Like minority groups the world over, the hill tribes of Laos are facing unaccustomed pressures on their traditional way of life. The depletion of protective, life-giving forest and wilderness, the upward migration of more lowland Laotians, growing pressure on the hill tribes to settle closer to accessible roads and river routes, and to adapt to the habits, customs and values of the more pervasive lowland Laotian culture, are forcing change at a rate never experienced before.
As mountains, secluded valleys and gorges are overcome by new roads and airstrips, time and spatial perceptions are altering. Villages that once seemed a world apart now belong within the same geographic orbit. With this compression of distance and time, minorities are finding themselves impacting with an outside world that seems increasingly less alien, but no less threatening.
Strikingly individual, with their own arresting styles of dress, customs, beliefs, rituals and interpretations of the animist world that surrounds them, the hill tribes of Laos, eking out a living from the mountain slopes and upland valleys that nobody else cares to inhabit, live a life apart. For this reason, the tribes, considered a law unto themselves, have always been viewed with a degree of suspicion by the authorities. Scornful of intrusive bureaucracy, difficult to tax, tame or conscript, with little conventional respect for borders, they represent, as idiosyncratic pockets of nonconformity, an ever-present challenge to state control.