| Abstract: |
In the Lao imagination the southern provinces, especially Attapeu, Sekong and Saravan, are viewed as being largely insecure as they are not lao-icised. Ethnographically, the scanty record for Southern Laos has tended to assert a simple opposition between two 'cultures', the Lao and the Austroasiatic, in contrast to the broad cultural diversity of the North. This article considers the history of the process of 'laoicisation' in the South, and portrays a dynamic of ethnicity that is different to that in the North but just as complex. Analysis of the societies of Upper Sekong, thought to have always resisted laoicisation, especially the Kantu (Katu), allows the author to examine the conditions of transmission and reproductionthrough the wars right up to the presentof a social, spatial and ritual model that is apparently opposed to Lao values and is out of step with the current norms of the national culture.
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