This article uses ethnographic data collected since 1994 in Northern Laos to reassess the modalities of Tai cultural and political influence on the Khmu, a Mon‐Khmer‐speaking highland population, and to understand why, after so many years of ‘Tai‐isation’, distinct identities still exist. For Grant Evans, who conducted fieldwork in Tai‐Dam and Sing Moon (Ksing Mul) villages at the end of the 1980s, the answer lay in the fundamentally dualistic character of Tai‐isation, which both favours assimilation and also tends to perpetuate interethnic boundaries. I will here insist on the fact that Tai‐isation does not imply only the influence of the Tai on the highland peoples’ way of life but also how the latter adapt themselves to this influence with their own cultural resources. Tai‐isation is traditionally an inclusive and therefore ambivalent process which can lead both to the assimilation of some highlanders and simultaneously to the emergence of new identity markers, myths or categories, which transform and structure interethnic relationships. State‐building and Lao nationalism have nonetheless profoundly reshaped these dynamics and Lao‐isation now operates in a radically different conceptual framework.

中文翻译：

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从台化到老挝化：老挝北部durée族的种族变迁

本文使用了自1994年以来在老挝北部收集的人种学数据，重新评估了泰族文化和政治影响力对喀穆语（一种讲高棉语的高地人口）的影响方式，并了解了经过这么多年的“泰化”之后，为什么仍然存在不同的身份。对于格兰特·埃文斯（Grant Evans）而言，他在1980年代末在大潭和星穆（金穆尔）村庄进行了实地调查，答案在于泰化的根本二元性，既有利于同化又倾向于延续种族间的界限。在这里，我将坚持一个事实，即泰化不仅仅意味着泰对高地人民生活方式的影响，而且还暗示泰如何通过自身的文化资源适应这种影响。传统上，适应化是一个包容的，因此矛盾的过程，既可能导致某些高地人的同化，又可能导致新的身份标记，神话或类别的出现，这些新的身份标记，神话或类别改变并构造了人际关系。国家建设和老挝民族主义仍然深刻地重塑了这些动力，老挝化现在在一个截然不同的概念框架中运作。