OF SOUKHUAN AND LAOS Elena Gregoria Chai Chin Fern Faculty ...

those characteristics as well”. Once regarded as an ancient and customary ceremony
only believed and performed by villagers, soukhuan has now been honoured as a
national ceremony. The government’s propaganda that recognizes soukhuan as a Lao
bohan or Lao tradition appears to be successful.
The concept of animism
In Laos, the basis of most traditional religious beliefs revolved around animism.
Heinze (1982:116) explained the concepts of animism in detail and according to her,
can be interpreted in many ways. Heinze noted that the concept of animism has been
wrongly used as a blanket term to simplify very elaborate indigenous beliefs in
developing countries. Weber (1961:4), approaching the subject of souls from a
sociological angle, noted, “These spirits or soul may ‘dwell’ more or less continuously
and exclusively near or within a concrete object or process. But on the other hand,
they may somehow ’possess’ types of events, thing or categories, the behavior and
efficacy of which they will determine. These and similar views are animistic. The
spirits may temporarily incorporate themselves into things, plants, animals, or people;
this is a further stage of abstraction, which is scarcely ever maintained consistently,
spirits may be regarded as invisible essences that follow their own laws, and are
merely ‘symbolized by’ concrete objects.”
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1971) defines animism as: 1) a
doctrine according to which the immaterial soul is the vital principle for every organic
development; and 2) attribution of conscious life and a discrete indwelling spirit to
every material form of reality often including belief in the continued existence of
individual disembodied spirits capable of exercising a benignant of malignant
influence. In the Webster’s 1967 dictionary, there is an additional definition of
animism aside from the above. It is also defined as a belief in the existence of spirits
separable from bodies, such as in Christianity.
In Hasting’s (1921:525) opinion, “in the language of philosophy, animism is the
doctrine which places the source of mental and even physical life in an energy
independent of or at least distinct from the body”. From the point of view of the
history of religions, animism is taken in a wider sense to denote the belief in the
existence of spiritual beings, some attached to bodies of which they constitute a real
personality (souls), others without necessary connection with a determinate body
(spirits).
The anthropological interpretation of animism is based on Tylor (1958:10-11), which
states that “Animism is, in fact, the groundwork of the Philosophy of Religion… the
theory of animism divides into two great dogmas, forming parts of one consistent
doctrine: 1) concerning souls of individual creatures, capable of continued existence
after the death or destruction of the body; and 2) concerning other spirits, upward to
the rank of powerful deities.”
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