will be red!”, and Duan worries that her skin will darken, “My face will get black!”.

We decide to take a walk around the park. On the Northern side of the shrine, tables with chairs stand in the shade of open tents, in readiness for the special guests: local politicians, high representatives of organisations, and important businesses—a category Lao people refer to as “big people” (phou nyai). But today, the most special guests are revered monks who travelled here even from the capital Vientiane, Duan tells me. The signs on the table signify the reserved places for members of the Sangha. I notice on the signs a logo and read: “Vangtat Mining Company Working for the People”. A little further I find benches that also read “Vangtat Company Mining Group” (photos by author below). I learn that these are the main sponsors of this event.

A monk announces the proceedings of the day over microphone, his dark orange robe almost matches the red carpet beneath his feet. Next to him stands a large wooden armchair with flower upholstery. Duan says it’s the Governor’s seat. I keep following Duan who is looking for the best photo spots: this one’s too dark, that one has too many people, that one…she tells me to take photos anyways. I see some people up on the pillar shrine. The doors are open, but I cannot look inside. I ask Duan if we can go up there, but she says that only men can go. That disappoints me; I want to see this stone up close.

We return to our sunny spot. It is now around quarter past seven. A monk begins reciting, and in the same moment, Duan answers her phone. Her colleague is on his way here and wants to know what’s happening.  A man with a large camera walks around and films people. He asks a couple of middle-aged women in front of us to take their picture, because they are “phou ngam” (beautiful people). I cover my face with my shawl for some shade. Duan hangs up and stands her phone against her offering bowl so that the camera films her face as she is chanting.

Eventually it is time to “take merit” (ao boun). When the group of monks arrive at our spot, women reach with their arms in between our heads to place their sticky rice, treats and small money notes in the monks’ bowls and trays. These are emptied frequently in large bags carried by young novices. The atmosphere seems jolly: a woman opposite to me jokes with the monk about the sweating she must endure. People attract the monks’ attention by calling out “Ajan” (teacher)—nobody wants to miss out. I ask Duan what this practice means to her. She says it “makes us have happiness” (hai mi khouamsouk). I ask “do the monks give happiness?’ She says, “Yes, they eat our treats, make Amelie and Duan be happy”.

When the last monk has passed us, Duan says “let’s go” and that now we can climb to the top of the pillar shrine, she has seen other women do so. We take off our shoes and leave them beneath the naga railing. It takes a little while for us to approach; many people wait to see the stone inside and take their picture. When we enter the shrine, I see the stone for the first time in its finished rectangular form. It is beautiful with its red, white and grey shades that remind me of flames and smoke rising in a dark sky. In front of the stone sits a Buddha statue made from the same stone, its lap is covered in money notes. We take more pictures, then Duan says it is time to go home, she has some housework to do for her parents.

The pillar and spiritual powers: Buddhas, deities, and spirits

To stress the spiritual significance of the event, the Attapeu Online News wrote that it was a “celebration and consecration, to give merit and praise towards the supreme city pillar deity, master of the place, master of the base, the ancestors, and is a dedication to bring luck to oneself and family to live well and happy”. My friend Ponsavad, a young woman from Attapeu city, consulted her family to explain that the city pillar hall is meant to “serve as an auspicious centre for the city”. They believed that the ritual was performed “to invite sacred deities to come and protect the people in the district”.

The notion of a city pillar deity has been documented by anthropologists of Laos and other Theravada Buddhist countries. Kazuo Fukuura’s research on a community of spirit worshippers of the Chiang Mai city pillar traces the pillar’s origin directly to the Hindu and Buddhist God Indra, more than 700 years ago, after whom the pillar is named. Holly High’s study of myths surrounding the city pillar spirit Lady Si, situated in Vat Si Muang in Vientiane, indicate that the erection of this pillar reaches back as far as 1563 under the rule of King Setthathirat, at which time tradition required the generation of a tutelary deity by human sacrifice.

My friend Souk, who grew up in Attapeu, believed that the custom of a female sacrifice (either voluntary or by murder) when a city pillar was established existed all over Laos. But he was not sure whether there was a previous city pillar in Attapeu, and where it would be located. According to some of the myths High collected, Lady Si’s decision to turn into a spirit by suicide was driven by a desire to spread Dharma, the Buddha’s teaching. For Ponsavad’s family, Dharma also played a role in the city pillar inauguration, as one of “three principal refuges: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha”, which she told me “are central to our prayers and chants, representing enlightenment, the path of truth, and the community of noble disciples”, also referred to as the “three jewels”.

Creations of and engagements with city pillars employ Buddhist concepts and deities in various ways, and not all Buddhists believe the same. Some people I asked in Southern Laos believed that through a som phot ceremony led by monks and attended by worshippers, the buddha statue within the city pillar would be endowed with protective power. Laypeople might bring their own Buddha statues from home to this event, since before the ceremonial act, they are mere objects. However, when I asked my friend Souk about these beliefs, he said of himself that he tries to follow the teachings of the Buddha, but does not believe in such “magic”. To him, good only comes from people’s actions—the power to affect our lives is within ourselves, not attached to, or radiating from, statues or rocks.

The pillar and political power: Lao nationalism and socialism

Spiritual powers of city pillars are entwined with the political power of the muang (a traditional city state, predating the nation), such as Vientiane or Chiang Mai, a term today used in Laos to refer to a city or district. John Clifford Holt, a historian of Buddhism in Laos, writes that Buddhist political power in Laos consolidated not until the 16^th century (the time when the Vientiane City Pillar was established), and was influenced from the neighbouring Lan Na kingdom, today’s Chiang Mai region. Buddhism re-entered the official Lao historiography after a phase of initial marginalisation of religion under the socialist regime. Laos’ more recent city pillars are created with the intention to strengthen a sense of national unity and incorporate Buddhism. Whilst regional, provincial sentiments of belonging and pride are tapped into, the intention is to instil pride in the Lao nation as a whole.

The pillar as an “historical and cultural symbol of the province”, as the Attapeu Online News write, thereby feeds into modern Laos’ socialist political culture, where selected notions of history and heritage of “good and beautiful customs” are evoked to enhance a sense of unity and nationhood amongst the “multi-ethnic Lao people”. When the Lao People’s Democratic Republic was established in 1975, Kaysone Phomvihane, leader of the Pathet Lao liberation movement, declared unity of the country a priority and, as Goudineau writes, ‘defended polyethnic solidarity in the context of a single and indissoluble Lao nation.’

Constructions of a national Lao culture to support unity are ongoing and the recent revival of city pillars are part of this nation-building-project. In 2012, a new pillar shrine was established in the national capital, Vientiane, not far from the landmark Vat Si Muang temple. Goudineau describes this as an act to regain “symbolic control”: a plaque at the pillar that I visited in May 2025 claims this to be the site of an ancient city pillar erected in 1540, under the reign of King Phothisarat of the Lan Xang Hom Khao Kingdom (the land of the One Million Elephants and the White Parasol), hence before Lak Si Muang appeared under Photsirath’s son Setthathirat.

The modern nation of Laos traces its origins back to kingdom of Lan Xang established by king Fa Ngum in 1353. Phothisarat made Theravada Buddhism the official religion of Lan Xang from the beginning of the 16th century, by rejecting indigenous spirit (phi) worship by decree. According to the plaque, the new Vientiane city pillar shrine “symbolizes unity and heroism spirit among Lao people in fighting for the protection of fatherland and for the social development in Vientiane and nationwide”. Champassak’s city pillar, Attapeu’s neighbouring province, also features a stone that stresses national unity and harmony. On one side of the stone, my friend Souk explained to me, a Buddhist monk appeals to everyone in this place that they should love each other like different-coloured flowers in the same tree—supposedly a lesson about love, and harmony, despite differences. The other side quotes a message linked to Fa Ngum, which addresses everyone on this land to not fight war against each other.

As the newest addition, Attapeu’s City Pillar Shrine is described in local news as “preserving culture and enhancing the unity of local people” (note, that people from at least ten recognised ethnic groups live in Attapeu, in a population of around 160,000 in 2024). In his speech at the procession for moving the soap stone to the new city pillar hall on 10 February 2025, the provincial governor praised the “participation” and “cooperation of people of all ethnic groups in Attapeu” in a procession that “shows solidarity, love, and devotion to the good traditions, culture, and customs of the nation and the tribes in the land of Attapeu province”. He compared the beauty and complexity of the stone to Attapeu where many ethnic groups live together.

Multiculturalism has gained some symbolic traction in Lao politics, which becomes especially apparent in Sekong’s city pillar, Attapeu’s neighbouring province. This pillar is surrounded by scenes of village work carved in stone, and ten statues of male-female couples accentuate (or fantasise?) differences in dress and tools deemed typical for their ethnic group identified by plaques. Here, the Lao couple is presented as standing alongside, and in line, with others who appear to guard the pillar.

Yet, despite such government-initiated showcase of multi-ethnicity, there is a widespread sense that on national scale, the Lao-Tai population remains dominant in defining what makes up “being Lao.” Researchers of Laos have critiqued the government’s efforts to create unity as “Laoization” of ethnic minorities who are encouraged to resemble the livelihoods, cultural and spiritual outlooks of Buddhist, Lao-Tai people. The establishment and ceremonies surrounding the Attapeu City Pillar may be seen as part of this political project of social integration on provincial level, sending the message that worshipping the pillar-deity is important to all people of Attapeu, if not Laos. Spending this event with my friend Duan, I got a sense that the aesthetic performance of a devote, Lao Buddhist woman with bright skin may add to one’s cultural capital in her society, prompting to post her religious participation on social media.

The pillar and powers of socioeconomic development

The message of unity sent out during the Attapeu city pillar inauguration is not only socio-political but has also an important socio-economic dimension. Memorabilia of economic, corporate power were scattered around the place, from VIP table signs to public benches that carry the name of the Vangtat mining company. Mixing economics and religion, the corporation’s representatives were named as benefactors of Attapeu in the monk’s speech prior to the alms-giving ceremony.

Established in Attapeu’s Sanxai district in 2009, the Vietnamese Vangtat Mining Company Ltd. Contributed to a further ”boost” in gold mining in Laos around 2019. In 2022, Vangtat received government approval to explore an area of 399.1 km² and exploit 18 km², with a target of 1,000,000 tons of rare iron ore, and 30,000 tons of rare earth minerals in Attapeu’s neighbouring Sekong province. According to a Radio Free Asia report, Vangtat had explored and mined 428 km²  by mid-2024 in Southern Laos. Investments and beneficiary often go hand in hand, and Vangtat recently made the government news for a 20 million kip sponsorship payment towards Laos’ ASEAN chairmanship.

According to the Lao Ministry of Energy and Mines, mining projects must ensure three benefits: of the nation, of investors, and of the local area. The latter is especially controversial. Residents in the district where the city pillar stone was mined said in an interview to Radio Free Asia that mining in their region disrupted livelihoods by causing damage to roads, traffic and noise, and limited access to farmable land. Wages paid to local workers were considered too low. People found it hard to see the benefits for the local area that their government promises, and lamented a lack of monitoring for social and environmental impacts by officials based in the faraway provincial centre.

Official statements instead spread narratives of cooperation, harmony and mutual benefit between mining companies and local communities. In the speech of Attapeu’s Provincial Governor in the local news on the day the nearly ten ton heavy soap stone was moved to the city pillar shrine from Phou Kang Hong, Phouvong District, he stresses his pride in seeing the peaceful cooperation between the Lao–China gemstone development company and Attapeu’s “multi-ethnic People”. These narratives are situated within the wider development ideology of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party. Five-Year Development plans are underpinned by a revolutionary mission of guiding and reforming the population through a socialist path: in essence, the population is supposed to unite in harmony and cooperate to realise development plans.

This narrative of national development is instilled throughout education, as I observed myself in politics classes during my PhD fieldwork at a state-run tertiary education institute. The government’s vision of national socioeconomic progress demands the population to make sacrifices; those considered “lagging behind” (commonly ethnic minorities) are requested to relocate and change their agricultural methods to what is deemed more innovative. As harbingers of modernisation, international investments into the country’s resources and infrastructural development are celebrated in official news; every deal is portrayed as testimony for socioeconomic progress. I found that many physical structures in Attapeu—new hospitals, an airport, and now a city pillar—were built with international, corporate money in exchange for land concessions or resource extraction deals. In Attapeu, investors such as the Hoang Anh Gia Lai Group employ the same narratives as aid organisation, promising to “reduce poverty” and “eliminate hunger”.

Meanwhile, Attapeu province has sad stories to tell of development turning against itself: a partial collapsed hydropower dam drowned people and robbed villagers of their livelihoods, rapid deforestation due to banana or rubber plantations limit access to free food sources and harm biodiversity, corporate mineral mining disrupts villager’s lives and pays poor local wages, the airport operated only for one year and lies since in decay, and during my research I learnt that the newish provincial hospital has an unsafe sewage system—ironically, a public health risk.

Heritage and powers enshrined

City pillars in Laos attempt to preserve a piece of tangible wealth or heritage of a region that over its tumultuous history sacrificed a lot, long before it called itself a nation. Vientiane’s monument is said to host ancient relics that escaped pillaging from Siam, French colonisation, and American imperialism. Attapeu’s city pillar shrine now holds one exemplar of a sought-after stone, mined by and exported to its more powerful neighbours, mainly China and Vietnam. Though some commentators have described the current political-economic dynamics neocolonial, it is not as simple as depicting Laos as victim. Danelle Tan argues that, by attracting economic powers such as China, the Lao government manages to maintain its own power, whilst “the minorities, the farmers and the poor” bear the costs.

Attapeu’s new city pillar stands there to celebrate, not to mourn, the treasures of the province. One big, shiny piece is now enshrined to be preserved for generations—“heritage” has been declared. In the governor’s words, as a “priceless” mineral, the stone symbolises the “abundance and wealth of the land and water resources of our Attapeu province”. For some, it may just be a dead rock hidden away. For others, who live in or can travel to the centre of the province, and participate in activities of worship like Duan and I, the soap stone block and Buddha may regenerate spiritual, political and economic powers—as well as more mundane hopes for happiness—that reverberate far beyond Attapeu.

Enjoyed this article? Subscribe to New Mandala

Keep up to date with opinionated, informed and accessible commentary on Southeast Asia from leading researchers. Leave your email address in the field below and you’ll receive new posts in your inbox as they are published.

Email Address

Subscribe

The post Attapeu’s new city pillar: worship, develop, unite! appeared first on New Mandala.

This post was originally published on New Mandala.

Eight o’clock, 14 July 2024

I arrive at the office of Ajan Mala, a teacher at a Public Health School in southern Laos. We grab brooms, buckets, sponges and floor cleaner and she walks ahead of me towards the student dorm. As we get closer, she spots people in the distance and yells: “Students, come and help clean Amelie’s room!”. Her tone sounds commanding and makes me uncomfortable; I do not wish to force anyone to clean my room. But Ajan Mala turns around, smiles and says she is just joking, that this is like “a game between teachers and students.” She assures me there is “midtaphāb” (friendship) between them.

At the student dormitory, Ajan Mala unlocks the door of my room-to-be. Suddenly there are around fifteen adults who pick up brooms, open all windows and doors, carry out beds and wardrobes, sweep and scrub. Ajan Mala tells me to dust the cobwebs from the wardrobes, while they will take care of the room’s interior and the bathroom.

I take a step back, feeling slightly overwhelmed by the rush and what to me appears chaotic action. Everything seems to happen at once: while people are still sweeping, one student finds a few pieces of green rubber hose that he links together and connects to a tap outside. Suddenly water floods the tiled floors, and gushes towards the wooden furniture I am still dusting off. Afraid of water damage to the untreated timber, I ask a student to help me move the furniture away from the deluge. I hear the noises of engines, and behind the back window, a couple of men slash the plants that had crossed the threshold between in and outside.

There are some teachers who help and some who watch. The school director, dressed in pink tracksuit and sun hat, walks by, takes a video with her phone, and kicks some snails off the corridor walls with her parasol. I watch one teacher pull out some plant with its root and stick it inside a plastic cup she found on the ground. She adds some dirt and says she’ll take it home to her garden. Ajan Mala squats and scrubs the walls, while her colleague mops the floor. I start to relax amongst these people who are chatting, joking, yelling teasing comments across the corridor—and the place is getting cleaner.

But the action is over as quickly as it started; students and teachers begin to disappear. As I notice a group walking away through the corridor, I run after them with biscuits as thanks. They share the biscuits and then leave. Once everyone is gone, I get down on the floor with a bucket of water-vinegar mix and a sponge, and give each tile a final, thorough scrub (much gecko poo has survived the water flood). I feel grateful as if I received a welcome gift. But it also occurs to me, that the students and teachers seem used to this; not of course, to clean a visiting anthropologists’ room, but to clean together.

Collective cleaning as labour: ǭkhǣngngān

Cleaning together at a worksite or educational facility is a routine practice of collective, physical labour in Lao PDR. At my field site people called it ǭkhǣngngān (ອອກແຮງງານ). When I first read the term in the weekly lesson timetable, I falsely translated it to “workout”. I expected ǭkhǣngngān would be some outdoors exercise regime (“ǭk” as “out”, “hǣng” as “strong”, and “ngān” as “work”). When the day came around, I asked a student what we will do this afternoon. She replied “ǭkhǣngngān!”, and I asked “mǣn nyang?” (“what is this/that”), so she said “anāmai” (tidy up). That afternoon, we swept concrete floors, scraped snail poo off walls, and squatted down to pull out weeds along paths. The weeds were piled up together with plastic rubbish and set alight.

My Lao friends tell me ǭkhǣngngān happens at every government-run workplace and school. The organised, institutional character of this labour can be observed in a number of aspects. A specific slot is allocated to ǭkhǣngngān in the school’s weekly timetable, usually on a Thursday or Friday afternoon. The task of the day is determined by a senior staff member. Lists of participation are kept which students and teachers sign, and all are expected to participate. The place to be cleaned is an outdoors area, in the vicinity of the classroom or school offices, and this location puts ǭkhǣngngān in full view of the public. In government news publications, stories of ǭkhǣngngān sessions abound accompanied with imagery of groups working together, especially in preparation for days of national celebration: tidying up around government buildings, pulling weeds at a military school, or sweeping in the capital’s public parks. At my field site too, students and staff take pictures of their tidying-up session to post on social media.

The term ǭkhǣngngān also sets this activity apart from other occasions of working together. “Work” in Lao is more commonly referred to as vīak: housework (vīak hư̄an), work on rice fields (vīak nā ), or gardens (vīak sūan), going to work (pai vīak). The nursing students at my field site work in groups for assignments (vīak kūm) and do homework (vīak bān). With most work, they refer specifically to the practice: hā kin (look for food, or go and get food), hed kin (prepare food), anāmai (tidy up), keb (collect). During our lunch break, we climb up on chairs or use long sticks to reach tamarind pods and raw papayas in the trees, we search for edible leafy greens, peel bamboo shoots, make a fire to cook bamboo soup or grill buffalo skin, prepare a floormat and dishes to eat on the classroom floor, and tidy up after the meal. None of this collective, physical labour that occurs on a daily basis would make the news.

Whilst ǭkhǣngngān is structured by the institution, these everyday practices of working together evolve dependent on people’s needs. Who participates and how depends on individuals’ motivations, skills and time. Often one person starts an activity which then spills over to others. People verbally organise each other to a degree, but this occurs spontaneously and according to emerging needs and desires identified by the students themselves—nothing is pre-set by an authority. All this work happens out of view from the institution (school staff). There is no fixed lunch group, but people drop in and out, some go home to eat with their family or to a restaurant. In comparison, ǭkhǣngngān at first sight appears to be an “unnatural” way of people working together at this school.

If working together already takes place on a daily basis, and seems to work to fulfill people’s needs, what then is the point of ǭkhǣngngān, and to whom? Is it just a means to make people tidy those large, shared spaces outside the classroom and office that no one would take care of otherwise? Or are there other reasons to make people work together in this particular way?

Possible answers as to why ǭkhǣngngān persists at state-run institutions in Lao PDR can be derived from its roots in a Marxist–Leninist concept of collective labour. This becomes clear when looking at how the concept of ǭkhǣngngān is taught in a Lao schoolbook on “Civic Education” for Year 5 students published in 2019:

People’s labour (kanǭkhǣngngān khǭng khon) is related to movements that have a social character. In that labour, people need to coordinate together to move together as a group. If just alone, a single person cannot earn food to live and resist disasters or forces that occur in the natural world. The ancient primitive people (khon pathombūhān) lived in a group before to carry out labour that had a social character because of that society. Therefore, as products (phalidtaphan) that affect each other, there is a relationship between person and person (khon), and labour is a power (kamlang) that creates (sāng) the person (khon) and society (sangkhom).

In this reading, labour as movement is social in both process and outcome. Social labour is naturalised because this is what allows humans to survive since the “ancient primitive people”. But this labour is about more than mere use-value, such as procurement of food or building of shelters that protect from wind and weather — because labour here is also a generative power to create the person and society as its “products”.

This means that neither person nor society are understood as abstract conditions or identities pre-existing to interpersonal relationships and practices of labour. The term (ǭk)hǣngngān as labour in this sense is used in Laos in political contexts, such as the “International Labour Organization” (ongkanhǣngngānsākon), and government news stories might use the term to refer to workers (phūǭkhǣngngān).

The organisation of weekly ǭkhǣngngān at all Lao government workplaces and schools is thus based in a socialist political philosophy of creating people and society through physical, collective labour. It links historically to the Soviet socialist organisation of unpaid, physical labour on Saturdays under the name of ‘Subbotnik’. Frederick Kaplan quotes from the Soviet Regulations of Subbotniks which describes them as “one of the forms of propaganda of the idea of labor service and self -organization of the working class” and as “a laboratory of communist labor”. Lenin in his 1920 handbill Pervomaisky Subbotnik, following the first large-scale Subbotnik for the Moscow–Kazan Railway, describes this process as a “matter of transforming the very habits of the people” from an individualist, capitalist economy towards labouring according to the two socialist rules of ‘“All for each and each for all”’, and ‘“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”, in order to gradually introduce “communist discipline and communist labour”.

Ǭkhǣngngān at government institutions in Laos can then be interpreted as the (intended) enactment of a socialist political theory about how people and society come to be. This political and symbolic loading turns it into more than just a mere tidying-up session, and hence it has a different frame compared to other types of working-together at the school, as described above.

This idea of labour as a transformative power that builds certain kinds of people also shines through in how education is described at my field site, where I was conducting ethnographic research on nursing education. The stated objectives of the nursing course use the language of “creating” or “building” students to become part of collectives as “good citizens” and “professional nurses of the ASEAN community”, with not only professional knowledge and nursing skills, but also with “revolutionary morals”, “correct political thinking”, and “patriotism and unity”. Ǭkhǣngngān as part of this education then presumably intends to practice the “rules” of socialist labour to be applied in the context of public health work. Simultaneously, it serves the practical need for tidying-up schools and workplaces in absence of paid maintenance personnel in Laos’ resource-poor public health and education system.

The term “labour” in anthropology is often used to describe “physical toil, performed out of necessity, coercion, or domination”. Folz and Smith see this application influenced by Marx’s writings on labour exploitation and class struggle. But for Marx, the process of work/labour (Arbeitsprozess) to begin with has positive connotations as that which makes humans human, as a practice of turning one’s abstract ideas or imaginings into things of the material world (Marx 1967, 141–142). In Volume One of Capital he describes this ideal state of working as a “play” of human’s “physical and intellectual powers”. Only from this conception of the working process could Marx develop his theory of  Entfremdung (alienation) of humans to their own work activities in the capitalist mode of production—and thereby to themselves as humans, and to other humans, whose work (and being) is perceived as a mere commodity.

Instead of simply interpreting ǭkhǣngngān as physical toil due to state-driven coercion of nursing students into labour, I want to experiment with Marx’ concept of physical labour as attempt to realise an abstract idea or imaginings: in this case, the idea itself that people and society are created through the power of labour, which underpins the institution of ǭkhǣngngān in Laos. Further, I want to return to Marx’ ideal notion of the working process as a “play” of our “physical and intellectual powers”. I argue that despite its seemingly restrictive set-up, the social situation that ǭkhǣngngān creates takes the form of play and re-imagining: within a “high level” imaginative frame, people working and studying at Lao institutions use their own imagination, invent their own rules and transgressions, and thereby create their own game in physical action with others.

ǭkhǣngngān: playing with the regulations

Above, I  outlined the basic organising characteristics of ǭkhǣngngān: the idea(l) situation and structure of mobilising physical labour. The first was a bounded temporality. A Lao friend who speaks English and has participated in ǭkhǣngngān said he would translate the term to “the day we clean together”. He emphasised the temporality of a day per week that was allocated to ǭkhǣngngān. At my field site, ǭkhǣngngān has a spot in the weekly class timetable on an afternoon at the end of the week. But despite this dedicated slot, teachers may also call students to ǭkhǣngngān on other days, such as when lessons are cancelled, a new term begins, or for special visitors.

The actual beginning and ending of ǭkhǣngngān, as I observed it, are rather fluid. Some students and teachers who live nearby go home during lunch break, change outfit from their uniforms to casual clothes and return for the clean-up. Others just wait in the airconditioned classroom until it is time, take naps, eat snacks, drink the odd rice spirit and chat. When people re-gather, it takes some time to determine the location of the clean-up in communication between teachers and students, for people to make their way to that location, to gather cleaning equipment and get started. Action subsides when people spontaneously decide it is enough. This happens less by verbal communication and rather by simply stopping and doing something else.

Watching others finish in their own time is also totally normal and accepted. Distractions come easy: if a market seller walks through, with bags of bamboo shoots and sour fruit hanging off the ends of a stick over her shoulders, students and teachers stop to buy and eat, always inviting others with a vigorous “kin, kin!” (eat, eat!). Most ǭkhǣngngān that I participated in took no longer than an hour (prior to national holidays, they took up to three hours), but the lesser part of that time would be actually spent with cleaning up.

In terms of outcome, an expected end goal of ǭkhǣngngān, in my experience, is not clearly defined. The direct objective is indeed to create some level of spatial order (which follows its own logic) and some people show a lot of commitment: they bring their own tools from home, expose themselves to toxic smoke, pick weeds with bare hands, and sharpen the blades of a grass cutter with a circular saw (and no goggles). Yet, incapable of achieving anything close to complete order—the school (a former hospital) is huge, the people few, the buildings in various stages of decay, and any plant grows at an enormous speed during the wet season—people seem to follow their own energy level and motivation in how much they clean up.

Effectiveness comes second to play: two adult men carry a basket of weeds away that a single boy could master, hold on to one handle each and joke about. While some students still sweep, rake and burn-off, another asks his classmate to take a video of his latest karaoke/dance performance. There is no “vote” or formal collective decision-making process to stop. But once most people have stopped, the final finish call “phǭ” (enough) and “mư̄a bān” (go home) come from the class leader or a teacher.

People do not celebrate or preserve the results of their labour either. The day we cleaned up my room, I discovered a half-eaten package of biscuits with crumbs covering the ground that was cleaned fifteen minutes earlier. I see people frequently throw plastic and cigarette butts in the grass around the classroom which they clean up at the next ǭkhǣngngān. And the rubbish and weeds set on fire never burn down completely, but leave sad-looking piles that greet us as we enter the schoolgrounds and classroom.

Playing with an idea of serious labour

To sum up, the practice of ǭkhǣngngān was messier and more playful than some outsider might expect of collective physical labour at an institution run by a socialist state. It felt more like a casual hang-out than any kind of physical toil for the institution. Because of its fluidity in temporality and achievement what seems to count most is turning up and doing something together, including continuous chatter, joking and eating.

However, people like to play with the idea that this ought to be a serious affair: like Ajan Mala on the day I moved in, students and teachers alike shout commands at someone further away, then turn to the people close to them, and laugh together. People also sometimes tease those right next to them about not doing a good job, which might result in a playful little wrestle. When students bring children who join in, this is another source of play and amusement for the adults. No one would say a child was in the way of the adults labouring.

Yet some formalities are kept. Students still address their teachers with the formal “Ajan”, never with first names. Participation is recorded on a list, which at my first clean-up day the class leader asked me to sign. Since then, I always sign when the list is handed around. This record-keeping indicates the possibility that there could be positive and negative consequences of people’s presence or absence in ǭkhǣngngān (that this could indeed be serious!). When I asked a student whether there is a problem if someone does not join ǭkhǣngngān, she said that “if they give a reason, if they have family or other work, there is no problem if they don’t come”.

Students are supposed to notify the school prior when they are unavailable. I asked the same student why lists are kept. She said “so that the school director can see how many people came, how many did not come with a reason, how many did not come without a reason”. “And if people do not give a reason and do not come many times?” “Then the director will talk to them,” she responded. A possible consequence could be a lowering of one’s score, which according to students can occur due to breaks with the school’s regulations (such as incorrect uniform wearing). However, the barrier to participation is very low: physical presence at ǭkhǣngngān alone seems to count as participation. I have seen the odd person turn up, sit on a bench, chat and sign their name on the list. Play never exists completely outside of social rules, whether these are made explicit or unspoken. But it cannot be assumed that official ones are always the strongest.

Granted its jovial character, ǭkhǣngngān keeps shared facilities clean(er). One student also pointed out that the cutting and burning of grass was important to contain dangers of mosquitoes and snakes around the school. The school uses about 20% of a former hospital’s space and has the sole responsibility to maintain it. But people speak more about social benefits. They say ǭkhǣngngān is “mūan” (fun, enjoyable), because “mī lāi khon, yǭkkan” (have many people, joke with each other). A common story I hear in Laos is that at government work sites ǭkhǣngngān results in extended beer drinking, though this is not the case at my field site. The benefits of ǭkhǣngngān are also perceived by people who do not work at government institutions: a Lao friend who works at a private language school tells me they employ a “mǣ bān” (literally mother / woman of the house, but means cleaner). Yet, each morning the staff clean together before starting their desk work. He likes this and says: “we can talk together when we clean together. If you just go to work, go in your room, do not talk, not good. When we first arrive, we clean together, talk together. Then if you have a problem, is easier, I think”.

The tangible outcomes of this cleaning up were much less impressive, and certainly took up less time, than most other work I saw students engage in outside of ǭkhǣngngān. Although ǭkhǣngngān was a space of labour for the institution, it was simultaneously a space to play for students where the actual outcome of labour mattered much less than in their day-to-day lives.

This does not mean that work outside of ǭkhǣngngān happens always in a serious manner. Instigated by students, I picked fruit from trees in a village head office’s backyard, our giggles travelled through the open door inside the office where other students collected information and exchanged amused looks with us. I saw a student drop her hair ribbon in front of a teacher who checked her outfit for compliance with regulations—the teacher and the whole class broke out in laughter. I sat in the car with teachers on a work excursion who laughed about their own imagining that I was “collecting information” about how many frogs and crabs they bought on the way to the district health department.

It is not as easy as allocating specific behaviours of obedience or transgression to spaces—as Sarinda Singh has observed in her studies of worker dormitories in Laos— or to constellations of people interacting. No place at the institution is reserved for any one kind of behaviour, and no person is excepted from play. The atmosphere and dynamics of interaction can change from one moment to another. I would suggest that when people joke and when not can be an indicator for the power of particular imaginings that turn into reality at a specific moment.

Labour, in Marx’ initial reading, is a practice in which humans play with imaginings about what their handwork ought to do, what is supposed to be realised and materialised through their practices. In this process that Marx called Verwirklichung (real-making), people’s own imaginings and those of others fold into each other and create ever-new expressions. Our imaginings are not fixed, but can easily shift and change in the process. And so the results are never identical with what anyone imagined their ideas would do prior to the practice.

Nursing students, for instance, might venture to the village head’s office to collect information about public health for their assignment, and then get distracted by fruit they spot in the backyard. A teacher might turn up at a classroom to discipline people who do not follow the dress code, but then breaks out in laughter when a student drops her ribbon in front of his feet. An anthropology student with a serious interest in nursing education in Laos might be joked about by a group of teachers who imagine she is collecting information on the most random things such as dead frogs (and they were correct).

For sure, not all people are equally able to realise their ideas or imaginings in the work process. What can be brought closest to real-making—or rather, is recognised by others as real—is where power dynamics can be located. But then, there is no objective judge as to what is made real: to some observers of ǭkhǣngngān, the state’s idea (as implemented by its officials) does mobilise the power of labour to form a group that gathers every week and makes a real difference to the tidiness of the school. Some might say ǭkhǣngngān subjects students to physical, at times risky, labour as an unfair condition to receive an education and progress in the public sector.

To others, ǭkhǣngngān is just a thin frame that is filled with people’s play who realise their idea of a fun time together, for that moment, and then disperse again. Of course, these realities can exist simultaneously. People were aware of what the basic idea was: they named the practice of “anāmai” or “the day we clean up” when I asked what the term meant. They consciously played with the idea that this ought to be taken seriously and made sure that people like me who were not used to their game (yet) understood they were “just joking”. During my time with them, I admired the students’ ways of finding enjoyment when they were called to ǭkhǣngngān yet again, when smoke stung in our eyes and lungs, when we watched the buildings crumble around us, and the jungle crawl back in. Together, the students developed and played their own game—which, perhaps, is a real power of imagination and labour.

Enjoyed this article? Subscribe to New Mandala

Keep up to date with opinionated, informed and accessible commentary on Southeast Asia from leading researchers. Leave your email address in the field below and you’ll receive new posts in your inbox as they are published.

Email Address

Subscribe

The post “Playing” with labour: on collective cleaning in Lao PDR appeared first on New Mandala.

This post was originally published on New Mandala.

Eight o’clock, 14 July 2024

I arrive at the office of Ajan Mala, a teacher at a Public Health School in southern Laos. We grab brooms, buckets, sponges and floor cleaner and she walks ahead of me towards the student dorm. As we get closer, she spots people in the distance and yells: “Students, come and help clean Amelie’s room!”. Her tone sounds commanding and makes me uncomfortable; I do not wish to force anyone to clean my room. But Ajan Mala turns around, smiles and says she is just joking, that this is like “a game between teachers and students.” She assures me there is “midtaphāb” (friendship) between them.

At the student dormitory, Ajan Mala unlocks the door of my room-to-be. Suddenly there are around fifteen adults who pick up brooms, open all windows and doors, carry out beds and wardrobes, sweep and scrub. Ajan Mala tells me to dust the cobwebs from the wardrobes, while they will take care of the room’s interior and the bathroom.

I take a step back, feeling slightly overwhelmed by the rush and what to me appears chaotic action. Everything seems to happen at once: while people are still sweeping, one student finds a few pieces of green rubber hose that he links together and connects to a tap outside. Suddenly water floods the tiled floors, and gushes towards the wooden furniture I am still dusting off. Afraid of water damage to the untreated timber, I ask a student to help me move the furniture away from the deluge. I hear the noises of engines, and behind the back window, a couple of men slash the plants that had crossed the threshold between in and outside.

There are some teachers who help and some who watch. The school director, dressed in pink tracksuit and sun hat, walks by, takes a video with her phone, and kicks some snails off the corridor walls with her parasol. I watch one teacher pull out some plant with its root and stick it inside a plastic cup she found on the ground. She adds some dirt and says she’ll take it home to her garden. Ajan Mala squats and scrubs the walls, while her colleague mops the floor. I start to relax amongst these people who are chatting, joking, yelling teasing comments across the corridor—and the place is getting cleaner.

But the action is over as quickly as it started; students and teachers begin to disappear. As I notice a group walking away through the corridor, I run after them with biscuits as thanks. They share the biscuits and then leave. Once everyone is gone, I get down on the floor with a bucket of water-vinegar mix and a sponge, and give each tile a final, thorough scrub (much gecko poo has survived the water flood). I feel grateful as if I received a welcome gift. But it also occurs to me, that the students and teachers seem used to this; not of course, to clean a visiting anthropologists’ room, but to clean together.

Collective cleaning as labour: ǭkhǣngngān

Cleaning together at a worksite or educational facility is a routine practice of collective, physical labour in Lao PDR. At my field site people called it ǭkhǣngngān (ອອກແຮງງານ). When I first read the term in the weekly lesson timetable, I falsely translated it to “workout”. I expected ǭkhǣngngān would be some outdoors exercise regime (“ǭk” as “out”, “hǣng” as “strong”, and “ngān” as “work”). When the day came around, I asked a student what we will do this afternoon. She replied “ǭkhǣngngān!”, and I asked “mǣn nyang?” (“what is this/that”), so she said “anāmai” (tidy up). That afternoon, we swept concrete floors, scraped snail poo off walls, and squatted down to pull out weeds along paths. The weeds were piled up together with plastic rubbish and set alight.

My Lao friends tell me ǭkhǣngngān happens at every government-run workplace and school. The organised, institutional character of this labour can be observed in a number of aspects. A specific slot is allocated to ǭkhǣngngān in the school’s weekly timetable, usually on a Thursday or Friday afternoon. The task of the day is determined by a senior staff member. Lists of participation are kept which students and teachers sign, and all are expected to participate. The place to be cleaned is an outdoors area, in the vicinity of the classroom or school offices, and this location puts ǭkhǣngngān in full view of the public. In government news publications, stories of ǭkhǣngngān sessions abound accompanied with imagery of groups working together, especially in preparation for days of national celebration: tidying up around government buildings, pulling weeds at a military school, or sweeping in the capital’s public parks. At my field site too, students and staff take pictures of their tidying-up session to post on social media.

The term ǭkhǣngngān also sets this activity apart from other occasions of working together. “Work” in Lao is more commonly referred to as vīak: housework (vīak hư̄an), work on rice fields (vīak nā ), or gardens (vīak sūan), going to work (pai vīak). The nursing students at my field site work in groups for assignments (vīak kūm) and do homework (vīak bān). With most work, they refer specifically to the practice: hā kin (look for food, or go and get food), hed kin (prepare food), anāmai (tidy up), keb (collect). During our lunch break, we climb up on chairs or use long sticks to reach tamarind pods and raw papayas in the trees, we search for edible leafy greens, peel bamboo shoots, make a fire to cook bamboo soup or grill buffalo skin, prepare a floormat and dishes to eat on the classroom floor, and tidy up after the meal. None of this collective, physical labour that occurs on a daily basis would make the news.

Whilst ǭkhǣngngān is structured by the institution, these everyday practices of working together evolve dependent on people’s needs. Who participates and how depends on individuals’ motivations, skills and time. Often one person starts an activity which then spills over to others. People verbally organise each other to a degree, but this occurs spontaneously and according to emerging needs and desires identified by the students themselves—nothing is pre-set by an authority. All this work happens out of view from the institution (school staff). There is no fixed lunch group, but people drop in and out, some go home to eat with their family or to a restaurant. In comparison, ǭkhǣngngān at first sight appears to be an “unnatural” way of people working together at this school.

If working together already takes place on a daily basis, and seems to work to fulfill people’s needs, what then is the point of ǭkhǣngngān, and to whom? Is it just a means to make people tidy those large, shared spaces outside the classroom and office that no one would take care of otherwise? Or are there other reasons to make people work together in this particular way?

Possible answers as to why ǭkhǣngngān persists at state-run institutions in Lao PDR can be derived from its roots in a Marxist–Leninist concept of collective labour. This becomes clear when looking at how the concept of ǭkhǣngngān is taught in a Lao schoolbook on “Civic Education” for Year 5 students published in 2019:

People’s labour (kanǭkhǣngngān khǭng khon) is related to movements that have a social character. In that labour, people need to coordinate together to move together as a group. If just alone, a single person cannot earn food to live and resist disasters or forces that occur in the natural world. The ancient primitive people (khon pathombūhān) lived in a group before to carry out labour that had a social character because of that society. Therefore, as products (phalidtaphan) that affect each other, there is a relationship between person and person (khon), and labour is a power (kamlang) that creates (sāng) the person (khon) and society (sangkhom).

In this reading, labour as movement is social in both process and outcome. Social labour is naturalised because this is what allows humans to survive since the “ancient primitive people”. But this labour is about more than mere use-value, such as procurement of food or building of shelters that protect from wind and weather — because labour here is also a generative power to create the person and society as its “products”.

This means that neither person nor society are understood as abstract conditions or identities pre-existing to interpersonal relationships and practices of labour. The term (ǭk)hǣngngān as labour in this sense is used in Laos in political contexts, such as the “International Labour Organization” (ongkanhǣngngānsākon), and government news stories might use the term to refer to workers (phūǭkhǣngngān).

The organisation of weekly ǭkhǣngngān at all Lao government workplaces and schools is thus based in a socialist political philosophy of creating people and society through physical, collective labour. It links historically to the Soviet socialist organisation of unpaid, physical labour on Saturdays under the name of ‘Subbotnik’. Frederick Kaplan quotes from the Soviet Regulations of Subbotniks which describes them as “one of the forms of propaganda of the idea of labor service and self -organization of the working class” and as “a laboratory of communist labor”. Lenin in his 1920 handbill Pervomaisky Subbotnik, following the first large-scale Subbotnik for the Moscow–Kazan Railway, describes this process as a “matter of transforming the very habits of the people” from an individualist, capitalist economy towards labouring according to the two socialist rules of ‘“All for each and each for all”’, and ‘“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”, in order to gradually introduce “communist discipline and communist labour”.

Ǭkhǣngngān at government institutions in Laos can then be interpreted as the (intended) enactment of a socialist political theory about how people and society come to be. This political and symbolic loading turns it into more than just a mere tidying-up session, and hence it has a different frame compared to other types of working-together at the school, as described above.

This idea of labour as a transformative power that builds certain kinds of people also shines through in how education is described at my field site, where I was conducting ethnographic research on nursing education. The stated objectives of the nursing course use the language of “creating” or “building” students to become part of collectives as “good citizens” and “professional nurses of the ASEAN community”, with not only professional knowledge and nursing skills, but also with “revolutionary morals”, “correct political thinking”, and “patriotism and unity”. Ǭkhǣngngān as part of this education then presumably intends to practice the “rules” of socialist labour to be applied in the context of public health work. Simultaneously, it serves the practical need for tidying-up schools and workplaces in absence of paid maintenance personnel in Laos’ resource-poor public health and education system.

The term “labour” in anthropology is often used to describe “physical toil, performed out of necessity, coercion, or domination”. Folz and Smith see this application influenced by Marx’s writings on labour exploitation and class struggle. But for Marx, the process of work/labour (Arbeitsprozess) to begin with has positive connotations as that which makes humans human, as a practice of turning one’s abstract ideas or imaginings into things of the material world (Marx 1967, 141–142). In Volume One of Capital he describes this ideal state of working as a “play” of human’s “physical and intellectual powers”. Only from this conception of the working process could Marx develop his theory of  Entfremdung (alienation) of humans to their own work activities in the capitalist mode of production—and thereby to themselves as humans, and to other humans, whose work (and being) is perceived as a mere commodity.

Instead of simply interpreting ǭkhǣngngān as physical toil due to state-driven coercion of nursing students into labour, I want to experiment with Marx’ concept of physical labour as attempt to realise an abstract idea or imaginings: in this case, the idea itself that people and society are created through the power of labour, which underpins the institution of ǭkhǣngngān in Laos. Further, I want to return to Marx’ ideal notion of the working process as a “play” of our “physical and intellectual powers”. I argue that despite its seemingly restrictive set-up, the social situation that ǭkhǣngngān creates takes the form of play and re-imagining: within a “high level” imaginative frame, people working and studying at Lao institutions use their own imagination, invent their own rules and transgressions, and thereby create their own game in physical action with others.

ǭkhǣngngān: playing with the regulations

Above, I  outlined the basic organising characteristics of ǭkhǣngngān: the idea(l) situation and structure of mobilising physical labour. The first was a bounded temporality. A Lao friend who speaks English and has participated in ǭkhǣngngān said he would translate the term to “the day we clean together”. He emphasised the temporality of a day per week that was allocated to ǭkhǣngngān. At my field site, ǭkhǣngngān has a spot in the weekly class timetable on an afternoon at the end of the week. But despite this dedicated slot, teachers may also call students to ǭkhǣngngān on other days, such as when lessons are cancelled, a new term begins, or for special visitors.

The actual beginning and ending of ǭkhǣngngān, as I observed it, are rather fluid. Some students and teachers who live nearby go home during lunch break, change outfit from their uniforms to casual clothes and return for the clean-up. Others just wait in the airconditioned classroom until it is time, take naps, eat snacks, drink the odd rice spirit and chat. When people re-gather, it takes some time to determine the location of the clean-up in communication between teachers and students, for people to make their way to that location, to gather cleaning equipment and get started. Action subsides when people spontaneously decide it is enough. This happens less by verbal communication and rather by simply stopping and doing something else.

Watching others finish in their own time is also totally normal and accepted. Distractions come easy: if a market seller walks through, with bags of bamboo shoots and sour fruit hanging off the ends of a stick over her shoulders, students and teachers stop to buy and eat, always inviting others with a vigorous “kin, kin!” (eat, eat!). Most ǭkhǣngngān that I participated in took no longer than an hour (prior to national holidays, they took up to three hours), but the lesser part of that time would be actually spent with cleaning up.

In terms of outcome, an expected end goal of ǭkhǣngngān, in my experience, is not clearly defined. The direct objective is indeed to create some level of spatial order (which follows its own logic) and some people show a lot of commitment: they bring their own tools from home, expose themselves to toxic smoke, pick weeds with bare hands, and sharpen the blades of a grass cutter with a circular saw (and no goggles). Yet, incapable of achieving anything close to complete order—the school (a former hospital) is huge, the people few, the buildings in various stages of decay, and any plant grows at an enormous speed during the wet season—people seem to follow their own energy level and motivation in how much they clean up.

Effectiveness comes second to play: two adult men carry a basket of weeds away that a single boy could master, hold on to one handle each and joke about. While some students still sweep, rake and burn-off, another asks his classmate to take a video of his latest karaoke/dance performance. There is no “vote” or formal collective decision-making process to stop. But once most people have stopped, the final finish call “phǭ” (enough) and “mư̄a bān” (go home) come from the class leader or a teacher.

People do not celebrate or preserve the results of their labour either. The day we cleaned up my room, I discovered a half-eaten package of biscuits with crumbs covering the ground that was cleaned fifteen minutes earlier. I see people frequently throw plastic and cigarette butts in the grass around the classroom which they clean up at the next ǭkhǣngngān. And the rubbish and weeds set on fire never burn down completely, but leave sad-looking piles that greet us as we enter the schoolgrounds and classroom.

Playing with an idea of serious labour

To sum up, the practice of ǭkhǣngngān was messier and more playful than some outsider might expect of collective physical labour at an institution run by a socialist state. It felt more like a casual hang-out than any kind of physical toil for the institution. Because of its fluidity in temporality and achievement what seems to count most is turning up and doing something together, including continuous chatter, joking and eating.

However, people like to play with the idea that this ought to be a serious affair: like Ajan Mala on the day I moved in, students and teachers alike shout commands at someone further away, then turn to the people close to them, and laugh together. People also sometimes tease those right next to them about not doing a good job, which might result in a playful little wrestle. When students bring children who join in, this is another source of play and amusement for the adults. No one would say a child was in the way of the adults labouring.

Yet some formalities are kept. Students still address their teachers with the formal “Ajan”, never with first names. Participation is recorded on a list, which at my first clean-up day the class leader asked me to sign. Since then, I always sign when the list is handed around. This record-keeping indicates the possibility that there could be positive and negative consequences of people’s presence or absence in ǭkhǣngngān (that this could indeed be serious!). When I asked a student whether there is a problem if someone does not join ǭkhǣngngān, she said that “if they give a reason, if they have family or other work, there is no problem if they don’t come”.

Students are supposed to notify the school prior when they are unavailable. I asked the same student why lists are kept. She said “so that the school director can see how many people came, how many did not come with a reason, how many did not come without a reason”. “And if people do not give a reason and do not come many times?” “Then the director will talk to them,” she responded. A possible consequence could be a lowering of one’s score, which according to students can occur due to breaks with the school’s regulations (such as incorrect uniform wearing). However, the barrier to participation is very low: physical presence at ǭkhǣngngān alone seems to count as participation. I have seen the odd person turn up, sit on a bench, chat and sign their name on the list. Play never exists completely outside of social rules, whether these are made explicit or unspoken. But it cannot be assumed that official ones are always the strongest.

Granted its jovial character, ǭkhǣngngān keeps shared facilities clean(er). One student also pointed out that the cutting and burning of grass was important to contain dangers of mosquitoes and snakes around the school. The school uses about 20% of a former hospital’s space and has the sole responsibility to maintain it. But people speak more about social benefits. They say ǭkhǣngngān is “mūan” (fun, enjoyable), because “mī lāi khon, yǭkkan” (have many people, joke with each other). A common story I hear in Laos is that at government work sites ǭkhǣngngān results in extended beer drinking, though this is not the case at my field site. The benefits of ǭkhǣngngān are also perceived by people who do not work at government institutions: a Lao friend who works at a private language school tells me they employ a “mǣ bān” (literally mother / woman of the house, but means cleaner). Yet, each morning the staff clean together before starting their desk work. He likes this and says: “we can talk together when we clean together. If you just go to work, go in your room, do not talk, not good. When we first arrive, we clean together, talk together. Then if you have a problem, is easier, I think”.

The tangible outcomes of this cleaning up were much less impressive, and certainly took up less time, than most other work I saw students engage in outside of ǭkhǣngngān. Although ǭkhǣngngān was a space of labour for the institution, it was simultaneously a space to play for students where the actual outcome of labour mattered much less than in their day-to-day lives.

This does not mean that work outside of ǭkhǣngngān happens always in a serious manner. Instigated by students, I picked fruit from trees in a village head office’s backyard, our giggles travelled through the open door inside the office where other students collected information and exchanged amused looks with us. I saw a student drop her hair ribbon in front of a teacher who checked her outfit for compliance with regulations—the teacher and the whole class broke out in laughter. I sat in the car with teachers on a work excursion who laughed about their own imagining that I was “collecting information” about how many frogs and crabs they bought on the way to the district health department.

It is not as easy as allocating specific behaviours of obedience or transgression to spaces—as Sarinda Singh has observed in her studies of worker dormitories in Laos— or to constellations of people interacting. No place at the institution is reserved for any one kind of behaviour, and no person is excepted from play. The atmosphere and dynamics of interaction can change from one moment to another. I would suggest that when people joke and when not can be an indicator for the power of particular imaginings that turn into reality at a specific moment.

Labour, in Marx’ initial reading, is a practice in which humans play with imaginings about what their handwork ought to do, what is supposed to be realised and materialised through their practices. In this process that Marx called Verwirklichung (real-making), people’s own imaginings and those of others fold into each other and create ever-new expressions. Our imaginings are not fixed, but can easily shift and change in the process. And so the results are never identical with what anyone imagined their ideas would do prior to the practice.

Nursing students, for instance, might venture to the village head’s office to collect information about public health for their assignment, and then get distracted by fruit they spot in the backyard. A teacher might turn up at a classroom to discipline people who do not follow the dress code, but then breaks out in laughter when a student drops her ribbon in front of his feet. An anthropology student with a serious interest in nursing education in Laos might be joked about by a group of teachers who imagine she is collecting information on the most random things such as dead frogs (and they were correct).

For sure, not all people are equally able to realise their ideas or imaginings in the work process. What can be brought closest to real-making—or rather, is recognised by others as real—is where power dynamics can be located. But then, there is no objective judge as to what is made real: to some observers of ǭkhǣngngān, the state’s idea (as implemented by its officials) does mobilise the power of labour to form a group that gathers every week and makes a real difference to the tidiness of the school. Some might say ǭkhǣngngān subjects students to physical, at times risky, labour as an unfair condition to receive an education and progress in the public sector.

To others, ǭkhǣngngān is just a thin frame that is filled with people’s play who realise their idea of a fun time together, for that moment, and then disperse again. Of course, these realities can exist simultaneously. People were aware of what the basic idea was: they named the practice of “anāmai” or “the day we clean up” when I asked what the term meant. They consciously played with the idea that this ought to be taken seriously and made sure that people like me who were not used to their game (yet) understood they were “just joking”. During my time with them, I admired the students’ ways of finding enjoyment when they were called to ǭkhǣngngān yet again, when smoke stung in our eyes and lungs, when we watched the buildings crumble around us, and the jungle crawl back in. Together, the students developed and played their own game—which, perhaps, is a real power of imagination and labour.

Enjoyed this article? Subscribe to New Mandala

Keep up to date with opinionated, informed and accessible commentary on Southeast Asia from leading researchers. Leave your email address in the field below and you’ll receive new posts in your inbox as they are published.

Email Address

Subscribe

The post “Playing” with labour: on collective cleaning in Lao PDR appeared first on New Mandala.

This post was originally published on New Mandala.