Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the interplay between nation-building, socio-economic development and hrooy (chthonic-ancestral vectors/"spirits") in an ethnic Khmu community in upland northern Laos. It posits hrooy as active stakeholders participating in local engagements with modernization.

Paper long abstract:

The ethnic Khmu community of Sanjing (a pseudonym) has been caught up in the turbulent changes that have swept through northern Laos in recent decades. War, revolution, authoritarian socialism, scientific materialism, high modernism and neoliberal developmentalism have engaged, challenged and re-shaped Sanjing's local livelihoods-politics-cosmology nexus.

This paper examines how local chthonic-ancestral beings (hrooy) have helped the Khmu of Sanjing make sense of and manage these changes. In particular, I trace the jostling between Sert (the erstwhile "master hrooy" of Sanjing's mountain ridge), the modernizing nation-state and the encroaching forces of global capitalism. I suggest that Sert's negotiations, resistance and ultimate acquiescence has enabled locals to engage development with an encompassing impetus and comforting sense of continuity. This has helped locals to reconcile the intense ambivalences surrounding their own ostensible modernization. The story of Sert thus lends ethnographic credence to the claim that ostensibly (un)dead and "sacred" beings crucially participate in local engagements with modernity. It also speaks to the question of how modernism/developmentalism may subvert or reconfigure existing modalities of the "sacred."