May 30, 2010

Only in Laos

It’s the last night and my neighbours want a memorable meal. There are just three of us. Another student has gone to stay with his monk friend and another has a wife somewhere. Their concession to not use MSG has also dampened what should be a festive moment. “Would be great if we had music,” he says, but we don’t have any. I like the sound of the crickets, but they must wonder why such a common sound pleases me.

Somehow the conversation turns to dragon monsters, spirits and animism. I’m not sure why this one student who can’t speak any English seems to be an anthropological specialist in village belief. He explains that every village has a shaman and that’s where they seek explanations. Someone’s headache goes away after it’s understood that a man must release the lizard he’s captured. There are rules about clearing forests and other violations of the spirits.

I told them I had heard from a Khamu man that they had lost their forest spirits because of Chinese logging and that he no native cosmology to pass on to his children. The two students I was talking to nodded their heads as if this was 9-11.

Devastation of a native cosmology is a form of terrorism, but in the name of modernity, it is executed by one’s own hand. There are no particular government policies against animism, but in the same way that driving a pick-up is more fashionable than riding a tractor, spirit worship gains few followers these days.
The student says these things will not survive because they are not true. Saying that truth is relative only puts them in a post-modern confusion. I’ve never heard of a Lao anthropologist and even if there were I’d be afraid that the research techniques used would undermine the terrain under study. “Modern” education is the Trojan horse that promises development and instead spreads viruses to conquer.

Forcing a bolt as if it were a screw is a good way to bewilder young people. I’ve determined that 80% have given up on trying to understand their teaching methodology courses. Full of rational and logical formulas, they appear clean and modern, but if you use these techniques in a Lao classroom, you might as well ask for the spirits for help.

I don’t know anything about Lao spirits, but there’s a spirit in the students that I recognize. I recognize when they’re dispirited and I recognize when they feel whole. Sign language helps them get back into their bodies. Could there be a way to attach foreign language learning onto their native spirit cosmologies?

Apichatpong Weerasethakul has made another movie recognized at Cannes. At the award ceremony he said that he hopes his achievements will inspire young people to try something new. "We have become too much of a monoculture, with the same logic of narrative," he said. "Minority cultures have been prevented from discovering their own ways of doing things.” Now, as if coming out, he admits that his inspiration comes from the fading spirit world of the Lao-Isan region of Thailand. He doesn’t dare to say exactly what his belief system is, but his movies are infused with this world to the very last drop.

Following a convoluted road, I feel like I’m seeing a light. Why is the most institutional of schools my battlefield? It’s because this is where the most destruction happens. What could possibly happen if these students reclaim their worlds? What kind of super-teachers would they become?
I told my neighbors, ‘I know of no other place in the world as special as Laos.”