ABSTRACT
For anthropologists interested in issues of cultural heritage, Luang Prabang, an ancient royal town of Northern Laos which became a UNESCO Listed World Heritage site in 1995, constitutes a fascinating example of ever-growing touristification, complex coexistence of Buddhist religion and politics of material conservation and gay sexscape with masculine prostitution on the rise (Berliner 2011). However, among the manifold changes occurring in this former colonial place, it is also a town where material preservation of ordinary and religious architecture has become a political and moral obligation, and nostalgia serves as a motto as well as a resource for preservation agents, private investors and tourist companies. Grant Evans (1998) and, later on, Colin Long and Jonathan Sweet have cogently emphasised how Luang Prabang’s UNESCO recognition is rooted in nostalgic imagination, ‘a quest for an Idealized, Orientalized “real Asia”’ (Long and Sweet 2006: 455). My anthropological research delves further into the very fabric of nostalgia in Luang Prabang, its multiple agents, words, contexts and objects. In the following pages, I will describe a complex landscape where ideas and feelings of preservation, transmission and loss are being differently displayed by diverse categories of actors, local elites, expatriates, Asian and Western tourists, UNESCO experts, Buddhist monks and inhabitants, who all occupy diverse positions within such an arena. A disappearing vestige of humanity for developers, an Indochinese Oxford for Western tourists, a damned town for some of its inhabitants, a great place to invest in for others, a religious centre for Lao and Thai visitors and so forth, Luang Prabang represents a hybrid which deploys an intricate scene under our anthropologists’ eyes. In that regard, it shows how such heritagescapes, caught in the dilemmas of modernity, tourism and nostalgia, can be variously experienced and contested by different groups of often disconnected people. However, while engaging with the Luang Prabang of their own, with their own agendas and influences, they still produce a heritage scene together.
