Abstract. – In Laos, the 1975 communist revolution brought an end to the constitutional monarchy. The new rulers, aware of their lack of legitimacy, quickly realized that they would have to fill the former elite’s symbolic and ritual frame. This paper shows that this return to traditional forms of power conceals the main anthropological implications of the shift caused by the communist revolution, which actually altered radically and permanently the Lao mode of being in society. [Laos, power, society, gift, social change]