Part 1

• Dreaming the ‘Chinese Dream’: Local Productions of Chinese Infrastructures of Connectivity in Northern Laos Simon Rowedder University of Passau

  Looking beyond spectacular infrastructure projects as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), this paper zooms in on small-scale cross-border traders in northern Laos and foregrounds their key role in enabling and sustaining the everyday workings of increasingly Chinese visions of land-linked connectivity. This study pays particular attention to the affective dimension of actively living with current and anticipating future Chinese infrastructures of physical connectivity. Playfully building on the notion of the ‘Chinese dream’, this article presents an ethnography of the emotional ambivalence of both positive and negative feelings towards Chinese visions and concrete projects of infrastructural development. This fine-grained micro-sociology of actually lived Chinese infrastructures complicates otherwise BRI-centric narratives of Chinese encroachment in Laos and the associated representation of Laos as a small and passive victim.

• Closer together, but still apart: reflections on the Laos-China Railway and the (re)making of neighbour relations Phill Wilcox Bielefeld University

  Laos and China are better connected in terms of transport than ever before. From improved roads, more frequent flights and, most importantly, the opening of the Laos-China Railway in 2021, options to move between the two, although suspended during Covid-19, are open to more people and at a faster speed than just a few years previously. But although transport connections are much improved, these new mobilities, ordered largely along Chinese lines, do not produce the same levels of increasing closeness and interaction between Lao and Chinese people, even in spaces such as trains and buses where they encounter each other. I suggest that this has much to do with a perceived sense of China in Laos being ordered along Chinese lines, something for which many Lao express varying degrees of enthusiasm. Through a detailed ethnographic examination of how people interact (or not) with each other, this chapter argues that while Laos and China are closer the people remain apart.

• Unwellness beyond disease: The broader perspective of health in Yru community Thipphaphone Xayavong University of Warwick

  Healthcare seeking behaviours of people can be influenced by many factors: geographical, social, economic, cultural, or health policies. Among ethnic communities, the broader understanding of what can cause illness plays a critical role in their healthcare decision-making. Reports from the health sector highlight that such different perspectives can sometimes hinder the community’s integration into the modern health system. My research aims to explore how health is perceived by the Yru community, one of the biggest ethnic groups in southern Laos, and how this notion of health coexists with modern medicine. The healthcare seeking behaviours of Yru people have undergone critical transformations within the past 15 years due to socio-economic changes in the region. In the past, people predominantly relied on Reed, a traditional healing ritual, as the primary source of treatment for their physical and spiritual illnesses. In recent years, sole reliance on traditional practices for healing has become less common and gradually reduced in terms of frequency, time, and resources spent on the rituals. Although people’s relationship with Reed has changed as a result of development and modernization, the intrinsic social and spiritual values of Reed remain significant in fulfilling broader dimensions of good health and wellness within the community.

Part 2

• Becoming Lowlanders – (Agri-)Cultural Change and Ambivalent Nostalgia among Khmu in northern Laos Paul-David Lutz Université libre de Bruxelles

  This paper draws on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between July 2023 and March 2024 in a roadside, wet-rice-growing Khmu community in northern Laos. It offers both an historical account of one swiddening community’s transition to lowland rice and the cash crop economy, as well as insight into locally- and culturally-specific memories and narratives of the recent past and how these are entangled with moral stances and ethical judgements in the future-oriented present. Bringing rich ethnographic data into discussion with the anthropology of memory, affect and (eco-)nostalgia, this paper shows the importance of the past inside the present as well as offering reflections on the ethnographers own affective stance.

• Telling affects in fieldwork. Why a reflexive approach can enhance ethnographic knowledge – examples from upland northern Laos Rosalie Stolz University of Cologne

  Fieldwork does lead to a wide range of affective reactions in the researcher. These affects can be “telling”, I wish to argue, and are worth to be critically reflected in our telling of the field. While this may not sound surprising, nuanced reflective accounts are oftentimes missing in our articles and monographs. Drawing inspiration from work that discusses affects not merely as epiphenomena of fieldwork but rather as valuable sources of knowledge, I wish to argue in favor of a more reflexive approach to fieldwork and, importantly, our ethnographic writing. I will discuss this in more detail based on examples from past and ongoing research among Khmu Yuan speakers in northwestern Laos – here I will give attention to, to name one example, the role of nostalgic affects.

Abstract