High, Holly. Projectland: life in a Laos socialist model village. 238 pp. , bibliogr. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2021. 28. 00 (paper)

Holly High's Projectland offers an ethnographic perspective on contemporary Laos (the Lao People's Democratic Republic) through a study of New Kandon village. This is an ethnic minority Katu (Kantu) settlement in Sekong Province that borders Vietnam to the east. The settlement is certified as a Culture Village, Peaceful Village, Developed Village, Model Healthy Village, and an Open Defecation Free Village. This string of accomplishments manifests a lively intersection of post-war reconstruction, state guidance, and village-to-village competition for official favours. High's study takes Lao socialism seriously as a political project, challenging common convictions regarding socialism as expired or as mere rhetoric. The book also challenges common academic notions of Southeast Asia's ethnically diverse highland peoples as fundamentally distinct from or even incompatible with lowland state-societies. Projectland offers a refreshing angle on contemporary multi-ethnic social dynamics, based on intermittent field research between 2009 and 2018. The Katu area was heavily bombed during the Second Indochina War (the ‘Vietnam War’). Twenty years after the war ended, in 1995, authorities allowed the current resettlement. New Kandon's leaders embraced the state's goals and rhetoric and received various assistance in return (ch. 2). However, everyday observations counter their stories of the successful eradication of old ways (polygamy, arranged marriages, gender inequality, buffalo sacrifice, and ‘superstitions’). Further, a large contingent of the successful new settlement from 1995 returned to their old village in 2001, in a move that has never been officially allowed. The certified Culture Village receives near-annual visits from a national television crew. It is also the focus of museum displays, magazine features, and guided tours (ch. 3). In Laos, the central focus of Culture Villages concerns progress, with breaking away from practices that are deemed outdated and undesirable. For example, the visiting national television crew was not after documenting some exotica but instead ‘a kind of forward-looking optimism where there were no regrets at what had been left behind and where a careful attention was being paid to the best path into the future’ (p. 58). New Kandon is an “Open Defecation Free and Model Healthy Village” (ch. 4). In southern Laos the measures of such success are often contrived, the methods for achieving compliance may amount to sanctioned bullying, and the means can involve an endorsement of local inequalities. Projectland also shows how the national focus on unity and solidarity involves the concrete pleasures of particular social efforts, not just political ideals for top-down rule. Toilets (hong nam, “water room”) created unexpected options. Previously, women had had to give birth alone in the nearby forest to avoid upsetting rice spirits. Their homes were not an option. Now, however, women have taken to using the “water room” as a convenient and safe alternative for their local birthing practices. In chapters 5–8, High explores village unity, gender roles, the creation and expression of value in ritual life, buffalo sacrifice, marriage relations (matrilateral cross-cousin marriage), weaving, and trade. High repeatedly encountered cases of gender inequality where women were silenced, rendered publicly absent, and/or were trapped in unwanted domestic situations, particularly regarding alcoholism and domestic violence. The political focus on recognizing the accomplishments of individual villages and the anthropological focus on rituals and feasting have generally called attention away from such topics. High's description skilfully balances these contradictory aspects of life. She used the national language, Lao, for her research. Reliance on the Katu language might have led to different stories, but on that front I can only guess. The discussion of buffalo sacrifices mentions that village-level rituals were commonly followed by more numerous sacrifices and feasting by individual households. This suggests that Katu households and villages have interlocked but separate and distinct agendas. Projectland’s subjects can thus be viewed as simultaneously but alternatively householders, villagers, and nationals, variously or both Katu and Lao. The enthusiastic alignment of a Katu settlement and the modern socialist Lao government draws the reader towards more complicated and contradictory issues. High's writing is clear and engaging, and the book has the strengths of a good ethnography. However, some regional anthropological comparisons could have sharpened the Katu-Lao case. Comparisons with analogous settings in neighbouring Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam might show if the case was somehow specific to Laos. Comparisons with how ‘feudalism’, colonial rule, war, and nation-building shaped Lahu, Akha, Khmu, Mien, or Hmong communities in the north during, say, 1880-2010 could suggest whether the outcomes are common for modern Laos, or specific to the Katu in Sekong or even to a single village.