Religious Changes, Ethnic Minorities and the State in Laos

Religious Changes, Ethnic Minorities and the State in Laos

As a communist state, Laos did not adopt atheism in absolute principle. Unlike the initial situation in communist China or in Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge, the Pathet Lao communists quickly gave up rejecting religion when they took power in 1975. They tried instead to integrate Buddhism into their Marxist reading of the country’s development, seeing it also as a force for cultural unification given the nation’s ethnic diversity. From a historical perspective, we will first look at state policies on religion in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (LPDR) in order to highlight the way in which the new state gradually addressed the country’s religious diversity. While officially promoting the cultural diversity of the country’s different ethnic groups, the place given to the religious beliefs and practices of ‘minority’ populations has been singularly restricted. We will look at the different ways the members of three local populations of Northern Laos, considered “ethnic minorities”, responded to the centralizing and homogenizing vision of the state.