ABSTRACT
A social unit – any social unit – exists and perpetuates itself within a spatial frame, which is at the same time a frame of reference. In this chapter I shall look at the household among the Tai Yong in northern Thailand as a social unit which occupies a ‘lived space’; this lived space is simultaneously a social space and a living space, the physical framework of which is the house. I argue that the organization of social units in Thailand – in this case among the Yong – may be best understood if this physical framework is taken seriously as an analytical entity, and that ‘kinship’ and ‘family’ (which have traditionally been taken as primary analytical entities in anthropology) are best seen, not as independent variables, but as contingent phenomena associated with the household, and even with the physical house itself. I shall illustrate this by looking at the Yong house (hold) as the smallest unit of the moral community that is Yong society. By focusing on the house (hold), rather than on ‘kinship’ among the Yong, I believe that earlier uncertainties about Thai society as ‘loosely structured’ around either cognatic, patrilineal or matrilineal kin groups, may be dispelled by shifting the focus from one of descent to one of production, consumption and commensality. The argument advanced by Janet Carsten (1997: 12) for the Langkawi in Malaysia also holds good for the Yong: ‘Kinship is a process of becoming, not a fixed state. The process is brought about through a variety of means that include feeding, living together, fostering, and marriage.’ On the basis of my ethnographic fieldwork among Tai Yong in a village in Lamphun province, 1 I would add to Carsten’s list of means of the ‘kinship’ process the facts of constructing and inhabiting a house. The house represents a form of capital, both material and symbolic, and I shall discuss some of the ways in which this capital is administered among the Yong by looking at the way in which they move houses, and move in and out of houses. I shall also look at the meaning of the ‘house’ in a wider socio-political context where it is employed as a metaphor for the ‘imagined community’ on various levels.
