Holly High is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Sydney.
The success of the book arises not simply from how it traces
success, but also from how it opens crucial questions around how
Laos remains staunchly socialist. This view challenges a previously
dominant view put forward by anthropologist Grant Evans (1998) that
Laos had become postsocialist. . . . Projectland offers an
important window into the lived realities of Lao state ideology,
the politics of culture and socialism's ongoing vitality. The book
is an accessible entry point into Laos's contemporary political
culture with remarkable empirical depth, which would appeal to
scholars and students interested in village life, socialism and
Southeast Asia.--Al Lim "LSE Review of Books"
In Projectland High destroys some simplistic assumptions concerning
ethnic minorities and their relation to the (socialist) state. It
takes individual subjectivities and desires seriously, and
highlights the social fragmentation below the surface of village
"unity." The author provides a lucid analysis of the functioning of
the Lao socialist party state at the margins, discussing the
dialectic of transformation and resilience. High's analysis goes
beyond many village studies that mainly focus on livelihood and
economic transformation. Unlike most studies that rely on
socioeconomic data, Projectland touches the individual
subjectivities of the villagers and the affective dimensions of the
socialist state. More than forty years after the communist
revolution, the author examines the ideological, biopolitical, and
affective outcomes of the socialist "project" in the Lao
PDR.--Oliver Tappe, University of Cologne
This rich ethnographic study tells the story of how a Lao highland
village community has successfully relocated to establish a new
lowland village that is a 'model' in the eyes of the socialist
state, but one that also expresses their own cultural values. The
book breaks new methodological grounds in that it is not only a
study of a village, but also a study from a village on important
matters of general interest. Ten years in the making, the author's
vivid prose portrays the very human story of how people negotiate
the conflicting demands of a socialist state, the market, kin, and
the desires of different individuals to create a world that is
meaningful to them. This book, a model of how ethnographic analysis
should be done, will be of interest to scholars and students from
all disciplines interested in understanding life in rural Southeast
Asia today.--Chris Gregory, The Australian National University
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