Named Kinds in Process: What Two Categories of Gambling in Luang Prabang Laos Help Us See
Charles Zuckerman
Assistant Professor of Formative Education
Boston College
An image of a money game of pètanque, which has given Laos more medals in international competition than any other sport
Recently, many cultural and linguistic anthropologists have begun processualizing the cultural categories they study. They have shifted focus from nouns to nominalized verbs, studying not “the economy” but “economization” (Çalışkan and Callon 2009, 370), not morality but “moralization” (Simoni 2016), not race but “racialization” (Rosa 2016). The hope is that processualization will provide a way to study local categories collaboratively and precisely, without either essentializing them in the analysis or erasing local attempts (whether sincere or “strategic” (Spivak 1988)) to essentialize them from the ethnographic record.
In this talk, I use my research around gambling and moral economy in Laos to refine this approach. I show that using categories “in process” is not a single kind of act, and that the difference between concretizing categories versus abstracting about categories matters for how we understand Laos’s current moment and the moral economic choices that have emerged within it. As post-1975 “revolutionary Laos” has shifted into contemporary “late-socialist Laos,” a shift in how people use categories is also afoot. The Lao socialists were revolutionary in part because they attempted to remake key moral categories with new abstract definitions. In contemporary late-socialist Laos, where capitalist economic practices commingle with the state’s commitment to socialist values, people still repeat these abstractions for moral and political effect, but their debates tend to concern not how to define moral economic categories, but how to apply them, as many now work to reframe once banned activities as newly good.