Schools, Ritual Economies, and the Expanding State: The Changing Roles of Lao Buddhist Monks as “Traditional Intellectuals”, in Pattana Kitiarsa & John Whalen-Bridge (2013) (eds.)

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Schools, Ritual Economies, and

the Expanding State:The Changing

Roles of Lao Buddhist Monks as

“Traditional Intellectuals ” *

Patrice Ladwig

In 2004, I walked into the office of UNICEF in Vientiane to inter- view a Lao member of staff. I was interested in a program set up by UNICEF with the Lao Buddhist Fellowship Organization, in which

monks were engaged in prevention work by disseminating informa-tion about HIV in remote villages. The project was supposed to com-bine “traditional” methods of teaching on compassion and Buddhistprecepts with new forms of information distribution. In this project,monks were praised as ideal disseminators due to their elevated sta-tus, knowledge, and authority in moral matters (Mettathamma , 2003;Ladwig, 2008, p. 475f). After a friendly and long conversation, my counterpart—himself a devout Buddhist in his late fifties—and I cameto the million-dollar question of the development of the business athand: the efficiency of the program and its overall impact. He gave mea critical look, and after a short moment of hesitation answered:

I think Buddhist monks in Laos have lost their leading position in soci-ety. There were so many fields in which they were involved in the past. What has remained of this? The development of modern Lao society has overtaken them and the ideas of most monks’ haven’t changed very much although society has. There are many reasons for this, like,for example, Laos’ isolation in the past, the missing possibilities formonks to study new topics and so forth. There is a gap of thirty years ormore, which we now have to compensate so that Buddhism can again

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contribute to the actual issues relevant for current society. (Personalcommunication, May 2004)

I was not sure whether his opinion was a political statement about thecurrent religious affairs in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, ashort analysis from the perspective of modernization theory, or simply a personal nostalgia based on an overholistic image of a “Buddhistsociety” that had been influenced by modern processes. Later on,reflecting on this issue, I had to think of the numerous ethnogra-phies and theories related to Theravada Buddhism. Indeed, in muchof this literature, monks are often presented as exemplary figures and

important personages in village life, as they possess the authority of the dhamma . According to this perspective, the temple stands in thecenter of social organization, fulfilling a whole range of crucial func-tions related to education, medicine, art, and law. One recalls the link between Buddhist monks and conceptions of statecraft in Southeast

Asia (Harris, 2007; Ling, 1993), giving the sangha a crucial positionin legitimizing the ruling elite.

Is this a romanticizing, or even Orientalist image of Buddhism,or a perspective just valid for the “premodern” period of Southeast

Asian Buddhism? Looking at the history of Lao Buddhism in the Vientiane region1 , it is clear that Buddhist institutions there were

already considerably weakened through the numerous wars that hadoccurred before the arrival of the French in 1893. French colonialpolitics sustained a Lao Buddhist revival, in that Buddhism servedto foster Lao nationalism (Ivarsson, 2008, p. 93f), but in many fields the effects of colonial government on Buddhism were quitelimited (McDaniel, 2008, p. 42). Due to the marginality of Laos’position in French Indochina—a “colonial backwater” as Gunn(1990) has called it—Buddhist temples often continued to fulfilltheir traditional roles. They, for example, were often one of the few institutions that offered educational opportunities. Even with the

independence of Laos after the Second World War many monkscontinued to perform a variety of roles that question the ratherrecent division of a “religious” and “secular” domain. The rolesthey had in their communities underwent more crucial transfor-mations with the beginning of the postcolonial period. The maindriving forces from the 1950s onward were the massive influx of foreign aid and the influence of external forces due to the politicalpolarizations during the Second Indochina War. With postcolonialLaos effectively being split in two fluctuating zones until 1975—one part administered by the Royal Lao Government (RLG) and




Schools, Ritual Economies, and the State 65

the “liberated zone” under control of the communist movement,the Pathet Lao (PL)—we see on both sides an increasing effort tointegrate a rather decentralized body politic into an expanding stateapparatus. This extension of the state’s power and the effects of its multiple agents were bound up with a powerful imaginary of amodernity to come.2

This chapter sets out to explore how expansion of state powerimpinged on Buddhism and transformed the roles of Lao monksin their communities. Employing a historical sociology perspectiveinterspersed with some ethnographic data from present Laos, I willpropose that a certain proportion of Buddhist monks can be con-

ceptualized as “traditional intellectuals” (a concept that I borrow from Gramsci) and that they actually constituted a sort of “peas-ant intelligentsia.” My main focus here is on the continuities, shifts,and ruptures that emerged from the confrontation of the monk as atraditional intellectual with the social, political, and economic devel-opments in Laos between the 1950s and 1970s. Starting with theconcept of the intellectual itself and testing its applicability to thecase of Lao Buddhism, I shall subsequently focus on the entangle-ment of monks with processes of modernization. I shall here mainly discuss the roles of monks that were not overtly religious and for themost part explore the creation of a state school system. I will then

explore the successive marginalization of the sangha’s role in pub-lic education in the Vientiane Plain in the 1960s. This developmentgoes hand in hand with new ideas of rural development and capitalinvestment promoted by the state. Here, the temple as an institu-tion became increasingly marginalized because the RLG (and the PL)tried to use the capital usually channeled into the ritual economy of the temple for establishing modern state institutions. I shall arguethat we here do not necessarily deal with “secularization,”3 but withthe redefinition of the religious that is intrinsically linked with theexpansion of state power through new methods of governmentality

and centralization.

The Monk as a “Traditional Intellectual” andthe Question of State Hegemony

A lot has been written about the alliance between the sangha andstate-ruling elites in anthropological and buddhological literature.Here, the sangha and monks are crucial in the legitimizing of politicalpower and to spread the dhamma in the population.4 Although many features of this symbiosis of state and sangha are still relevant today,




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it is equally crucial to understand the changes that have occurredthrough modernization and the redefinition of religion in the contextof the creation of nation-states (Schober, 1998; Taylor, 1993). If webreak away from the important, but often rather generalizing notionof sangha-state relations, and look at the concrete roles of monks intheir communities during the expansion of the nation-state and theunfolding effects of modernization, it may be possible to understandthe transformations of the monk’s role more thoroughly. The few ethnographic accounts that we have of Lao Buddhism from the late1950s to 1960s reveals that the monk’s role in society was clearly morethan what today would be described as religious. The temple took on

a variety of roles and, according to Condominas (1998), stands in thecenter of social space and is a hub for a number of social relations inLao peasant society. The blurb of Condominas’s now classical accountof Lao Buddhism in the late 1950s reads as follows:

A Lao village community does not really come into existence with-out its vat, its monastery, which carries its name and give it its name. At the centre of social space the temple fulfi ls multiple functionsand is at the same time school, town hall, festival location, a placeof care for ill people and suffering souls, shelter for travelers, and alocation for match making. But its principal role is evidently reli-

gious: It is there where the monks live, and this presence allowsthe villagers to perform acts of piety, primarily alms giving, through which they acquire prestige in this world and merit for the after- world. Fur thermore, it is the temple around which the large festivalsof the Buddhist calendar and those deriving from old local tradi-tions are organized, and which mark the year of the rural collective.(Condomias 1998)

According to this account, village meetings, decision-making pro-cesses, politics, and “social services” were very often located in thetemple. Monks did not necessarily have a direct and active role in all

of these but they were, and still are, important figures in lowland Lao village life (Zago, 1972, pp. 51–52; Ireson, 1996).5 Education andeven public schooling were largely in the hands of monks (Taillard,1974); traditional health care was provided by monks and traditionalhealers who often got their training in monasteries (Pottier, 2007,p. 123ff.); and monks played an important role in local village law and conflict resolution (Koret, 1996, p. 12). Ireson (1996, p. 224)has claimed that even in the 1990s there was a remarkable absenceof state power in many Lao lowland villages. Therefore, it is crucial





to recall that in the rural areas of Laos in the 1950s, many of thetasks today regulated by state institutions were either nonexistent or

were in the hands of villagers themselves. Reflecting on the changesthat have occurred through the extension of the state into variousfields, one has to be reminded of what Bourdieu (1994, p. 1) hascalled an attitude of “hyperbolic doubt” when analyzing the state. Inhis view, the state and its institutions have become so naturalized inour perception, that it even imposes its categories onto our analysis.Other accounts of the state point out the diverse “effects” of the statebeyond the perspective of a single actor, or try and grasp the powerfulimaginary it produces.6

Close to Condominas’s image presented above, Yoneo Ishii depicts very similar roles of monks and temples in the rural areas of Thailand.He divides the secular from a certain religious use, but more impor-tantly proposes that monks in the premodern period held positionsthat were similar to those of intellectuals:

While the welfare, lodging, social, recreational storage, and administra-tive function amount to no more than the secular use of the monastery’sfacilities, the educational, medical, judiciary, and artistic functions canbe regarded as evidence that monk’s were society’s intellectual elite. Insecular matters as well as religious they were more knowledgeable than

laymen (1986, pp. 26–27).

Condominas and Ishii’s accounts are indeed very close to the open-ing statement of the UNICEF employee. But does it make senseto apply a Western category like “the intellectual” to the Therav ā dacontext and specifically to Lao monks? Let us first have a look atsome definitions of the intellectual in a Western context. Shils (1972,p. 3) defines the intellectual in general as people with “an unusualsensitivity to the sacred, an uncommon reflectiveness about thenature of the universe and the rules which govern their society” andpostulates that they have “the need to externalize this quest in oraland written discourse, in poetic and plastic expressions, in historicalreminiscence or writing, in ritual performance and acts of worship”(ibid.). Considering the Buddhist renouncer and the ascetic monk asfigure outlined above, I think that many of the connotations listed by Shils indeed fit the example of Buddhist monks.7 In a similar manner,Lipset (1959) defines intellectuals as those who create, distribute,and apply culture in the symbolic world of man. He includes art,science, and religion in the category, but he excludes lawyers and




Patrice Ladwig68

physicians. Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the traditional intellectual,however, is more appropriate for the argument that I am trying tomake. I agree with Vacca that “the central thread running throughGramsci’s writings is that of the intellectual” (1982, p. 37). Why didGramsci place so much emphasis on the intellectual and how canthis be useful for our analysis? Being confronted with the specificsituation in Italy, Gramsci clearly saw the importance of religion, theecclesiastics, and the church in the process of building hegemony (Portelli, 1974), especially among south Italian peasants. Gramsciremarks with reference to the traditional intellectuals of Catholicism:“The most typical of these categories of intellectuals is that of the

ecclesiastics, who for a long time . . . held a monopoly of a numberof important services: religious ideology, that is the philosophy andscience of the age, together with schools, education, morality, jus-tice, charity, good works” (1971, p. 61). He distinguishes the tra-ditional intellectual from the organic intellectual who, in Gramsci’sMarxism, becomes an activist, frees himself from tradition, and takeson the task of advancing cultural transformation. With regard to theinstitutional context in which these intellectuals operated, Gramscipoints out the importance of “the ecclesiastical organisation, whichfor many centuries absorbs the major part of intellectual activities andexercises a monopoly of cultural direction” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 17).

One also has to consider that Gramsci made a conscious effort toanalyze non-Western notions of the intellectual.8

Although in Lao (and Thai) the words for intellectual do notreally resonate with many of the modern Western connotations,9 and a cross-cultural comparison might for many reasons be prob-lematic, the parallels between this account of the traditional intel-lectual in Italy and the one previously outlined in this chapter withregard to Lao and Thai Buddhism are remarkable. I do not want topropose that all monks had the status similar to those of intellectualsand that there was no intellectual outside the sangha. Considering

that our modern idea about the intellectual is very specific,10

it iscrucial to note that Lao intellectuals such as Maha Sila Viravong(1905–1987) (Viravong, 2004, p. 31f.), Prince Phetsarath (1890–1959) (Goscha and Ivarsson, 2007), Phoumi Vongvichit (1909–1994) (Vongvichit, 1987), and Souphanuvong (Gunn, 1992) eitherhad an intellectual formation based on temple education or at leastmade constant reference to Buddhism. It is also worth noting forthe Lao case that the French already fostered the establishment of an intellectual elite that was somewhat more or less loosely con-nected to Buddhism.11





I think that the basic thrust of his idea can with some caution betransferred to the case of Buddhism in Laos, and in other Theravadacountries. Despite crucial differences between a Catholic clergy asunderstood by Gramsci and a Buddhist, the parallels of the basicqualities of intellectuals are striking: monks were very often theonly available teachers, and only men who had a longer ecclesiasti-cal career had knowledge of scriptures, composed texts, and localchronicles; officiated in rituals; and created many of the art formsavailable. Although there were constant complaints about the pooreducational level in the Lao sangha (Abhay, 1956; Asia Foundation,1966, p. 20) in the 1950s and 1960s, many Lao monks indeed ful-

filled the tasks described above. With the precolonial political orga-nization (Stuart-Fox, 1997, ch. 1 ; Tambiah, 1976) being at timesfairly decentralized, and with this feature continuing even into Laos’postcolonial era, the sangha and its institutions were described asbeing “the only permanent vertical functional organisation whichreaches into the Lao rural population” (Chapelier and Boutsavath,1973, p.15).

Before we begin to look at concrete cases to explore changes thatoccurred, let us for a moment return to the relationship of intellectu-als to the powers that govern a country. Raymond Williams has, withreference to Gramsci, proposed that intellectuals are “direct producers

in the sphere of ideology and culture . . . The argument about the rela-tion of intellectuals to an established social system, and therefore theirrelative independence or incorporation in such a system, is crucially relevant in this” (1988 pp. 170–71). It is important to understandhegemony as a process of constant negotiation. In the absence of stateinstitutions, monks took on important roles that contributed to themaintenance or decline of hegemony. However deficient and limitedin reach these institutions might have been, it is legitimate to say thatmonks and their institutional networks often presented reservoirs of knowledge transmission that could sustain or question the hegemony

of the center. However, when society is confronted with massive polit-ical and social changes, as it was the case in Laos in the early postco-lonial period, the relationship of the sangha as an intellectual eliteand the state are reshuffled, leading to new forms of cooperation andintegration, or disintegration and co-option. From this perspective, itis possible to analyze the entanglement of monks as traditional peasantintellectuals in society and through time, and see how they contrib-uted, sustained, undermined, or opposed developments in the courseof the confrontation of various developments in society and politics.For the case of Laos, I have chosen two examples that relate to the




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entanglement of monks into the developments in Laos in the 1950sand 1960s. Both are intrinsically connected to the efforts to modern-ize Laos and expand the reach of the state. The first example is relatedto the change of the role of monks as teachers in public education andtheir marginalization in the course of building a state school systemin the areas controlled by the RLG. I will here also briefly touch uponthe health-care system. The second example is linked to this expan-sion of the state’s administration into rural areas and the promotionof rural development. I will here refer to the reinforced change of rural investment patterns that prioritized secular fields and impingedon the ritual economy connecting monks and laypeople in both RLG

and PL zones.

Establishing a State School System without Monks

The establishment of a state school system has to be seen as oneof the most crucial efforts to “develop” a country and is oftenintrinsically bound up with a powerful vision of modernity and thenation-state. The following example is important because the estab-lishment of a national school system is often the precondition foranchoring a specific vision of the world in the population, instill-

ing discipline, spreading nationalism, creating the conditions andknow-how for new economic orders, and providing students witha sense of belonging to a wider imagined national community. Thespread of a “national language” and a specific writing of history,establishing the legitimacy of a government, often go hand in hand

with a civilizing mission of the state and its ef forts to increase con-trol of the population through nationwide institutions; in this sensethe school is the “prime institutional state” apparatus, as Althusser(1977, p. 151) has described it. In his discussion of the genesisof the state and the structure of the bureaucratic field, Bourdieu

(1994), also states “that one of the major powers of the state is toproduce and impose (especially through the school system) catego-ries of thought.” As we shall see, the Buddhist monk as a traditionalpeasant intellectual had—up to a certain point—an important rolein this system.

When we specifically examine the situation in and around Vientiane in the 1950s and 1960s, we see concerted efforts to estab-lish such a system. With the massive influx of international, specifi-cally American, aid money in the late 1950s in the context of the





politics of containment, we find that a certain idea of “development” was one of the potential weapons to inoculate the population againstcommunism. Although under French colonial rule there were already efforts to do this, mass schooling became ubiquitous in and aroundurban centers only beginning in the 1950s and 1960s. In order toanalyze the changing role of the monastery and monks as intellectu-als in this process, I will first give a very short historical overview of the development of the school system in Laos. We here have to dis-tinguish the monastic education given by monks for monks, from the

wider role of monks in teaching laypeople. Obviously, both systemsare dependent on each other, but I am first going to focus on those

schools that were located in the temple and had monks as teachersteaching laypeople.

Phouvong Phimmasone (1973, p. 126), in a somewhat romantic view, describes the secular functions of the monastery in a similarfashion like Condominas in his quote above. He postulates that tra-ditionally the Buddhist monastery “is the centre of religious, profes-sional, social and moral education . . . Here the pupils receive theirfirst rudimentary training in education. They learn reading and writ-ing, arts and the sciences with the help of technical treaties of thetraditional system of education.” Moreover, the subjects taught inthe monastery were in our modern sense not only religious, but also

as Kourilsky (2006, p. 31) mentions, “multidisciplinary.”12 It seemsonly logical that the early colonial regime tried to expand that sys-tem. A few years after the establishment of the French protectorate,the colonial administration begins to encourage the establishment of schools in temples in 1907. Kourilsky (2006, p. 32) concludes thata school system for laypeople was only being developed in the endof the 1920s. Before that period, colonial education officials such asBlanchard de la Brousse clearly saw monasteries at the center of theLao education system.13 The creation of Ecole normales des bonzes in1909 in Vientiane (and subsequently in Luang Prabang, Pakse, and

Savannakhet) was aimed at training monks in Western pedagogicalmethods and strengthening the underdeveloped colonial school sys-tem (ibid.). A similar system was advocated in Cambodia. Later, spe-cialized schools for monks were established in Laos and Cambodia.The temple remained the primary place of education outside thefew state schools that were reserved for a small colonial upper class.However, the content of the curricula was already changing. Ivarsson(1999, pp. 77–78) reports for the early colonial period: “while

Vientiane in this sense was revived as a secular educational centre for




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Laotian monks this was not linked with religious education as in thepast.” In his view, Vientiane became the center for monks’ “secu-lar studies,” and he also states that pagoda schools were used “as ameans to diffuse secular education” (ibid.). Unfortunately, Ivarssondoes not specify what was actually secular about these schools. JustinMcDaniel (2008), in his excellent study on Buddhist monastic edu-cation in Laos and Thailand, presents a slightly different picture of this development. He argues that there are significant continuitiesto be found inside the monastic education system. Although he rec-ognizes the changes that have occurred in the curricula due to theengagement of several É cole franç aise d’Extrê me-Orient (EFEO)

scholars (2008, pp. 42–51), he persuasively argues that the methodsof teaching and most of the contents actually changed surprisingly little over a hundred years: “In fact, ‘Western’ influence, in practiceand theory, seems to have bypassed monastic educational practice”(ibid., p. 38; pp. 66–67). While I largely agree with McDaniel inrelation to the inner workings of the monastic education system, thiscontinuity cannot, in my opinion, guarantee the social value of thiseducation and the overall significance of the temple as an educationalinstitution for the laity. The function of monastic education changesaccording to the attitude of an elite that during the colonial and post-colonial period “seems to have absorbed certain French anti-clerical

attitudes,” (Halpern, 1964, p. 23; cf. also Asia Foundation, 1966, p.6). As this elite was guided by a more laicized approach, we already

witness a transformation during the colonial era:

Under colonial rule, the elites began to claim national leader-ship for themselves, while the members of the sangha were denied asocio-political role. Particularly frustrating for this latter group was thedevaluation and diminution of monastic education in urban society, which may have led to a fall in the general level of literacy under theFrench. (Thant and Vokes quoted in Rehbein, 2007, p. 101)

While the value of monastic education itself was already diminishingunder colonial rule, the role that monks took on as teachers in schools

was still crucial. According to Gunn (1998, p. 38) and Schneider(2001, p. 51), the majority of Lao pupils went to monastery schoolsuntil the Second World War. Statistics show that in 1957 the num-ber of schools run by monks for novices and monks made up almost10 percent of all schooling (Halpern, 1964, table 5.). Given the low numbers of sangha members in the overall population, this number is





pretty high. It is clear that the education in most rural areas was still inthe hands of monks. However deficient or secular these schools mighthave been, the sheer number of monks acting as teachers reveals thecontinuing influence of the monk’s role as a traditional intellectualin the community. Christian Taillard—on whose data I will here rely extensively—gives us more detailed information for the postcolonialperiod and states for the development of the Lao school system: “Themonks played a crucial role in that evolution until 1950, the moment

when the Lao government took power concerning all affairs of pri-mary education. They represented 878 out of a total of 1172 teach-ers” (1974, p. 149). With 75 percent of all teachers being monks,

most pupils were exposed to monks on a regular, if not daily basis. Asa teacher and peasant intellectual, the monk had a wide-ranging influ-ence. In most cases, the temple was in fact the school building. In thefollowing years, we see concerted efforts to further expand the stateschool system. Due to staff shortage and quality problems, the gov-ernment started a new program in 1953 with a teacher-training col-lege preparing future teachers for their careers in three- to six-monthscourses with three hundred new posts being created. Taillard gives usthe concrete numbers for this development:

The number of monks teachers begins to drop after that. According

to the UNESCO report from the year 1956–1957, their number wasnot more than 220 out of 1686 teachers. At the end of the 1950s, themonastery schools disappear from the statistics and are replaced by theCommunity Centres for Rural Education, where monks continue toteach, but their number drops rapidly. (1974, p. 149)

However, the plans to create a secular education system werenot successful and many of the schools had no teachers. The“Bousquet-reform” of 1962 once again tried to integrate monks intothe state-schooling system, but only as a compromise: “When a villagehad no school, but a temple, the monk often continued to teach the

primary school classes, but when there was a school and a temple inthe village the division of labour between the institutions [school andtemple] and the staff [lay teachers and monks] was often unclear.”One must see these efforts in a purely pragmatic light: due to a short-age of staff and capital, the resources that were ready at hand—thepersonnel and infrastructure of the sangha—should be used, but this

was only an interim solution. The government introduced eveningalphabetization classes and more rural education centers. The efforts




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to integrate temples into this system were only short-lived, and there was a clear preference for a dissociation of temple and school as insti-tutions. Taillard sums up the end of this development as follows:

For the year 1971–72 the situation presents itself as follows: the num-ber of primary school teachers was 6084, and there were 1021 teachersin the Community Centres for Rural Education. In the latter group, we find the number of monks varying between 9 and 14. One can

therefore say that the monks have definitely lost their educational function . Not only the monks have lost their role in education, but more-over the schools have left the temple. In the whole of Laos, only 9%of the schools are situated in the temple (all Community Centres for

Rural Education). For the Vientiane region, the development is evenmore advanced because the number doesn’t even reach 4%. School andtemple are spatially dissociated from each other. (1974; pp. 149–150;my emphasis)

Speaking of villages around Vientiane and looking at an evolv-ing urban Buddhism, Barber also mentions that this “effectively removed one of the wat’s [temple] principal functions” (1974, p.48). There are several reasons that may account for this transition.First, the kind of knowledge that could be transmitted by monks andthe methods that they used were not deemed appropriate anymore.Trained experts (i.e., teachers) were needed for building up a mod-ernized system for a rapidly growing population; peasant intellectu-als were here only of limited use to the state. Moreover, to reachout to the ethnic minorities (living in areas where often there wereno temples), the system had to extend beyond the areas in whichmonks were active. In a more Foucauldian perspective one couldargue that “schooling in itself has been a disciplinary response tothe need to manage growing populations; within the progressively discriminating space of the schoolroom the productive regulation of large numbers of pupils also required new methodologies” (Deacon,

2006, p. 181).On a general level, we witness a dramatic change in the role of

monks in Lao society and in the demarcation of schools and templesas institutions. In the course of 20 years, the monks’ significanceas public school teachers lessened. Although the establishment of a“Buddhist Youth School” in Vientiane in 1959 (McDaniel, 2008,pp. 53–56) and the introduction of “Buddhist Morality” as a schoolsubject (Anonymous, 1964) somehow compensated this develop-ment, the overall development presented by Taillard is clear. Thestate authorities tried to communicate their vision of development





to villages through school education (cf. also Taillard, 1979). Theschool now acts as a mediator between urban center and periphery,bringing the state into the village. Althusser’s statement about thisinstitutional shift in Europe fits perfectly to our case: “In fact thechurch has been replaced today in its role as the dominant ideologi-cal state apparatus by the school” (1977, p. 157). The monks andnovices’ declining status as educators reflects the decline of religion’sauthority. Whereas monks and novices—who often only temporar-ily ordained—were due to their high status often promising poten-tial grooms after they defrocked, this changed in the course of time.Martin Barber cites one woman from a village around Vientiane in the

early seventies. Her statement reflects the changed status of monks:“When I was young, girls hoped to marry a thit or chan [titles givento ex-monks]. Now they just like generals and colonels, the people

who have money or jobs in town. I don’t understand their thinking”(1974, p. 57).

Something similar that has been attested for the school system canalso be observed in other fields. Monks very often were practitio-ners of traditional medicine and were responsible for herbal gardenscultivated on the temple ground. In the recently published, seminalstudy on traditional therapeutic methods, Richard Pottier (2007, pp.123–124) attests for his period of inquiry (mainly the 1960s) that all

documents he collected and consulted for his study were written by monks and kept in monasteries. Although, due to their status, monksdo not often actively care for sick people (mo yaas usually functionas caretakers), Pottier reports that laypersons profit from the monks’knowledge of traditional medicine. Concepts of the body and ideasabout illness and curing were deeply intertwined with Buddhism(Bhikkhu Mettanando, 1999). Some of the practices described by Pottier still exist today 14 , but one has the feeling that we here readof practices that are part of a time that has passed. With the expan-sion of the state health system, the founding of hospitals and health

stations, many of these practices and forms of knowledge became lessimportant, or even marginalized. Keyes, who dealt with health carein the Isan region, states that in the 1960s people still dealt with ill-ness by emphasizing life-essence (khwan ), dealt with sprits ( phi ), orpractices related to fortune (sia kho ), and also says that “in the pasttwenty years . . . dramatic change has been brought about by relatively easy access to western medication.” He then continues: “The increas-ing irrelevance of religious belief for some aspects of life in Thai-Lao

villages is indicative of a growing separation between religious andsecular spheres of meaning” (Keyes, 1990, p. 180).




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Emphasizing the heterogeneous nature of modernity and the con-temporaneity of “traditional” and “modern” practices, it is not only clear that many of these practices still exist today, but it is also crucialto mention that they increasingly stand in opposition to each other(Bertrand and Choulamany, 2008). What before was stated for theschool system, can on some level also be conveyed to the health sys-tem in Laos: the state creates institutions that replace the older rolesof monks and the temple. The establishment of a national medicalsystem, much in the way schools function, is a way of integrating thepopulation into a body politic, as stated in the meeting of upland-ers and lowlanders in Laos (Mignot, 2003). Health care becomes

part of the state’s project to manage its population; “medicine is abio-political strategy” (Foucault, 1994, p. 210). In a similar vein,schooling is one of the large mechanisms of social regulation thatcould not remain in the hands of monks alone. New forms of knowl-edge had to be transmitted, and neither the number nor qualificationof monks was deemed adequate for this. Although new systems of schooling and health care remained far from perfect, the state (viamultiple agents) here definitely rearranged social practices, redefinedthe role of monks, and made them as traditional intellectuals largely redundant in these fields.

The Ritual Economy and the State’s Vision ofCapital Investment

Modernization and the creation of state institutions associated withthis process are in need of capital and a transformation of the econ-omy. Streets and schools have to be built; local bureaucrats have to besustained. This might be achieved through external investment com-ing from the central state authorities, but more often local resourceshave to be mobilized as well in the form of labor, cash, and skills. Thisis still apparent today in Lao villages. High (2006, pp. 28–29) has

shown this for rural areas in the south of Laos and proposes that thiscan be understood as an interesting form of corv é e continuity. Yet,monasteries also need capital to maintain themselves, and monks haveto be sustained by their communities. In the following part, I want toargue that parallel to the establishment of a state, school system runsa process of the redirection of capital and local investment patterns.Considering the historical period that I have been discussing here(1950s–1970s), one can assume that the vast majority of people livingin the Vientiane Plain were (and still are) wet-rice cultivating lowlandpeasants (Evans, 2008, p. 508). Scott (1976) proposed that Southeast





Asian peasants form self-sustaining communities that have aversionsagainst interventions from the central state. In this “moral economy,”the small surplus that is produced is kept in the communities and israrely used to enter relationships with the outside because of theirunsure outcome. Although this account has been subject to extensivecritique15 , it is for our case noteworthy that these peasant economiesare intertwined with Buddhist notions of the ritual economy. Givingto the sangha (Pali: d ā na , Lao: hai taan ) is one of the major waysin which Buddhists acquire merit (boun ) and, for this reason, it is animportant means for the local monastery to sustain itself.16 Parts of the economic surplus of the Lao peasant economy are directed to the

temple to fulfill its multiple functions. As an institution, it takes on animportant role in sustaining the peasant’s “subsistence ethic,” as Scott(1976, pp. 4–7) states. The temple here also serves as an institutionof distributive justice, enhancing status differences, but evening outdifferences in wealth (Taillard, 1977, p. 78). Halpern (1961, p. 3)remarks about this link of surplus and investment:

One cannot discuss rural Lao economy without detailed reference tothe local pagoda. The primary objective of the villagers is to produceenough from their land and feed themselves . . . Once this has beenaccomplished, it must be decided whether to work harder to increase

production and how to dispose of any surplus beyond the family’simmediate consumption needs. In Lao culture the purchase of addi-tional consumer goods has secondary priority. Rather, first priority isthe allocation of resources for religious purposes.

Although this is rather generalized, the research of Condominas(1959, p. 85) in the late 1950s reports something similar about the

villages around Vientiane. The at-first largely uncontrolled influx of economic aid—supposed to counter the increasing influence of thePL after the 1957 elections—was in the majority of cases simply usedto build or renovate the village temple and sustain the activities of

their monks. According to the logic of the Buddhist ritual economy based on d ā na (Pali for generosity or giving), the villagers around

Vientiane channeled the external capital into the temple and not, asadvocated by external experts, into schools, roads, or rural develop-ment programs. After this became known, the USAID and officialsfrom the Royal Lao government implemented stricter control mecha-nisms, instructing the villagers not to invest in temple construction(Condominas, 1959). The state here clearly acts as a social engineer of high modernism (Scott, 1998) trying to “guide” the development of




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rural villages and its economy. Moermann (1969) discusses a parallelcase in Northern Thailand, where a village chief tries to collect dona-tions for a school using the religious discourse of those that arguefor the merit of temple donations, but finally fails to do so becausedonations to the temple are sometimes deemed incompatible withmodernization projects.17

Taillard gives us more concrete data on this for a somewhat laterperiod. In his carefully executed study on rural investment patternsfrom the 1960s, he exemplifies this on the basis of 31 villages in andaround Vientiane: whereas the temple averagely consumed almost 60percent of all mobilizable investments of these communities before

1968, this number dropped dramatically in the following years. In1968–1969, civil investments (school, road, dispensary, etc.) already consumed 51 percent (1974, p. 144f.). While the investment intothe temple dropped to 34 percent in the following years, the schoolate up 40 percent of the budget, and the construction of streets 13percent. For him this change “denotes a new preoccupation of the

villagers” (ibid., p. 144). He proposes that the central governmenttried to replace the temple as a local center of education and invest-ment with institutions like the school. According to Taillard, thisstrategy also had political functions: the state authorities and the ideaof rural development were supposed to enter the villages via secular

institutions, not the temple. He then examines the relationship of bureaucrats with the villagers and there too observes a shift in pre-occupation: teachers partially take over tasks that were reserved formonks such as giving children names (traditionally based on astro-logical calculations) and, more importantly, the organization andimplementation of festivals (boun ) that are marketed with a religious

vocabulary, but largely profit state institutions and their employeesin the context of, for example, election and mobilization campaigns(Taillard, 1977; 1979). I do not want to propose that this was anationwide development. People for sure continued to give to tem-

ples and try to acquire religious merit, even when under pressurefrom the local authorities.18 This is also attested for postrevolutionary Laos, when the government tried to restrict the d ā na economy in thelate 1970s and 1980s (Evans, 1993, p. 139; 1990, p. 87). However,

what is crucial here is the fact that, in this vision of the economy,the temple and monks compete with the agents of development andthe institutions of the state over resources. Villagers have a limitedamount of capital and workforce to invest, and the distribution of these resources is crucial for the development process as imagined by state authorities.





We again have to recall that these developments took place ina time when the PL intrusion into the rural areas of Laos was fastadvancing. Halpern remarks that in “1959 infiltration proceeded tothe point where Lao government officials were made unwelcome evenin the villages in the district of Vientiane” (1964, p. 16). The cen-tral government was eager to promote state institutions and thereby secure its influence. What is astonishing, however, is that despitetheir ideological differences, both the RLG and the PL followed asimilar, thoroughly modern, technological approach in this respect.Both tried to limit the economic significance of the d ā na economy.

Around the same time, in the liberated zone large temple festivals

were discouraged and branded as wasteful, and monks were asked tobe economically productive (Chapelier and Maldergehm, 1971, p. 70;Ladwig, 2009a, p. 195). This became even more so after the revolu-tion (Stuart-Fox and Bucknell, 1982; Lafont, 1982). In the liberatedzone, and also after 1975 in the whole of Laos, the aversion to largedonations was not only caused by a desire of the state to appropriateresources but also by the vision of an egalitarian society in which there

would be minimal difference in social status. During the early years of the revolution, d ā na performed outside the regulated framework that

was given by the state was seen as a “capitalist technique.” Buddhistsocialist activist monks such as Khamthan Thepbuali suggested that

“the feudalists live on the people, they pretend to be meritorious,but just take away people’s belongings in order to build temples andstupas” (1976, p. 18). In the same vein, Phoumi Vongvichit, revolu-tionary leader and first man for religious affairs after 1975, asked LaoBuddhists to “abandon these residues of capitalism in the city” (1995,p. 171). He attacked this wrong display of wealth and described largegift-giving ceremonies as “feudal” (ibid., p. 287). Here, as the case of the RLG zone around Vientiane, the capital of the ritual economy wassupposed to be redirected and invested into modernization projectsunder the leadership of the state.

The economic developments that accompanied the marginalizationof the monk’s role and the temple as an institution in both zones aretelling. Whereas in the traditional Lao peasant economy, the temple

was the villagers’ prime object of investment for upholding its multipletasks in the community, the situation changed rapidly in the 1960s. Asa comparative note it might be worth pointing to a study of Timothy Mitchell, who has worked on similar issues in Egypt. There he ana-lyzes the intrusion of a new idea of the “economy” (2002, p. 4) andthe central state into the country’s rural communities. Internationalorganizations and the state sustain an evolving “rule of experts” and




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“invention of the peasant” (2002, p. 123) for the sake of develop-ment. According to this logic, local institutions are financially margin-alized and have to be replaced by the central state authorities in theprocess of modernization. Karl Polanyi (2001) has described this pro-cess as a step from an “embedded economy” to a modern economy,and Michel Foucault (2006) has analyzed this in terms of his notionsof governmentality, in which political economy becomes a crucial sci-ence in the management of populations and their productivity.

I have discussed several examples with respect to the monk’schanging role as a traditional intellectual in the course of Laos’ post-colonial modernization from the 1950s to the early 1970s. In the

context of the establishment of a state school and health-care system,I proposed that the sangha largely lost its role in these specific fieldsand was replaced by state agents. I then showed that the resourcesneeded for the state’s modernization project was drawn from localinstitutions, such as the monastery. Monks and Buddhist institutionsbecame marginalized as a result. A historical review perspective aboutthe roles of monks in a phase were the state was beginning to expandits reach demonstrates that the monk’s role as a traditional intellec-tual was subject to dramatic shifts. Gramsci’s definitions of hegemony as “intellectual and moral leadership” (1971, p. 57) here has to beunderstood as being a leadership in decline through the co-option of

the state, or better yet, a relocation of leadership to a domain thatis now labeled as religious. Here we also can reevaluate the notionof the intellectual introduced at the beginning of this chapter. If we

would employ Shils definition of the intellectual (sensitivity to thesacred, expression in art, ritualistic roles etc.), we wouldn’t see muchchange in monks’ roles. The monks continued to be active in thereligious domain. However, with a focus based on Gramsci’s broadernotion of the traditional intellectual (and Althusser’s institutionalfocus), we can perceive a significant difference that evolved in thepostcolonial period. Monks still have leadership roles in the religious

domain, but they have not become organic, activist intellectuals thatsustain a modernization process in a variety of fields. Instead, they have been relegated to what now is identified as the religious field.The decrease in the number of monks in Laos and Thailand sincethe 1950s could also be connected to this social differentiation andmarginalization process.19

I do not want to propose that there was an intentional secularagenda at work in Laos’ postcolonial modernization. Modernizationis rarely a unilinear process and does not follow a single logic, butrather a “complex rearrangement of social practices driven by a





series of different and intersecting logics” (Mitchell, 2002, p. 14).Modernization processes created secular state institutions such asthe school, which simultaneously relocated boundaries of the reli-gious field. Through spatial separation of school and temple, andthe different priorities of investment, the “religious field” (Bourdieu,1991) and an idea of the secular emerged. With regard to notionsof belief and identity, Talal Asad states that “representations of ‘thesecular’ and ‘the religious’ in modern and modernizing states medi-ate people’s identities, help shape their sensibilities and guaranteetheir experience” (2003, p. 14). We might add that behind thesenew representations, we also have a bundle of political and economic

interests that are put into practice by state agents in order to rein-force the advancement of state power. The roles of religious expertsand institutions are bypassed in this process. Religious experience andsensibilities are now situated in a more clearly defined field. Most Laochildren are no longer taught by monks on a daily basis in the templeschool; instead, children go to the temple for rituals on specific days.Returning to the Lao UNICEF informant’s remark that opened thischapter: Is it now possible to evaluate his statement about the lossof significance of the monk in current Lao society more precisely?The examples that I have referred to as a marginalization of the tra-ditional intellectual actually confirm his stance and are still valid.

Monks, indeed, have lost their role in many fields and are today morerestricted to a sphere that can—after this separation has occurred—belabeled as the religious field.

I have not discussed the postrevolutionary and current state of affairs in the Lao politics of religion, which is another, but intrinsically related story. Interestingly, for some years before and after the revolu-tion, monks siding with the PL indeed were urged to take on rolesbeyond purely religious ones and were actually close to what Gramscilabeled the organic intellectual. However, the technocratic socialiststate has since the 1990s been relegating them to the field of “cul-

ture,” where they are supposed to perpetuate the “beautiful Lao tra-ditions.” With the introduction of a market economy this process hasbeen intensified. Looking at the multiple outcomes of the traditionalintellectual’s meeting with postcolonial modernity, we here witnessanother reconfiguration: the monk is championed as a moral leader

who preserves ancient Lao traditions and embodies righteousness.Does this contradict the opinion of the UNICEF employee? GrantEvans has spoken of a “Re-Buddhisation” (1998, p. 67f.) of Lao soci-ety in the current period of reformed socialism. I completely agree

with this standpoint, but let us be more precise here and ask: does this




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revitalization of Buddhism go hand in hand with a reactivation of themonk’s intellectual role? I do not think so. Although there are someefforts to establish a socially engaged Buddhism in Laos and regainan intellectual leadership role (Ladwig, 2008), the monks involvedin these projects are under quite strict supervision of the state andhave only begun exploring this role. In Thailand, the segmentationof Buddhism has lead to the evolvement of a variety of movements;some of them conservative, others more oriented toward civil society.

Without taking into account the diversity of these movements, I think it is valid to say that in the last decades there have always been majorintellectual leaders in Thailand who were Buddhist monks themselves

or were heavily inspired by Buddhism. In Laos, the brain drain afterthe revolution and the strict control of Buddhism has—with someexceptions20 —prevented the growth of a Buddhist-inspired intellec-tual culture.

The entanglement of monks with the forces of modernity—that of a globalized capitalism under the aegis of a socialist one-party state—

will yield multiple outcomes and a redefinition of roles. The religiousfield, the secular sphere, the economy, and the state and its institu-tions will be subject to even more radical transformations than before.The position of the sangha in the future might again be altered:

Although the order has suffered a loss of status as values have changedin contemporary Lao society, the political leadership discovered theintegrating, nationalist appeal of Buddhism several decades ago. It ispossible that the higher ranks of the order are regaining their socialand political importance and that a new religious elite might eventually become an administrative and even an intellectual elite, as in Thailand.(Rehbein, 2007, p. 86)

I think my UNICEF employee would for sure share the hopes echo-ing from this assessment of the contemporary situation.

Notes

* Research on which this chapter is based was carried out in Vientiane andseveral provinces in 2003–2005, 2008, and 2012. I gratefully acknowl-edge funding by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and theUniversity of Cambridge. Thanks also to my colleagues at University of Bristol(Theology and Religious Studies) and at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle, Germany), where I worked as a postdoc at the time of (re)writing this contribution. Special thanks to Pattana Kitiarsa for inviting me





to the workshop (although I could not attend it), Gregory Kourilsky (Inalco,Paris) for feedback, and Grant Evans for providing me with several interestingdocuments and good ideas.

1. I here employ the term in the sense of postcolonial “mainstreamBuddhism” that is to be found in the current national boundaries of theLao PDR. I shall focus on Vientiane and its surroundings and Buddhismas practiced by ethnic Lao. I do not discuss forms of Buddhism as prac-ticed by the Tai Lue, Tai Neua, or even non-Tai-Kadai groups such asthe Phu Neuy. I occasionally make comparative references to the Isanregion, today located in Thailand, and also advance a comparative per-spective by referring to neighboring Theravada countries when deemedappropriate.

2. The dualisms at the basis of the construct of modernity such as the con-trast between “traditional” and “modern societies,” Gemeinschaft andGesellschaft, are often too general and are part of what James Fergusoncalls “modernization myth” (1999, pp. 13–17). The focus is today very often on the hybrid constellations, the synergy effects, and the contradic-tions that have emerged through modernization (Latour, 1993). It makes,in my opinion, more sense to understand modernity as a set of a multiplic-ity of projects (Mitchell, 2000) and reflect on the transformed position of religion in this constellation.

3. Due to the limited scope of this chapter, I cannot discuss theories of secularization here. Elsewhere, I have explored the link of Lao monaster-

ies and secularization in a historical context in another essay (Ladwig,2011). Some points made in this chapter can also be related to some of the important contributions in the field such as Asad’s (1993) idea of a“genealogy of religion.” For further discussions see Taylor (2007) and Asad (2003).

4. The fact that the alliances and tensions between state-ruling elites and theTheravada clergy form a crucial part of traditional conceptions of statecraftin the regions of ‘Indianized’ Southeast Asia (Coedè s, 1968) has beenresearched extensively (Tambiah, 1976; Ling, 1993). Ideally, the sanghaand ruling elite are in a symbiotic relation representing the “two wheels of the dhamma” (Obeyesekere, Reynolds, and Smith 1972), and their con- juncture establishes a system of righteous Buddhist kingship. However,

this relationship is also one of potential conflict, as Collins (1998, p. 415)has pointed out.

5. However, one should be careful and not take Condominas’s account atface value for the whole of Laos. Some Lao Loum villages have no templeat all or only small ones inhabited by a single monk for the festivals of theritual cycle or during the rains retreat. Lao villages are often less homog-enous than imagined, and the solidarity and moral economy of the peasant village is an ideal that in practice is highly problematic. See High (2006,pp. 32–38) for a critical account of this idea of Lao villages as a “unit” andtheir solidarity.




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6. Readers might get the impression that I present the state as an agent witha single telos, namely, that of modernization. As an analytical category, Iunderstand the state as an apparatus with contradicting agendas (Abrams,1988; Trouillot, 2001; Mitchell, 2006), nevertheless producing a power-ful and effective imaginary of unity (Hansen and Stepputat, 2001).

7. We obviously deal here with an ideal type, and there always were andalways will be monks who in reality are far cry from this account, which,however, is not the point here.

8. Gramsci was aiming at the cross-cultural comparison of intellectualsand analyzed intellectuals in Italy, Russia, the “negro intellectual” inthe United States, and finally deals with religious intellectuals in India,China, and Japan (1971, p. 23). Although the content of his analysis

of Asian intellectual religious cultures is rather ill-informed, the com-parative effort is nevertheless interesting. See Kurtz (1996) for a detailedanalysis of anthropological readings of Gramsci.

9. The Lao and Thai word used for monk and teacher is achan (derivingfrom Pali acariya ) and probably closest to intellectual, but is somewhatmore modest in its meaning. Nak kid (thinker, intellectual) might beused in an overarching, also nonreligious sense, whereas in Thai probably nak robru (scholar; learned man; savant; intellectual) is applicable to bothmonks and laypeople as intellectuals.

10. For more contemporary definitions geared toward Western academiaalso see Edward Said (1994) and Michael Walzer’s (1989) notion of the“social critic.”

11. Ha (2003, p. 103) states: “In 1917, Albert Sarraut, in his capacity as gov-ernor of French Indochina, introduced a series of educational changesaimed, among other things, at dismantling the native precolonial schoolsystem . . . the existent system was perceived as a threat to French hege-mony.” Her analysis is more concerned with Vietnam, but there was atleast a conscious effort to reshape the Buddhist education system in Laosand make it compatible with colonial rule (Kourilsky, 2006; Hansen,2007, pp. 120–146). The Lycé e Pavie trained an upper class to come inthe tradition of French la ï cité . At the end of the 1960s, there also evolvedan intelligentsia in Vientiane that was closer to Western urban intellec-tual culture, but only had a short existence. The writers grouped around

the publication Mittasone and engaged in the Committee Litt é

raire thatalready in the 1950s discussed social, political, and cultural issues andapproved for an “unprecedented flourishing of intellectual activity,”(Evans, 2002, p. 151) which, however, disappeared with the takeover of the Pathet Lao in 1975.

12. Already travelers such as the Portuguese Father Leria in the seventeenthcentury mention this in relation to monasteries in Luang Prabang. SeeKourilsky (2006, p. 31). One of the best descriptions that we have of “traditional schooling” for the laity stems from Tambiah, who workedin a region of ethnic Lao in Thailand, close to the Lao border. He





reports that lessons usually took place in the open courtyard, withmainly boys attending, but occasionally also girls: “At the turn of thecentury the village school was situated in the old temple . . . It was theabbot alone who taught the children, sometimes helped by a layman(an ex-monk). The teaching was voluntary and the abbot received nopay from the government . . . There were no grades, no examinations,and no child studied for more than two years. What the children weretaught was the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic.” (1968,p. 94–96).

13. McDaniel (2008, p. 38), in contrast to that, asserts that the “Frenchdid not base their secular or Catholic educational institutions on localmonastic models, nor did they invest in the maintenance of monastic

schooling.” I think due to the marginality of Laos as a colony, theseefforts were rather unsystematic and might, therefore, have gone unno-ticed. They also had a very limited impact in comparison to the reformsadvanced in Vietnam.

14. There has been a sort of revival of traditional medicine, and temples suchas Vat Sok Pha Luang in Vientiane still grow herbs in their gardens, if,however, mainly for the herbal sauna located there.

15. Others such as Popkin (1979) have proposed that peasants act on thebasis of a “rational calculation” and have no such thing as a moral econ-omy. The other problematic issue with Scott is, in my opinion, his con-cept of the community or village, which has been subject to wide critiquein the anthropology of Southeast Asia (Kemp, 1988).

16. On a more general level, Ivans Strenski (1983) has skillfully analyzedthe ritual economies connecting laypeople and monks from a practicalperspective. James Egge (2002) has explored the textual backgroundsof Theravada gift-giving, and see Ladwig (2009b) for its ideology in thecontext of the Lao Vessantara Jā taka.

17. See also High (2006, pp. 38–41) for an account of the “religious village”and its differing forms of solidarity and cooperation.

18. Temples, for sure, also profited from an expanding capitalist economy.See Martin Barber’s (1974, p. 50) critique of Taillard’s approach.

19. For the number of monks in Laos, see the unreliable fluctuating figuresgiven by Bechert (1967) and Zago (1972). I here rely on the num-

bers given by Halpern (1964, table 1): 17,000 monks and novices in the whole of Laos for 1957, with an overall population of about 2 million.The fall in numbers becomes apparent when looking the current statis-tics: 20,000 monks and novices with an overall population of 6.5 million(Vannasopha, 2003).

20. Most monks are far away from being public figures that commentupon current affairs. Exceptions are, for example, some members of Mahasila Viravong’s family, who draw on Buddhism and traditionalLao literature and are regularly visible in the rather thin Lao publicsphere.




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Documents

Schools, Ritual Economies, and the Expanding State: The Changing Roles of Lao Buddhist Monks as “Traditional Intellectuals”, in Pattana Kitiarsa & John Whalen-Bridge (2013) (eds.)