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Chapter 6: Resurrecting the State -- “The will and desire of the people”
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106 Fields of Desire 106 6 Resurrecting the State “The will and desire of the people” When the Village Chief, Siinuk died, there were rumours. There were rumours that he had stolen the money I had donated for the school project, and that the worry had put so much strain on his brain that he died bleeding from the nose. There were rumours, that, to the contrary, he had simply contracted TB and in his obstinacy had left it untreated, which caused him to die. There were rumours that he had embezzled the fees householders had paid for their Household Registration Census Booklets, and the debt was still owed by the village to the District for these in the months and years afterwards . There were rumours that some of the three million kip that had been paid from the Village Chief pension fund to his widow would be claimed back to cover this, but this was controversial. So, we spoke of Siinuk often after his death. In the rainy season of 2003, the rain did not come as expected in June and July and the rice seedlings struggled pitifully in the droughtstricken paddy fields. If the rain did not come soon, the seedlings could not be transplanted and the crops would fail. In desperation, Don Khiaw residents turned to the old irrigation pump. This pump had originally been part of a government-sponsored mechanized irrigation project, designed to let farmers raise at least two crops a year. However, the pump had fallen out of use and was sunk in the mud on the lee of the island. In July 2003, the men strained and worked in the heat of the day to lift it from the mud and clear the pipes that were choked with soil. They spent precious cash to obtain diesel so that they could start it, hoping against hope to get water to those seedlings. But the pump jumped to life, ran hot, spluttered out and would not start again. Resurrecting the state 107 There was speculation that Siinuk had haunted the pump. The irrigation pump, now abandoned, had arrived during his term in office. When he was alive he had spoken to me of his frustrations with this project. He had presented me with a terse, telling analysis of the project’s faults: the inadequate technical training and maintenance, the debt that accrued to those villagers who had experimented with irrigated rice, and the subsequent frequent visits from bank staff seeking repayments, then the threats from the bank to seize people’s fields, buffalo, even their bicycles. The dramas and disappointments surrounding this project had harried his term in office. It had haunted him. Now, I was told, he haunted it. In the previous chapter I drew attention to the everyday reifications that are made of the state in Laos. I attempted to take these reifications at their word, as serious, indeed world-making, symbolic engagements with some of the most important forces my interlocutors had experienced. It would be easy to argue, now, that in fact these reifications do not hold up, that in reality state and society are impossible to distinguish, that after all the state is a human construction and thus only a part of the social relations that it seems to stand apart from. Some time ago, Abrams influentially wrote that, “The state is not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is.” He argued that therefore, “The task of the sociologist is to demystify; and in this context that means attending to the senses in which the state does not exist rather than those in which it does” (1988: 58). This influential essay sparked a trend for demystifying the state, taking off the mask to show the state as actually non-existent, exposing to us that the reifications are all in our heads. Demystification might be the task of sociology, but it is not the task of anthropology. The anthropological approach that I follow is one that wilfully lets itself be “caught” by the meanings that are powerful for the people one encounters in the field. Jeanne Favret-Saada, a champion of this approach, suggested that the word “belief ” itself is problematic as it implies already the analyst’s disbelief: it is only things that we already disbelieve that we describe as “beliefs”. This presents a methodological problem for the anthropologist: to adopt a dis...