Introduction
In the Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao P.D.R.), weaving and its products are linked to a long history of practices and representations that have recently undergone considerable transformation. These changes are in particular linked to the emergence since the 1990s of new sites of textile production, namely private workshops that bear innovative marketing strategies, which are referred to as discourses on ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ intended for the world market. The capital, Vientiane, where economic reform has made its clearest impact, is the centre of this fundamental commercial textile revolution.
This article argues that an empirical approach to the politics of culture implies a micro-perspective that has to be fulfilled by a commitment to bottom-up research. Here I present evidence of how uses and values have become locally assigned to certifications of excellence, the criteria of which have been developed and defined abroad by international agencies. I compare two ethnographic examples of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) certification devices that have been attributed to the Dok Dao Gallery,Footnote 1 one of the oldest and most prestigious private weaving companies of the Lao P.D.R.,Footnote 2 namely, the UNESCO Crafts Prize and the UNESCO Awards of Excellence for Handicrafts which replaced it from 2006. In particular, I question the mobilisation of these international awards in the commoditisation of fabrics produced by this company and examine discourses elaborated in relation to them. On a larger scale, I consider current dialogic relations between global policies and entrepreneurial practices. Therefore, I also discuss authorship claims and the local demand for the establishment of intellectual property laws that are emerging in the field of a handicraft which was considered until recently as a shared tradition or a common heritage.
The UNESCO Crafts Prize: A certification of traditional technical expertise
In 1991, one year after the official foundation of her company, Keomani, the director of the Dok Dao Gallery won a UNESCO Crafts Prize for a naturally dyed re-edition of an ancient shoulder cloth (pha biang) decorated with zigzag naga Footnote 3 patterns,Footnote 4 a shoulder cloth that she personally wove. The Crafts Prize programme was initiated in 1990 under the 10-year Plan of Action for the Development of Craft in the World ‘to reward and encourage the talents of most creative crafts workers and to make their products known outside their place of origin’.Footnote 5 Besides financial rewards, the prizewinners benefited from a series of promotional activities such as exhibitions or participation in international trade shows (for example, Maison et Objets, Paris), the broad dissemination of their works through different means of communication (brochures, Internet websites or calendars) and promotion in regional craft exhibitions and fairs. Between 1990 and 2005 (the final year of the programme), this prize was awarded to 83 artisans from four regions of the world (Africa, Arab States, Asia-Pacific and Latin America-Caribbean).
Keomani officially received this Crafts Prize from the hands of Queen Sirikit of Thailand during the opening ceremony of the meeting and exhibition entitled, ‘Asian Textile Heritage: Craft and Industry’ in January 1992 at the University of Chiang Mai. This event had been organised in honour of the Queen's 60th birthday and was the occasion for the Director General of UNESCO to present her the Borobudur Gold Medal. This medal symbolised ‘the gratitude and the recognition of the international community for [her] contributions to the safeguarding and promotion of traditional arts and crafts, which constitute a vital part of the world's cultural heritage’.Footnote 6 Queen Sirikit is indeed renowned in her country and abroad for her involvement in the preservation and revival of local Thai crafts, notably through the setting up of her Foundation for the Promotion of Supplementary Occupations and Related Techniques, known as SUPPORT. For the past 50 years, among crafts certified as ‘Thai’, Queen Sirikit has been particularly dedicated to weaving. She is celebrated for wearing solely Thai hand-woven silk fabrics to the extent that north-eastern Isan matmi, a kind of ikat patterned fabric, has become known as the ‘Queen's silk’Footnote 7 due to her strong interest in promoting and popularising it. Moreover, in the 1960s, Queen Sirikit participated in the creation of a Thai ‘national’ dress based on a reinterpretation of outfits from earlier periods.Footnote 8 Initially offered in five versions, now eight, from a range of informal to formal clothing, this ‘neo-traditional invention’Footnote 9 relies in particular on the phasin, an ankle-length wrap usually associated with north and north-eastern Thai margins. This revived women's attire was mainly intended for the Thai elite and served, at that time, to display an ideal of royalty that was ‘modern’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ but deeply rooted in ‘tradition’,Footnote 10 and also to promote the weaving of some of the poorest and most unstable areas of Thailand. In this way it ‘indirectly link[ed] élite fashions with rural development and nation-building’.Footnote 11 Indeed, what was – and in some way still is – at stake in the reinvention and wearing of such official outfits has been the political and cultural incorporation of these margins into the Thai state's negotiated image, and also the very definition of ‘Thai-ness’ (khwampenthai).Footnote 12
The presentation of the UNESCO Crafts Prize under the patronage of Queen Sirikit's 60th birthday celebration in conjunction with a meeting and an exhibition entitled ‘Asian Textile Heritage’ included definitely this award in the field of the ‘politics of culture’. This cultural bias had been in fact inscribed in the programme from its very origin. In UNESCO's general policy, handicrafts are indeed considered to be a dynamic part of the ‘cultural industries’, which also include publishing, music, cinema and design. From 1997 and the characterisation of the craft field by this international agency, ‘artisanal products’ have been considered as ‘those produced by artisans, either completely by hand, or with the help of hand tools or even mechanical means, as long as the direct manual contribution of the artisan remains the most substantial component of the finished product’.Footnote 13 Craft is then considered as the living expression – through knowledge and techniques – of an intricate intimacy that links humans and shaped materials, an intimacy that is inscribed in an assumed ‘tradition’. This perspective on craft justifies, in a way, its inscription in UNESCO's politics of culture that is known to focus on the promotion and preservation of international ‘heritage’. In this context, the Crafts Prize had been initiated not only to boost commercial promotion of selected craftsmen's products outside their original place, but also to act as a tool of action that aimed ‘to recognize a skillful and creative artisan that strives in the field of traditional handicrafts’ (as stated on the diploma).
The criteria by which Keomani had been chosen are unknown, as is unknown the committee who presided over the decision. Nevertheless, the prize had a priori a double effect: it institutionalised Laotian weaving as a ‘traditional cultural expression’ that deserves to be highlighted and promoted by international agencies and also recognised Keomani, herself, as the icon of this particular ‘tradition’. Indeed, she is the only Laotian ever to have been presented with this prize. As such, it contributes to her embodiment as bearer of this ‘traditional cultural expression’, assigns her potentially as a leading authority in this field and recognises her as a standard of ‘Laotian tradition’. Hence, two questions arise: first, how does this entrepreneur mobilise this prize in practice? Second, does it have implications for local, national or even regional Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) politics of culture?
To mobilise a UNESCO Crafts Prize in entrepreneurs' marketing strategies: A (re)call on a nationalised tradition?
A replica of the winning textile, a picture of the event and a diploma attesting to it are exhibited in the new Dok Dao Gallery's showroom and boutique. Beyond the shop itself, the prize is mentioned in various bilingual English–Japanese commercial brochures edited and distributed by the company. It appears also on its website and in various books and booklets written by Vilevanh, Keomani's younger sister. In the former shop, those certifications were shown with a picture representing Keomani and Vilevanh, when they were about 10 years old, working on their looms in the company of their mother, Dao.
In the Dok Dao Gallery shop and commercial brochures, the UNESCO Crafts Prize is mobilised as an international recognition, not only of the skills of the company's director who personally wove the awarded textile, but of Keomani's mother, the founder of the company, and Vilevanh, the marketing manager. Indeed, they have been closely associated with this certification of technical expertise through the picture that shows all three of them weaving. Furthermore, in their commercial brochures, the prize is evoked as a joint effort and a statement of the ‘long experience’ of those women as weavers. The text of the brochure emphasises in particular that the two sisters began to weave at six years of age ‘under the expert guidance of [their] mother [and that] since then [they] have gained considerable experience’.
This familial expertise claim is coupled with an assertion of a regional and national weaving genealogy. By calling upon the weavers of Sam Neua (the mother's birthplace) who ‘are renowned through-out the country for their high-quality weaving’ and more generally upon the women of Laos who ‘have for many generations woven colours and motifs in harmony, producing the most intricate and eye pleasing weaves of the region’, the owners of the Dok Dao Gallery declare themselves as heiresses of a Laotian weaving ‘tradition [that] continue[s] to be an expression of an ancient culture’, a ‘living Lao textile heritage’ that they ‘are proud’ to share with their customers and apprentices. As such, they inscribe themselves in an assumed living practice, which they claim to be inherited from their ancestors, here understood as their relatives as well as all Laotian women, which they assert to share common skills.
The Dok Dao Gallery's marketing mobilisation of the UNESCO Crafts Prize is linked to discourses on weaving as part of a Laotian ‘heritage’ and meets both the national imaginary/imagery and everyday practices that prevail nowadays in Laos. Indeed locally, weaving is considered fundamentally as a ‘tradition’ (papheni) or as an element of the ‘culture’ (vatthanatham) that is intrinsically linked to women not only in the Dok Dao Gallery's commercial brochures, but also in national discourses and state policies.Footnote 14 Here, to be a woman is to be a potential weaver.Footnote 15 Today, however, this potential is no longer systematically revealed in everyday practices, as weaving has declined considerably, particularly among urbanised women. Except for a few entrepreneurs such as Keomani and her relatives, this technical expertise is even quite rare among entrepreneurs that are engaged in the Laotian contemporary textile scene. Although ideological gender roles (women as weavers) differ somehow from modern practices, this naturalised and essentialised ‘tradition’ is still spread nationally and internationally through various media such as television and radio programmes, newspapers and magazines, books written by Laotians and foreign scholars, entrepreneurs and connoisseurs and even exhibitions and catalogues.Footnote 16
This women-centred textile world is considerably strenuous, especially in the women's attire that has been the subject of an intensive political investment.Footnote 17 The phasin, the ankle-length wrap usually associated with Tai ethnic groups (notably the politically dominant Tai Lao), has been elevated to the rank of national uniform for certain categories of women in the population, particularly schoolgirls, students, teachers and the armed forces. It is also unofficially a tacit requirement for all civil servants and for those who frequent offices of administration; otherwise they are exposed to criticism and even to delays in processing their business. Moreover, the wearing of the phasin has been imposed on all women who enter holy sites on occasions such as the That Luang Festival, one of the most important Buddhist festivals in Laos. A reminder of this ‘official recommendation’ is publicised in Laotian, English and French language local newspapers a few days before the event, publicly contrasting Laotian and Western outfits – clothes and haircuts – that are banished since they are considered as anti-Laotian culture and tradition.
This emphasis on the Tai phasin in a national multiethnic context raises questions on the ‘tai-isation’ or ‘lao-cisation’ that is imposed on marginalised nationals.Footnote 18 Sartorial diversity is nevertheless regionally highlighted and stereotyped during political and religious gatherings such as the inaugural procession of the That Luang festival,Footnote 19 and in official imagery on stamps, banknotes and propaganda paintings during the 1970s and 1980s. These two dyadic relations – Laotian versus Westerner and minority versus majority – exemplify how, in the field of women's attire, both the majority/minority internal dichotomy and external relations participate alongside the elaboration of the politics of culture in the Lao P.D.R. and of an homogenised Laotian national identity.Footnote 20
This emphasis in national policies on the Tai phasin, on ethnic and on traditional outfits underlines further the centrality of textiles in Laotian social life. Indeed, textiles were – and in some ways still are – actively involved in all forms of sociability and ritual. In the lowlands for example, prior to the large-scale commercialisation and consumption of clothing, furnishing and home accessories, weaving as practice was conceived as an agent of women's subjectivation, through the constant and painful shaping of their body and their insertion in womanised technical networks composed of their relatives and neighbours. While everyday weaving practices mould their bodies and their social manners, the textiles that they produced enable them, through exchange, to be entangled in an enlarged society made of men, monks and ancestors. Women were indeed the principal textile suppliers of the family and of the community as a whole. Through exchange and gifting to their relatives, notably for their wedding ceremony, they created and established social relations and reinforced local social hierarchies. Furthermore, giving to the sangha – the community of ordained monks – was, for them, a means to gain merit for themselves and their ancestors. At the same time, as textiles were bearers of ethnic groups, genders, age groups or even the meanings of social statuses, weavers directly contributed to the fashioning of individual and collective social self social self.
What is at stake in everyday female practices linked to personal outfits and national politics of culture are the definition and the spreading of a certain ‘Lao-ness’ (khuampenlao) that is openly related to weaving, textile production, consumption and wearing. As I shall demonstrate, entrepreneurs and other civil agents led notably, but not solely, by Keomani and her relatives ennobled by virtue of the UNESCO Crafts Prize's awarding utterly participate in the elaboration and broad dissemination of this textile-related ‘Lao-ness’.
Local involvement in the field of the politics of culture of artisans awarded the UNESCO Crafts Prize
For the past 10 years, new discourses on local handcrafted textiles have been emerging in some official and intellectual – however small – Laotian circles. Among most entrepreneurs, government officers and scholars, weaving and textiles are nowadays viewed as a national ‘heritage’ (moladok) that has to be catalogued, preserved and promoted. Books are published, museums (often private) are opened and conferences are organised, in particular under the patronage of the Institute of Research on Culture.Footnote 21
This shift is perceptible locally from a shared approach of weaving as an ineffable and unquestioned tradition to a social and political approach in terms of heritage and legacy, inventory and preservation. I will consider this new perspective on handcrafted textiles in relation to local implementation of UNESCO's cultural policies on tangible and intangible heritage that have been developed worldwide since the 1960s.Footnote 22 Indeed, in 1987, Laos ratified the 1972 Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. Since then, the town of Luang Prabang and the cultural landscape of Vat Phou and Champasak have been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, in 1995 and 2001, respectively. Moreover, an international meeting entitled, ‘Safeguarding and Promotion of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of the Ethnic Minority Groups of the Lao People's Democratic Republic’ was organised in Vientiane in 1996.Footnote 23 This conference established that much of the heritage of the ‘minority cultures’ of Laos would qualify as ‘intangible’. Garments and textiles, considered as ‘ephemeral’ and ‘vulnerable artefacts’ due to the external influences that they undergo and their specific perishable materials, have been particularly highlighted and weaving has been, in a way, promoted while nationalised as a ‘cultural Laotian heritage’.Footnote 24
Since their distinction by UNESCO in 1991, Keomani and her relatives have been centrally involved in this movement through different media such as publishing, exhibitions, conferences, practical workshops and so on. As previously mentioned, the two sisters have written articles, books and booklets on Laotian textiles. Apart from the history of their family and their genealogical claim,Footnote 25 they have been dedicated to the diffusion of technical knowledge on natural dyes and on various weaving practices in Laotian and in English publications. For example, they have described and analysed the use of both Tai floor-looms and Mon-Khmer back-strap looms.Footnote 26 They have also presented the terminology of ethnic motifs and designs of different local textile traditions.Footnote 27 As such, they have actively participated in the listing and compiling of the traditional know-how for which Keomani had received her award. Recently, they published a book dedicated to the phasin which recalls the centrality of this outfit piece for ‘Laotian women's identity’ and catalogued their collection's ancient masterpieces,Footnote 28 some of which are on show on the third floor of their gallery shop. Through its display in a gallery and, furthermore in a Lao–English catalogue distributed worldwide, this collection is now experiencing a reallocation. From now on, it is indeed not solely a familial or a company inheritance, but has entered publicly a national heritage.
The involvement of the Dok Dao Gallery's owners in the promotion and safeguarding of Laotian weaving and textiles is not restricted to the walls of their company or their publications. It frequently reaches a larger audience in events displayed in the public domain. For example, they formerly co-organised the annual ‘Lao Textile Festival’ held around the same time as the That Luang Festival. On this occasion, weaving contests, conferences and commercial temporary stalls gather together weavers, scholars, sellers and buyers from across Laos and the rest of the world. In their studio, they have also been involved in the transmission of textile know-how to both foreigners and to the Laotians who, as their brochure states, ‘will hopefully become the master Lao textile artists of tomorrow’. As such, they claim to link the past, present and future of Laotian weaving. Moreover, through the evocation of weavers as artists, they reveal the emerging idea of weaving as an art practice and textiles as potential masterpieces. Then, they echo directly the worldwide ‘artification’ that these days transforms artefacts and handicraft processes into ‘art’ and ‘art's works’.
Keomani and her relatives are engaged in these activities largely through their active membership of the ‘Group for the Promotion of Art and Traditional Textiles’, launched in 1990. Influenced by international agencies led by UNESCO in which their members often participate as consultants, this group has been created to promote ‘Laotian culture’ in the field of textiles. It brings together mostly Laotian women from various social and cultural backgrounds, including intellectuals and textiles practitioners, like Keomani and her relatives. Through their activities, as individuals or as a group, they underline how the politics of culture are sometimes initiated and carried out by members of the public sphere. As such, cultural politics are determined and performed not only from a top-down perspective but also from a bottom-up one.
Cultural embodiment
Intensively and routinely mobilised in the Dok Dao Gallery's marketing strategies, the UNESCO Crafts Prize has been involved in building up the reputation of Keomani, her relatives, her workshop and of Laos as a country belonging to a ‘culture of fabrics’.Footnote 29 Virtually extended always to include Keomani's sister and mother, the prize encompasses all of the company's workers and acts as a ‘quality label’ for their products. As such, originally awarded to a named individual, this prize became the shared warranty of a family and a company that participates, in practice, in the elaboration of a valorised image for a globalised market: an image based on an international testified call on a nationalised tradition and, in a way, on a heritage in progress. To a certain extent, the weaving know-how of the Dok Dao Gallery's owners attested by the Crafts Prize legitimises their involvement in the elaboration and the extensive diffusion through the commercial field of this particular ‘Lao-ness’ that is openly related to weaving and textile production.
In awarding the Dok Dao Gallery's director, UNESCO distinguished her from other craft workers. Nevertheless, the UNESCO Crafts Prize, advertised publicly through various UNESCO networks, cited in published biodata of Keomani or displayed in the Vientiane boutique and on the company's commercial brochures, is fundamentally dedicated to an international audience, an audience of mostly foreign visitors, tourists and international buyers who are interested, broadly speaking, in ‘culture’, ‘arts’ and ‘crafts’. As such, very few Laotians or even neighbours and employees of Keomani are aware that she was personally awarded 20 years ago for her skills as a weaver. Nowadays, although Keomani and her relatives are recognised by them as master weavers and dyers in particular in natural dyes that built up partially the reputation of their company, they are only considered as good as all Laotian women who have also been weaving since a young age under the patronage of their mothers and female relatives. It is only in the context of the small elite circle interested in the promotion and preservation of Laotian ‘culture’ and ‘heritage’ that Keomani embodies the so-called ‘Laotian weaving tradition’, linking intrinsically international politics of culture and trade. Ultimately, her ‘singularization’ questions the current policies on national ‘heritage’ that have been raised during the past decades by the cultural international agency that awarded her. The question is indeed how elements of a national culture, such as weaving, can be embodied and, as such, appropriated by individuals, ethnic groups, nations or even humankind as a whole while they are so much intrinsically linked to individual and community self-fashioning. The analysis of another UNESCO device may enlighten this issue.
The Award of Excellence for Handicrafts: ‘A stamp of approval’
The Crafts Prize is not the only award attributed to the Dok Dao Gallery by UNESCO. Since 2004, the company has also been granted several Awards of Excellence for Handicrafts (formerly known as ‘Seal of Excellence in Handicraft Products of Southeast Asia’), hereafter referred to as ‘SEAL’. As stated in the dedicated UNESCO brochure, this certification was jointly created by UNESCO and the ASEAN Handicraft Promotion and Development Association (AHPADA) in 2001 ‘in order to establish quality standards and to enhance international awareness of handicrafts from the ten ASEAN countries’.Footnote 30 Now extended to Central Asia (2004), South Asia (2004), East Asia, western Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean region (2006), the SEAL programme aims ‘to support small crafts businesses and creative crafts people in the global market [and] to encourage artisans to produce handicrafts using traditional skills, patterns and themes in an innovative way, in order to ensure the continuity and sustainability of these traditions and skills’.Footnote 31 The Crafts Prize is exceptionally exclusive, and was awarded to ‘only’ 83 craftsmen all over the world in the 15 years of its existence (1990–2005), whereas, since its establishment in 2001, the SEAL programme has already awarded 725 products in Asia (253 in South-East Asia, 182 in South Asia, 212 in West-Central Asia and 78 in East Asia).
SEAL in practice: To qualify commercial products
Four Dok Dao Gallery silk shawls and scarves have been awarded a SEAL, two in 2004 and two others in 2006. In contrast to the shoulder cloth awarded by the UNESCO Crafts Prize, these textiles were not perfect re-editions of ancient pieces of fabric in dimension, structure or design, but reinterpretations of some of them. Although Keomani and her relatives drew their inspiration from pre-existing Tai textiles from Laos (notably textiles originating from Hua Phanh and Xieng Khouang provinces), they reworked their shapes, designs and colour combinations so that they look totally new, especially in terms of texture and appearance. Threads, which are twisted and plied like organzine, are in particular thinner. Their thick interlacing creates rigid, creaky and shiny surfaces in contrast to the soft and wispy aspects of ancient textiles often woven with raw silk (silk from which the seiricin gum has not been removed). Their patterns, elaborated from the extraction of motifs, structures and techniques, have been reshaped through the performance of successive displacements, distortions and recombinations. Designs that are jointly accumulated on ancient pieces have been extracted, reworked and reproduced for the occasion on entire scarf and shawl surfaces, creating a somehow hypnotic symmetrical visual effect. Finally, taking into account the desires of their targeted markets, Keomani and her relatives have based the colour combinations of these products on colour trend books elaborated and published each fashion season by international trends offices. In sum, to create these textiles, from now on considered as standardised and reproducible models in accordance with normative and continuous quality standards, they have been ‘revisiting Laotian tradition’ and are going ‘beyond it’ in order to meet tastes and contemporary expectations of a globalised market.Footnote 32
Interestingly, the difference between the Crafts Prize and the SEAL attributed to the Dok Dao Gallery is not limited to the properties and qualities of the awarded textiles. For example, in contrast to the Crafts Prize, no tremendous public ceremony was organised for the presentation of these four SEAL rewards. In fact, the whole qualifiying procedure differs between these two UNESCO programmes. Whereas the Crafts Prize was attributed to Keomani thanks to a textile contest, the SEAL takes place at the end of a standardised process that happens every two years. So, to benefit from the latter, Keomani and her relatives had to apply personally for each of the products and product lines that they expected to see awarded.
They filled in the application form,Footnote 33 providing detailed information about their company (contact, production capacity, copyrights, social responsibility with regard to the product proposed) and each submitted product (category of use, material, production process, ‘authenticity’ with regard to the local craft ‘tradition’, originality, marketability, respect for the environment). Moreover, on the standardised application form they had to list all materials, techniques and designs used and mention whether they were ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’. They also had to explain how their products reflected the craft tradition of the area (in materials, production process, design, source of inspiration, function) and to tell a story or a legend about the object or some of its patterns. Finally, they had to clarify what was ‘new’ or ‘original’ about them. In keeping with requirements, they appended pictures of both finished artefacts and major production steps. They also provided a sample of each craft product for evaluation and exhibition. Basically, the four Dok Dao Gallery scarves and shawls awarded a SEAL were qualified, on the form, as produced with ‘local’ techniques (such as discontinuous supplementary weft weaving) and materials (such as silk and natural dyes) that were specified as ‘traditional’, ‘safe and harmless’ and ‘not recycled’, indicated by crosses added to the relevant application's checkboxes.
Each of these textiles had then to be appraised by an international panel of experts, nominated by UNESCO, according to two required preconditions (eco-friendly and fair) and four criteria (excellence, authenticity, innovation, marketability), all of which they had to fulfill. To test and prove the ‘traditionality’ and ‘innovativeness’ of submitted textiles, which are nowadays central features of UNESCO's policies, members of the jury relied entirely on handcrafted products that had been given as samples, on their photographs and moreover on the biographies of both these products and the company that produced them. Basically, the whole SEAL procedure consists of constructing, diffusing and eventually authenticating the artifact and company's biographies, as elaborated by the applicants themselves. So what is ultimately being judged by this UNESCO device are the abilities of humans to tell stories about objects and the abilities of objects to match or to respond to those humans' qualifications.Footnote 34
SEAL as a discreet award in the Dok Dao Gallery's marketing strategies
Once the adequacy of products submitted to the SEAL programme has been tested and proved, they are certified to enter the global market under its banners. Interestingly, SEALs awarded to the Dok Dao Gallery's textiles after a voluntary application of the company's owners have been utterly underpublicised as promotional devices in contrast to the Crafts Prize. Indeed, the Dok Dao Gallery's commercial brochures make no mention of them. In the boutique, no special tags appear on these awarded textiles, nor are informative flyers specifically dedicated to SEAL certifications displayed. The only visible sign of the SEAL programme in the showroom is the certificate that accompanies each recognised product and that can be used as a promotional tool. This credential hangs, soberly, on the wall next to the cashier's desk.
Instead, the SEAL awards are publicised in other places and at other times. Far away from Vientiane and the boutique of the Dok Dao Gallery, the programme and awarded products have been shown under the banners of UNESCO and its partners in international exhibitions and trade fairs such as the Bangkok Gift Fair or the Salon Maison et Objets in Paris. In these venues, the Dok Dao Gallery's awarded textiles are covered by promotion and communication campaigns coordinated by UNESCO, and are publicised through promotional materials such as brochures, catalogues and product tags that aim to ‘enhance the product visibility and marketability’.Footnote 35 The SEAL programme has also been developing a website where all SEAL products and producers' data are listed. This enables interested buyers to contact producers directly and place their orders.
It was precisely in order to reach this international audience that Keomani and her relatives applied for the SEALs. However, the apparent local undermobilisation of these awards, in comparison with the hypermobilisation of the Crafts Prize previously discussed, reveals de facto a discrepancy in the status and value that Keomani and her relatives assign to this specific programme. I believe that this crucial gap has to be discussed with regard to UNESCO's general policy since 2006, when the SEAL officially ‘replaced’ the Crafts Prize and became, as such, the new commercial ‘flagship for handicrafts’ of this international agency.Footnote 36
UNESCO Crafts Prize and SEALs, from humans' to artifacts' qualifications
The reorganisation of UNESCO awards in the field of crafts is directly linked to the progressive reshaping that has been occuring, within this international agency, including the official definition of ‘heritage’ since the 1990s. As Chiara Bortolotto has stated, ‘heritage’, which from then on should be considered as an ‘intangible cultural heritage’, entails ‘a shift away from considering cultural expressions as objects to considering them as processes’.Footnote 37 She notes that formerly, ‘heritage’ was conceived indeed as fixed and static, and reified objects had ‘to be preserved either in museum cabinets, or for intangible forms in archival files and catalogues’. Nowadays, heritage is considered dynamically ‘as a living and creative process […] that stresses the importance of reproduction and transmission of practices for elaboration and adaptation by future generations. […] Heritage does not apply [anymore] simply to ‘cultural objects’ but also to the way of making them, and to the people who are the bearers of this technical knowledge, to ways of life, of worshipping gods, of healing people – ultimately to all aspects of life within a community'.Footnote 38 In this renewed conceptual context, textiles are considered as intangible heritage, not as craft products, but as material embodiment of skills and knowledge. As hand-made objects they indeed embody the cultural tradition of craftspeople and touch, through their ‘aura’, those who acquire them, notably local elites, foreign buyers and tourists, the main targets of UNESCO promotional policies.
The adoption by UNESCO's general policy of a wider definition of cultural heritage, where a concept of immaterial heritage has replaced the earlier, more materialistic one, has been translated in practice through the establishment of different intangible heritage plans such as the Living Human Treasures (launched in 1993), the Proclamation of the Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Heritage (established in 1997) and the adoption of the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (established in 2003). Faced with the emergence of these new devices, the UNESCO Crafts Prize (1990–2005), which had arguably been their precursor, became obsolete. Indeed, the Crafts Prize was too restricted to endorse renewed international heritage policies that had been opened not only to crafts, but to other aspects of social life. For example, the Living Human Treasures programme that insists, like the Crafts Prize, on the continuing transmission of knowledge and skills acts in the enlarged field of ‘traditional arts’ and includes music, dance and theatre as well as craftsmanship. Moreover, it focuses less on the technical expertise in itself than on technical process as an entangled cultural tradition that is a ‘testimony of the human creative genius’ and an endangered practice. Since its establishment, various exemplary bearers and practitioners of intangible cultural heritage have been identified by national agencies involved in the latter programme, including weavers and textile artists in Australia (Liz Williamson), Nigeria (Alhaji Hamida Uba Zango), the Philippines (Haja Appi) and Japan (Keisuke Serizawa), the country that initiated the living heritage paradigm in the 1950s.Footnote 39
Within this renewed UNESCO line, neither the Living Human Treasure programme nor the SEAL awards fit precisely the previous outlines of the Crafts Prize. Indeed, as noted, the first goes beyond crafts, and includes rituals and arts, in which the performative dimensions are considered as embodied cultural expressions while the SEAL is dedicated to handicrafts and focuses on the reified abilities of artifacts to fit international trade norms such as ‘eco-friendship’, social and economic ‘fairness’, ‘excellence’, and so on, as typified in standardised forms. As such, these two devices exemplify the history of the ‘heritage’ paradigm that dealt successively with ‘objects’ and ‘processes’ and the ambivalence of UNESCO's cultural rationale that attempts to accommodate both ‘preservation’ and ‘promotion’; in other words, tradition/heritage and its adequacy to the global economy.
Interestingly, Laos does not yet have any Human Living Treasure among its craftspersons, performers or artists. However, the textiles of six Laotian companies, including four from the Dok Dao Gallery, have been awarded SEALs. As such, since 1991 and the presentation of the UNESCO Crafts Prize to Keomani, the international focus on the world of Laotian textiles has been on commercial promotion of products rather than on the reward of a single artisan's expertise. I have demonstrated indeed that, unlike the Crafts Prize, the SEAL is not a certification of know-how attributed to a specific craftsperson. Instead, it aims to serve as a control mechanism and a marketing device that guarantees the quality of handmade craft products. As such, it is not considered as ‘an award given for the most outstanding piece, but a ‘stamp of approval’ which [aims to certify] that a handicraft product or product line meets the highest standards of quality'.Footnote 40 In consequence, the difference between the Crafts Prize and the SEAL expresses a fundamental displacement of the attention from craftsperson to artefact, or more generally from subject to object.
This discrepancy, entailed conceptually and practically into these two devices attributed by UNESCO, explains the undermobilisation of the SEAL awards by Keomani and her relatives in contrast with the hyperpublicisation of the Crafts Prize. As the SEAL has been awarded far more often than the Crafts Prize it is not appended with the specific ‘aura’ that bears rare devices and their precious effects. As it is object-centred, it furthermore does not testify to humans' abilities, knowledge and experience, all of which the Crafts Prize does by virtue of its focus on traditional artisanship and technical performance. Consequently, as the SEAL does not act as a statement or reinforcement of humans' and artisans' subjectivation and identification, the Dok Dao Gallery's owners neglect it while they incorporate the Crafts Prize into a personal and also familial, regional and even a national history. In fact, the Crafts Prize owes its mobilisation in the Dok Dao Gallery's marketing devices precisely to its matching of this Laotian imagery/imaginary or Lao-ness that intimately connects textiles, individuals, communities and nation self-fashioning.
Brand names, tags and etiquettes: Beyond the fabric
Once their adequacy to the criteria of UNESCO devices has been attested, humans (Crafts Prize/Living Human Treasure) and products (SEAL) are officially labelled by this prestigious international agency. From then on, prizes awarded them are promoted in trade fairs and professional exhibitions all over the world. In those promotional spaces, these certifications are mentioned in UNESCO's written marketing materials, and are in particular materialised through tags and etiquettes.
Brand names and copyrights
Added to products, these material supplements join commercial brochures and a company's own branding which serves to distinguish one company from another. Locally, brand names are generally related to humans who established the firms claiming and strengthening, as such, a strong intimacy between the company's owners and the textiles that they produce. For example, the Dok Dao Gallery is named after Keomani's mother, Dao. Linking entrepreneurs and textiles, these brand names act nowadays as ‘signatures’ that validate producers and the origin and authenticity of products.
By virtue of this naming process, textiles and their producers – often private companies, but also individuals, community groups, cooperatives or public agencies – are fundamentally viewed as closely associated, so intrisically that international programmes such as the SEAL actively encourage and advise company owners to register their products under intellectual property rights regimes. In fact, since its early days and the adoption in 1952 of the Universal Copyright Convention, UNESCO has been engaged in developing copyright in all fields of creation and ‘cultural industries’. Crucial to this convention is the concept of ‘copyright’ that means ‘to protect works, understood to embody the unique personality of their individual authors. […] The expressive component of the original is [then] so venerated that even a reproduction or imitation of it is deemed a form of theft’.Footnote 41 This concept is conceived by this agency as ‘essential for enhancing individual creativity, for the development of cultural industries, the promotion of cultural diversity [and the support of sustainable development while] rampant piracy and low level of enforcement of copyright laws destroy the incentives for the creation and distribution of local culture products in all the countries of the world’.Footnote 42
These international policies on intellectual property laws, in particular those on copyright, are currently topical questions in the small world of Laotian private weaving companies. Indeed, since entrepreneurs decided to label their models under their company's name, they have considered themselves as their sole owners. While Lao P. D.R. has not yet ratified all international property laws (especially on copyright),Footnote 43 private textile workshops have not only labelled their products with name tags but have relied on other media – possibly more powerful than legislation – to publicise textiles as their own and to claim property rights over them. I am thinking in particular of books and exhibition catalogues that are published sometimes at the initiative of entrepreneurs themselves. Those richly illustrated publications are of great importance in the current copyright claim movement in Laos. Indeed, some contemporary textiles woven in private workshops have been exhibited not only inside the country, but in international museums. This public exposure, and their diffusion through catalogues and books, exposes these pieces of fabric to possible reproduction by other textile producers in Laos or elsewhere. Nevertheless, at the same time, they assert and, in a way, attest the ‘very origin’ of those pieces while naming their ‘creators’. Models and entrepreneurs are then at a certain level irremediably associated and their reputation established, both authentified in sum.
These promotional devices, however, do not reduce or solve conflicts that nowadays have increasingly involved entrepreneurs and other merchants in Laos and abroad, with the former blaming the latter for stealing their textiles by copying and selling them as their own. In response, those weavers and merchants present fabrics as common goods belonging to ‘Laotian tradition’ or, in other words, in the public Laotian sphere and, as such, as things that can not be restrictively labelled and considered as owned by any individuals or groups.
The naming of things and labellisation processes are radically new in Laos.Footnote 44 Although some fabrics were – and in some way still are – sometimes marked with discreet signs, those signs were not systematically added to be recognisable by others, but by the weaver herself, her relatives or members of her community. While some could identify the weaver inside these circles of acquaintance, the renown of marks rarely expanded beyond their limits and did not have vocation to do so. Moreover, even if we consider these marks as ‘authors’ signatures', they do not mean that pieces of fabrics were copyrighted and claimed as unreproducible by others.
In fact, in the field of textile production and commercialisation, apart from private companies that set out in the 1990s to conquer world markets, tradespeople have rarely marked their products with tags and labels mentioning the names of their company or weaver, their origin or their composition such as ‘Dok Dao Gallery’, ‘Made/Handmade in Laos’ or ‘100% Laotian Silk’. This is especially true for the hundred merchants of Vientiane's Morning Market, the largest permanent market of the country where a wing is entirely dedicated to handicrafts, in particular to local textiles.Footnote 45 Here, no brand names, no tags and sometimes no shop signs are visible. Although products belonging to named traders' stocks are stored in identified commercial spaces, textiles are never labelled with tangible marks. Moreover, their purchase from suppliers (either weavers or wholesalers) and their sale to clients are rarely monitored. Indeed, merchants usually do not keep detailed records of their commercial activities. Whenever they are sold without any materialised marks, commodified textiles thus become impossible to connect with their previous owners. Not individualised, ‘anonymous’ and part of a collective ‘textile tradition’, their passage through the boutique has been, in a way, dissolved. Sometimes, their history nevertheless continues to be mentioned, but solely through the memory of humans who handle them and reconstuct their biography.
Cultural appropriation challenged
It is important to ask which element(s) of their models do entrepreneurs consider as copyrighted: is it specific designs, structures, colour combinations or formats? And what, in their opinion, should not be reproduced by others? In other words, what do they claim as intellectual property? On what grounds do they consider themselves as the ‘creators’ of the textiles and, hence, as ‘owners’ of proprietary rights on them? These are fundamental questions about local conceptions of authorship and creation in and outside private weaving workshops that need to be addressed.
Whenever they weave, Laotian women draw their inspiration from textiles of their relatives or their neighbours, usually within their ethnic group or group of origin. Whether they are perfect reproductions or reinvented fabrics according to weavers' own inspiration, textiles have always been influenced by changing fashion trends circulating on micro- but also on macro-geographical levels. While national and, latterly, international markets have expanded during the past 60 years, in Vientiane, especially, merchants and specialised weavers have diversified their sources of reference. Indeed, during the second half of the twentieth century, wars and migrations transformed Laotian cities morphologically, sociologically and economically. Textiles from all regions of the country intensively reached the capital and have been, since then, a great and still underexplored wealth of inspiration. Between internal migrations, trade and national politics of culture, textile designs, structures or even colours of various regional and ethnic groups are becoming more and more influential on each other, thus increasingly blurring their previous ethnic or regional outlines and creating a common ‘Lao-ness’.Footnote 46
This traffic, reciprocal influences and borrowings of fabrics have always been free since textiles have been considered as part of a common heritage. We should nevertheless notice that in some contexts, particular designs, colours and the number of ornaments linked to royaltyFootnote 47 have been specifically viewed as attributes of hierarchical ranks, official positions or as family belongings at least since the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. As such, they identified people's ranks, and were not in use among other courtiers. In a way, they were appropriated by individuals or groups for their exclusive use and then may be compared to signatures or current copyrighted trademarks. Interestingly enough, one Vientiane entrepreneur drew on that court etiquette to claim the design of her grandfather, a royal official, as her own and instituted it, after reshaping, as her company's logo. This example challenges not only the common idea that notions such as personal property only arrived with the impact of capitalism or colonial regulation and order on local laws and thoughts,Footnote 48 but demonstrates the fact that among entrepreneurs, property rights on designs could be claimed by virtue of a familial inheritance.
The latter point supports the technical skills claimed by entrepreneurs such as Keomani and her relatives as heirs of Laotian weaving ‘tradition’. In fact, apart from technical expertise, Keomani and her relatives also based their reputation and authority in this field on their collection practices. All Laotian workshop owners have actually brought together private collections of textiles that they have partly inherited and partly gathered during the past decades. Those pieces, called ‘historic’ or ‘antiques’, are considered by local and international collectors as traces of a prestigious – and obviously reinvented – weaving past directly linked to the ‘very origin of the Laotian textile tradition’ – even if they are rarely older than 150 years and if Laos's ‘origin’ is still a matter of debate – and, subsequently, as museographic pieces. They are then usually shown to visitors privately, exhibited in company galleries or even in international museums such as the Museum of Craft and Folk Art of San Francisco. These ‘antiques’ are exhibited not only for their remarkably intricate designs and techniques, but also in order to legitimate and authenticate the contemporary workshops' production. Entrepreneurs indeed adopt textiles as their own and generally present them to visitors as possessions of their family, even if they have been bought, creating thereby a sense of continuity and intimate connection between themselves and the prestigious Laotian weaving heritage. By creating a sense of continuity, they also entail the possibility of a past for Laos as a nation.
If entrepreneurs take their legitimacy as textile producers from the individual re-appropriation of both ‘traditional’ know-how and ‘ancient’ pieces of textiles assembled in collections, their inspiration is, as previously stated, double: both rooted in a Laotian weaving past, and fashioned by contemporary international markets. On the one hand, entrepreneurs have been claiming ‘antiques’ as the main stock of inspiration for their contemporary products, whether they are perfect re-editions or reinterpretations. Thus, ‘historic’ textiles are viewed as repertoires and ‘conservatories’ of old techniques, motifs, textile structures, colour combinations or even textures. Then, if some ‘antique pieces belonging to entrepreneurs’ collections are displayed in exhibitions, most of them are hidden from public eyes and remain in secret so that they cannot be copied. On the other hand, whenever they produce commercial fabrics, those entrepreneurs take into account desiderata of their targeted markets whether they are American, Australian or Japanese. According to them, their innovative creativity and eventually their copyrights on products rely precisely on their knowledge of markets and their adaptability to them. They consider indeed that they take all the risks while distinguishing themselves from other local textiles producers and traders like those of the Vientiane Morning Market who, they argue, are content to reproduce textiles without seeking to innovate.
The purpose is not to discuss whether entrepreneurs are or are not ‘creators’ compared with other Laotian textile producers and merchants but to study the shift in point of view that they have introduced locally regarding textiles. Before the expansion of trade, textiles were representatives of individuals who produced, exchanged or wore them, maintaining as such a symbiotic relationship that encompassed not only themselves as individuals, but their families, their ancestors and finally their community as a whole. With the spreading of commercial exchange and moreover with the internationalisation of these exchanges, this relationship between textiles and humans involved in their commercialisation, more particularly women, has been in a way objectified, while pieces of Laotian past such as know-how, designs or collected fabrics have been appropriated and claimed strategically as personal attributes by individuals.
Locally, those practices initiated by entrepreneurs have introduced a conceptual discrepancy about the outlines of what belongs to the so-called ‘national heritage’. Henceforth, Laotian weaving and textiles are no longer balanced between the public sphere and familial heritage, but have become subjects of appropriations and labellings for commercial purposes. As such, ancient pieces are hidden in private collections while contemporary fabrics are copyrighted for the sole use of their proprietors. In a way, out of the public domain, their values and status changed, while they became potential subjects of theft.
UNESCO's Crafts Prize and SEAL programmes are among numerous global devices that have been expanding a certain idea of ‘culture’ that, globally speaking, was balanced, as Rosemary Coombe perfectly stated, ‘between three dominant assumptions that complete, but also sometimes contradict each other’Footnote 49. The first view ‘identifies culture with the accumulated material heritage of humankind as a whole, or of particular human groups, including monuments and artefacts’ while the second ‘sees it as a process of artistic and scientific creation’ and the third ‘as the material and spiritual activities, products, meanings, and values of a given social group that distinguish it from other groups’.Footnote 50 According to these positions, the right to culture would respectively mean ‘the equal rights of individuals to have access to this accumulated cultural capital’, ‘the right of individuals to freely create their cultural “oeuvres”, with no restrictions, and the right of all persons to enjoy free access to these creations (for example, [sic] museums, concerts, and libraries)’ and finally ‘the right of cultural identity [that] arguably underlies rights of cultural property. This [latter right] is not primarily a right of individual enjoyment (although it is conferred upon individual members of minority groups), but rather is a right to collectivity’.Footnote 51
UNESCO's certifications and the appropriations of entrepreneurs reveal potential conceptual and practical conflicts that may emerge in the near future in relation to the very definition of what belongs to the Laotian public sphere and what can thereby be or not be collected and/or copyrighted for the sole use of an individual, especially when we consider that those individuals may not be the designers or the producers of these products, but entrepreneurs and sometimes even international companies.
Conclusion
Through the comparison of these two UNESCO certifications awarded to the same Laotian weaving company, I have discussed the international politics of culture in relation to local entrepreneurial practices. I have shown that a fundamental conceptual shift has taken place between the UNESCO Crafts Prize personally attributed to Keomani as an expert weaver and the UNESCO Awards of Excellence for Handicrafts awarding four textile models designed and produced by her company. Indeed, the Crafts Prize is dedicated to the recognition of a particularly skilful and creative artisan through the examination of a remarkably handcrafted piece of his/her own. Through this award, this artisan embodies the intangible cultural heritage of his/her country or community linking prestigious reinvented past, present and future. As for the Award of Excellence for Handicrafts, it aims to certify not subject and know-how, but objects and their artefactual qualities according to international trade standards, which include their ‘cultural authenticity’.
This discrepancy between the Crafts Prize and Awards of Excellence for Handicrafts has been particularly emphasised by entrepreneurs such as Keomani. Even if UNESCO, the most prestigious cultural institution in the world, has been issuing both certifications, they indeed do not bear, locally, the same meanings and values. The Crafts Prize has been for example utterly and, in a way, routinely mobilised in the Dok Dao Gallery's marketing devices. It contributes, through its insertion into Keomany's official biography, not only to her self-fashioning as a recognised master weaver, but to the identification and authentication of her relatives and, more generally, of her employees and company as a whole. On the contrary, Awards of Excellence for Handicrafts are rarely mobilised and remained discreet in the shop while they are never mentioned in brochures or discourses. Then, far from being imposed from a top-down perspective, these certifications appear fundamentally as ‘supplements’ with which things, whether humans or non-humans, are imbued, and which both singularise them and transform their position and ‘aura’ at different stages of their social biography and circulation. These supplements are mobilised by local agents whenever they match their commercial everyday ‘tactics’,Footnote 52 these ‘arts of practice’ in unstable places, and, in some way, their own unstable intimacy and self-image.
From an anthropological point of view, this two-label process is significant because it demonstrates that the politics of culture are not only determined by state or by supra-state institutions, but also are performed in a wider space. The example of UNESCO has shown how entrepreneurs, often textile collectors themselves, are constituting Laotian textiles as culturalised and ‘patrimonialized’ goods, and thereby intrinsically linking trade and ‘culture’. This is especially manifest in their marketing strategies, their exhibitions and their private museums, not to mention the variety of written materials on textiles that they produce. These companies, alongside learned societies, non-governmental organisations, consumers from overseas and producers aiming at an international market, are all in their own way engaging in cultural discourses, which deal with textiles and are contributing, in practice, to local and worldwide politics of culture.
