Middle Way to Lao Modernity: a Cultural Analysis of Development and Aid in Laos

Achren deftly weaves Lao voices into a series of narratives to reveal how Lao values are enacted at classroom, management and policy level in an educational change process. With a development assistance project serving as a lens for viewing broader development issues, the study engages in debates within critical development studies and applied linguistics, and draws on understandings from sociology. It is argued that the cultural underpinnings of Lao pre-colonial, Buddhist- legitimated social organisation has continued to influence the values and priorities of the ethnic Lao throughout their history of foreign domination and their more recent political embracing of Marxism- Leninism. The study then examines the disjunctions between these values and those of the dominant development discourse with its roots in the Eurocentric notion of modernity. Ultimately, the actions of culturally knowledgeable Lao agents present us with a glimpse of a distinctly Lao alternative development possibility. As a result, this book contributes to a deeper, more nuanced understanding of appropriate development assistance from Lao socio-cultural perspectives.