The colorful volumes of anthropology produced in the past by gifted amateurs, lady travelers of independent means, colonial officers and the like, have been replaced by the works of highly trained professionals, calibrators of infinitesimal change among the ethnic peoples they study. Contemporary writers and anthropologists seem to share a common need to classify Laos, to assign it an unassailable cultural identity. In the absence of an obvious role for the country, they have needed to invent one. The results have been wondrous and mixed.
Laos has been variously described as a strategic wedge, something like a Corinthian structure holding apart and preventing the tumbling of Vietnam and Myanmar, while at the same time supporting the weight of China, or at least a small part of it. Others have waxed effusive about a "forgotten country" or the region's "last lotus land." With its rich natural resources, Lilliputian population and historical preference for neutrality, landlocked Laos has even been described as the emergent "Switzerland of Southeast Asia."
Whether Laos is a crossroads, a keystone, the latest paradise for cash-strapped backpackers, the "back garden of Indochina" (as the French were fond of characterizing the country) or merely the impoverished panhandle of the lower Mekong basin, it is endowed with a staggering macrame of ethnic peoples. The extraordinary range of cultural and social plurality found within its porous borders is only just becoming apparent, even to anthropologists.