The Textual Corpus of the Lanten Yao of Laos: Methodological Issues in the Collection, Classification, Cataloguing and Evaluation of Manuscripts.

Abstract

The ritual tradition of the Lanten Yao (Mun) of Northern Laos exhibits marked Daoist structures and features. From 2015–20, with grants from the British Library Endangered Archives Programme and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, our research team member Joséba Estevez conducted on-site digitization of a corpus of 2120 texts, consisting of most of the manuscripts in use by the Lanten ritual specialists in northern Laos. This article presents some of the basic characteristics of this corpus, as well as some of the issues involved in cataloguing and classifying the manuscripts. We discuss the criteria used to select, out of the corpus, a “reference collection” of the best versions of 79 unique and representative texts representing the complete ritual tradition, and highlight the benefits of a parallel textual and ethnographic methodology for understanding the structure of the corpus.