‘Before others’: construction pioneers in the uplands of northwestern Laos

Abstract

Given that houses have become a key signifier of an orientation towards the future, several villagers in Pliya can be regarded or regard themselves as pioneers of the construction of a new type of house. I will suggest here that the construction of new concrete houses is not to be understood merely as an adoption of lowland styles but as a self‐conscious and selective use of a style of building. Those who are pioneering these houses also discuss their efforts in terms of pioneering acts, emphasising the self‐taught nature of their appropriation of new aspects of craftsmanship. Drawing on long‐term fieldwork among the Khmu of Pliya, and especially on more recent fieldwork in 2019 and 2020, I wish to argue that the way in which new houses have entered the local cosmos and are materialised by pioneering builders highlights a pioneering ethos that infuses local attempts at future‐making, from wet rice cultivation to concrete villas.

The end of bamboo houses in northern Laos

“…More recently, concrete has been spreading widely in rural areas of Laos. As I describe elsewhere (Stolz, 2021a), in only five years since the erection of the first semi-concrete house in Pliya in 2015 the number of houses built either entirely with concrete or with concrete elements in Pliya rose from 2 to over 20. The pace at which locals employed concrete as a building material left me stunned.…”

“…Their new house was planned to be a more refined structure intended to reflect the couple's aspirations: though the upper floor was made of wood and built on stilts in a rather ordinary manner, the ground level was encased with a wall of concrete blocks. It was, in fact, the first semi-concrete house built in the village, after which many houses built with concrete were to follow (Stolz, 2021a(Stolz, , 2021d, apparently replacing the bamboo and timber houses that only a few years ago had made up the built landscape of Pliya.…”

“…This lends themselves for being a temporary shelter for liminal dwelling periods. For more details on this category of building among the Khmu, see Évrard (2006, 125), Damrong Tayanin (1994, 17–18), Stolz (2021, 238–41), and Stolz and Petit (2020).…”

Reality, Realism and the Future

“…Another old-time utopia found alive and well in many parts of the world is infrastructural modernisation. While the progressivists of a certain ilk look to live with, or like, plants, many people in rural Laos selfconsciously choose to live in and stake their identities on the inorganic surroundings of concrete buildings (Stolz 2021). And so do the urban dwellers in Mozambique, who defy urban developers' intent to 'lessen' the humans, and to remove humans from the limelight when it comes to the layout and the functions of their cities (Bertelsen 2021).…”