Revolutions of Rice – Agrarian Acceleration and Modernist Metanarratives among ‘Indigenous’ Peasants in Laos

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

ABSTRACT This article engages recent calls to bring human-centred historical time into conversation with more-than-human ‘natural time’. It relates the Marxist-cum-market-Leninist Lao state’s longstanding pursuit of revolution in agriculture to (memories of) change in rice seed selection and cultivation among ‘indigenous’ Khmu peasants in the country’s north. Drawing on ethnography, ethnographic history and ethnography of history, I document and analyse how the decidedly anthropocentric and acceleration-focused Lao revolutionary project has been shaping – and, I argue, severing – Khmu-rice entanglements. Identifying acceleration at the locus of ambivalent local experiences of be(com)ing ‘modern’, I offer a grounded counterbalance to the comparative neglect of the salience of modernist metanarratives among indigenous peoples. This article also offers new vantage on questions of nostalgia, continuity and rupture in the Lao socialist revolution, as well as on broader debates about how to reconcile developing countries’ right to ‘catch up’ with the equally pressing need for agrobiodiversity conservation and global ecological redress.