With his latest book Spirits of the Place, the renowned Buddhologist John Clifford Holt delivers a fine piece of scholarship on a marginal sector of Asian Buddhist studies: Lao Buddhism. It has indeed been almost four decades since Marcel Zago presented his comprehensive study of the Lao religious domain (Rites et ceremonies en milieu bouddhiste lao, Rome: Università Gregoriana, 1972). After that, publications were limited to individual specialized articles or works on the Lao minority in Thailand. Holt's bold project analyzes the current complex religious dynamics in the Lao People's Democratic Republic. He not only tackles canonical questions and makes keen observations on the subject of ritual, he engages political history, state-religion relations, and modern phenomena such as heritage tourism and their relationship to Lao Buddhist practice. Some parts of the book will sound familiar to experts on Laos, and the different chapters cohere to provide an...

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