Unblocking Laos: Colonial Infrastructure, Sociopolitical Friction and Forms of Mobility in the Lao-Vietnamese borderlands

• In Event: Invisible Actors and Factors of Infrastructure: Ethnicity, Gender, and Work across Mainland Southeast Asia

Abstract

The 1914 uprising of Sam Neua (Houaphan Province, NE Laos) laid bare complex processes of social and economic mobilization in the mountainous hinterlands of French Indochina. As a first prelude to the upcoming anticolonial struggles in the Lao-Vietnamese borderlands, this heterogeneous movement is so far little understood in its sociopolitical and cultural dimensions. Though initiated by armed Chinese bands, the participation of different upland ethnic groups also suggested that the uprising was the result of socioeconomic discontent and disquiet among the local population. Here, cultural processes of mimetic appropriation, and the emergence of new classed and gendered forms of social differentiation could also be witnessed. At the turn of the 20th century, an ambiguous interplay between colonial anxiety and optimistic visions of the débloquement (unblocking) of upland Laos triggered misperceptions and contradictory strategies among French administrators and their local allies. Besides, the colonial infrastructure frontier was contested by an evangelical frontier. The presence of the French missionaries of the Missions Étrangères brought another dynamic into the complex sociopolitical configurations of Houaphan – particularly concerning their involvement in the rivalries between the small Lao elite, other Tai-speaking groups, and upland societies such as the Khmu and Hmong. By means of combining microhistory and historical anthropology, this paper aims to investigate forms of mobility, mimetic encounters, and shifting conceptions of sociopolitical hierarchies in colonial Indochina that have so far received scant attention.

Author

• Oliver Tappe, University of Cologne