Households and Villages: The Political-Ritual Structures of Tai Communities

Abstract

Villages seem natural units with an internal coherence that binds their members together. This perception in anthropology comes from the earlier functional theoretical orientation that produced classic ethnographies of villages. We thus regard household clusters as villages or hamlets. The question of what these clusters may mean to the people who inhabit them remains unexamined, however. In mainland Southeast Asia there is a wide range of possibilities in the meaning of clusters of households. In some, markers seem to provide some reality to the concept of village as a unit: fences; gates; and additional nonhousehold structures such as temples and spirit altars. Periodically there may be rituals demarcating the community as a whole, closing it off to outsiders. When these exist it seems reasonable to talk about the village as a unit. What does MvillageH mean with other clusters of households where none of these markers may exist? In order to understand what we label as villages, we need to first look at households and relations among households that constitute these clusters. The theoretical range is from households that are separate units, existing by themselves with no relations to other households or larger collections of people, to places where households have little independent reality and the village or other groupings are the major organizational forms. In mainland Southeast Asia neither extreme exists; villages have some ethnographic reality and usually people prefer to live in clusters of households for protection or enjoyment of social interactions. There are isolated households, but those I know of are families in the slow process of moving, with stops to farm and renew stores along the way. This essay explores the ways lowland Tai2 groups use rituals to mark the autonomy of households and incorporate them into villages and larger regional groups. After describing the ritual features associated with Tai households, villages, and supra-village groups, the political-religious organization for three Tai groups is examined for an explanation of what village might mean.