The Politics of Ritual and Remembrance: Laos Since 1975

Grant Evans's The Politics of Ritual and Remembrance, Laos Since 1975, published by the University of Hawaii Press in 1998, is a scholarly study of how Laos's communist government has managed Buddhist ritual, royal symbolism and public memory since the 1975 revolution, built on Evans's own fieldwork and archival research in a country outside researchers had limited access to for decades. Evans was a leading Southeast Asian studies specialist with sustained direct research experience in Laos specifically. Its strength is that rare direct access and fieldwork grounding on a country understudied relative to its neighbors, tracing concretely how the state has selectively preserved and repurposed Buddhist ritual for its own legitimacy. Its limit is that the book covers the period through the late 1990s, so a claim about Laos's more recent religious policy or ritual practice in the decades since needs more current sources, since Lao state religious policy has continued to develop past this study's own coverage.