A Palang Among the Kantu: Or, Difference is a Medicine

Abstract

ABSTRACT Palang is a word used in an ethnic Kantu village in Sekong Province, Lao PDR meaning people of a broadly white appearance. It is similar, in sound and semantic range, to words found in many Asia Pacific languages of indicating the West, Westerners, and things originating in the West. The Kantu palang is furthermore linked to other categories of human difference, including ethnicity, possession, sorcery, witchcraft and the dead. Health and a good life are understood as requiring judicious incorporation of difference, but the power of difference is understood as ambivalent and difference is thus also potentially dangerous. Often, difference is understood in terms of material things, the position of these things inside or outside (of bodies, the village, the region), and their resulting capacity to heal or harm. This materiality troubles any easy classification of these concerns as mimetic, suggesting instead a distinct outlook on difference.