Associate ProfessorHolly High

Hi! I’m Holly High.

I’m also:

• an anthropologist with over 25 years’ experience researching Lao PDR;
• passionate about bringing insights from anthropology to a broad, non-specialist audience. I’m a frequent guest on podcasts, radio and news outlets where I’ve discussed anthropology, socialism, and Lao PDR. I write a Substack, Revolutions in Reproduction, about what anthropology and Laos have taught me;

• an experienced applied anthropologist with a track record of impactful commissioned research on Lao PDR, cultural heritage, and policy processes;
• currently available to supervise Honours and PhD students in Anthropology at Deakin University.

Whether you’re a potential student, have a media enquiry, or are interested in knowing more about my research, I’ve provided some FAQs below to get you started.

To get in touch, email holly.high@deakin.edu.au.

N.B. if you are contacting me about peer reviewing or examining scholarly work, please read my statement on the use of AI here. 

What made you an anthropologist?

I was probably always an anthropologist, but to be honest when I arrived at university as an undergraduate student, I hadn’t heard of it.

At high school (All Saints College, Bathurst), I’d aced Asian Studies and loved the way my economics teacher taught Marx, Smith, Ricardo… all these competing theories about human motivation. It seemed profound and philosophical.

So I headed to ANU to study economics. But this was 1994, the height of microeconomics. The debates I loved were confined to one subject: economic history. The rest was statistics and formulas we were expected to memorise and apply, not question and dissect.

I fell into a spin. On approaching my economics lecturer with my concerns, he told me that if those were the questions I wanted to ask, I was studying the wrong degree. I remember walking out of one of my economics exams in a half-baked, one-woman protest. Thankfully, ANU assigned me an academic advisor. When I told him what was bothering me, he told me about anthropology.

At that time, a wonderful economic anthropologist—Professor Chris Gregory—taught first year. I remember sitting in lectures taking notes as he talked about reciprocity and fieldwork and ethnography and how anthropology challenges your preconceptions by exposing you to difference. I was 18 years old and speechless. I wanted to be an anthropologist so badly I couldn’t say it aloud. I wrote it in my diary, then hid the diary under my bed.

I took as many anthropology subjects as I could possibly fit into an Arts degree. The world was changing around me: I accidentally crossed a picket line protesting against Howard’s gutting of university campus life because I was trying to get to an anthropology lecture (only to find it had been cancelled); I saw Powderfinger and The Prodigy play in a tiny venue called The Asylum; I got nose rings; the internet, mobile phones and laptops arrived; I removed my nose rings. But anthropology stayed steady, one subject leading to the next until, after a brief hiatus working largely for the Australian Aid Agency AusAID, I was doing my PhD.

One day, after fieldwork when I was writing up my thesis, my PhD supervisor Professor Andrew Walker knocked on the door of my office in Coombs Building. I opened it to find him holding a printout of “Black skin white skin,” one of the first things I’d written since flying in from Laos. It was my contribution to a Thai-Yunnan Bulletin he was putting together in memory of Peter Hinton, an anthropologist we’d both worked with and admired. He wanted to know: What was my end game? What did I want from my PhD? Previously I’d spoken cautiously about maybe going back to government or aid work. Now he wanted the straight answer.

Cheeks flushing, eyes fixed on the carpet, I admitted that, yes, I wanted to be an anthropologist. I wanted it so badly I thought I would throw up right there in the crazy-angled Coombs hallway.

He looked down at my article draft, back at me, and said: “I want you to know you can do it.”

Why Laos?

It was a pragmatic choice. By the time I formulated my PhD proposal, I knew enough about anthropology to know about scarcity of funding. At that time, Australian government research funding prioritised the Asia Pacific region, so it seemed sensible to limit my choices to somewhere in Australia or our region.

Within that, Laos stood out. I found very little ethnographic work on Laos when I surveyed the literature, and almost none I considered gold standard. Grant Evans (a sociologist who later identified as an anthropologist) wrote about Laos after the revolution but admits he was never allowed to stay in a village overnight and always had government minders accompanying him. A bunch of applied anthropologists worked in Laos, although with little scope to conduct classic fieldwork. Colonial-era French anthropology and, after them, CIA-sponsored US social science research, although valuable, struck me as anachronistic and compromised.

I travelled in the region before submitting my PhD proposal, crossing from Thailand into Laos at Chiang Khong, amazed to find that in the space of a few meters, everything changed. Compared to Thailand’s blaring consumerism and mincing speech, Laos felt sparsely-populated, plain-spoken, but confident. We took a slow boat down the Mekong, and when it stopped to load and unload cargo, children came down from the hills begging for pens, a twinkle in their eyes suggesting some great joke I couldn’t catch. I wanted to follow them back to those hills.

What do you specialise in, within Laos?

I like to joke that Laos has only 8 million people: if one narrows one’s research down to such a small country, one can’t afford to specialise much further than that. So when I say I study Laos, I mean all of it.

But seriously, my take on regional studies is this: anthropology is holistic. This is because any slice of humanity contains the full scope of humanity’s diversity in one form or another. George Devereux made this argument in From Anxiety to Method. I can’t step through all his reasoning here, but the upshot of his insights for a practicing anthropologist is this: no matter where you choose to do your research, that is your window onto the whole of humanity. Your fieldsite, that real-world instance of human experience, is your starting point. It need not define your endpoint, i.e. your contribution to knowledge.

I’m best known for my engagement with the everyday politics and philosophy of Lao socialism. I’ve written about development projects, statecraft, decision-making, economic thought, and values,

I’ve also researched everyday life in Laos, including religion, ritual, mythology, health and illness, infectious disease, family and kinship, reproduction, parenting, rice farming, gift giving and more.

When I write about Laos, most of the time I’m trying to do three things:

• Provide accurate information about Laos (especially given the dearth of independent, accessible and reliable sources in English about Laos);
• Advance anthropological debates about core cross-cutting issues that speak to fundamental truths about human experience; and
• Draw out what is practically useful in these debates and advances, for myself or others.

I’m new here: where should I start if I want to read your work?

On pregnancy birth and parenting, start by looking at:

• my online exhibition “Listening to Parents";
• this article in The Conversation about birth in Australia compared to Laos; and
• this open access article about abortion in Laos.

On socialism in Laos

• This article in Anthropological Forum is my most accessible open access summary of my findings;
• The Ethnogaphic and LIterature Report to ACIAR on our research into policy-making processes in Laos makes a detailed argument (email me directly for access); 
• I make my most extended argument about Lao socialism in Projectland, available via online booksellers or University of Hawaii Press.

On anthropological theory and methods, see:

• As if Already Free, which is open access. The introductory chapter I authored with Joshua O. Reno presents a synthesis of David Graeber's anthropology, and comments on the synergies between activism and anthropology,
• this article in The Conversation on the use and abuse of the legacy of David Graeber.
• For my contributions to the anthropology of the gift, my most cited is this one: Re-reading the potlatch in a time of crisis: Debt and the distinctions that matter. Social Anthropology 20 (4): 363-379. (Paywalled: please contact me if access is an issue);
• I've applied the anthropology of the gift to rethinking ethnographic methods in Ethnographic exposures, American Ethnologist 37(2):308-322 and Melancholia and Anthropology, American Ethnologist 38 (2): 217-233 (both paywalled: please contact me if access is an issue).

On Asian Studies, a good place to start is:

• Fields of Desire, where I develop core arguments about state and society, available through online booksellers or the publisher NUS.
• Stone Masters, which makes an argument about comparison, place and power in Southeast Asia, available through NUS.
• A lot of people contact me about the US bombardment of Southeast Asia. Specifically, wanting to access “Electronic records of the airwar over Southeast Asia: A database analysis” Journal of Vietnam Studies 8 (4), 86-124 also regrettably behind a paywall: please email me directly and I will arrange access.

What are you working on now?

I’m writing a book about women and Lao socialism. I’m fascinated by the negotiation under socialism about what is collectivised and what isn’t. Often such conversations end up discussing the home in some way: either freeing women from the home so they can join the collective effort, or reaffirming the home as the effective backbone of the economy, what in Laos is called “the family economy.” And you have to remember that the Lao ethnic group, the dominant ethnic group is Laos, is matriarchal and homes are inherited largely by women, and usually women are the backbone of family economies. So Lao socialism has this really interesting relationship to women.

I’m writing the book as essentially a theoretical argument about the anthropology of women (from the perspective of a socialist-aware anthropology) as the introduction, followed by short chapters that are character sketches and stories about the real women I’ve encountered in Laos and in the archives.