10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4560
application/pdf
2239-625X
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2
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urn:nbn:it:unica-28022
Rosalie Stolz
Anuac
Listening through houses: Changing communities of sounds in Northern Laos
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
10
Thematic section: The anatomy of houses: Materialities of being at home
2021-12-22
2021-02-05
2021-12-31
2021-12-31
155-176
1
Rosalie Stolz
2021/12/22
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4560
155
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
2239-625X
2
176
urn:nbn:it:unica-28022
Listening through houses: Changing communities of sounds in Northern Laos
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/4560/5026
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                                       2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2021: 155-176




Listening through houses
Changing communities of sounds in northern Laos
Rosalie STOLZ
Heidelberg University




ABSTRACT: In the uplands of northern Laos, in which bamboo and timber houses have so
far prevailed, concrete houses are now on the rise. It will be argued that houses can be
used as prisms to illuminate processes of social change. Drawing on experiences of
staying in both a timber house and a new concrete one over the course of long-term
ethnographic fieldwork among the Khmu, a key experiential difference will be analysed:
their different soundscapes. While one can easily listen through the cracks and spaces
between timber boards, concrete walls produce a perceivable barrier between inside and
outside. It will be argued that the changing materiality of the house and its (sonic)
repercussions contribute to shaping a different relationship between the house, its
residents, and the village. Finally, it will be argued that when inquiring into the shifting
sensory experience of living in concrete houses in a social context in which houses are
of central importance yet are not the places where locals spend much of their time,
emphasis should not solely be given to the house but to other meaningful locales of
sociality.
KEYWORDS: HOUSES; MATERIALITY; SOUNDS; KHMU; LAOS.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Rosalie Stolz
Listening through houses: Changing communities of sounds in northern Laos
2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2021: 155-176.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4560
156                                                                            ROSALIE STOLZ




   This article discusses the changing acoustic experience of new concrete
houses in upland northern Laos. It presumes that when the materiality of
houses changes, so does the sensory experience of the house space. This
assumption is based on the ethnographic experience of staying in one of the
newly erected concrete houses in a Khmu village, having already been
familiar with living in timber houses. Drawing and reflecting on this
experience, this article will shed light on the ways in which one can listen (or
not) through houses – an aspect of the changing materiality of new
vernacular houses that still awaits more comprehensive anthropological
attention.
   Houses are more than mere architecture; their social, ritual and – overall
– processual nature has been testified to in an enormous body of
anthropological literature1. Yet, also “less tangible phenomena such as light,
sound and air, are part of the sensuous experience of buildings” (Bille and
Sørensen 2016: 159). In his article “Lighting up the Atmosphere”, Tim Ingold
(2016) poses the question “Can there be architecture without atmosphere?”.
He proposes that “a building is as much a thing of air, light sound and mood
as it is a construction wrought from solidary elements” (ibidem: 163). These
intangible dimensions of houses play an important yet so far rarely
considered role when discussing the interrelationships between houses and
their residents.
   Transformations of the materiality of houses, which go along with the
increasing preference for concrete over bamboo and timber houses in
northern Laos, are a good entry point for approaching the shift in sensory
experience that is tied to the changing materiality and design of houses.
Being familiar with a particular sensory house environment, that is, with the
sensory qualities of the house that surrounds the inhabitants, the experience
of a new house environment brings one’s sensory expectations to one’s
attention and triggers reflections among residents2. Here, this article is
inspired by the phenomenological approaches to sociality in and across
houses developed by Christine Helliwell (1996, 2006) and Catherine Allerton
(2013). For the purposes of this article, I will particularly focus on the village

1. See, for instance, the collections edited by Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones (1995)
and by Stephen Sparkes and Signe Howell (2003).
2. In order to emphasise this sensorial quality of everyday sociality and moving in the home,
based on her research in Spain and the UK, Sarah Pink (2003) suggested the term “sensory
home”. See also Irene Cieraad’s discussion of the role of sound in memories of the child-
hood home (Cieraad 2010: 99).


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LISTENING THROUGH HOUSES                                                                    157


soundscape and the changes in the acoustic and relational dimensions of the
emerging concrete houses. The term “soundscape” is used here to
denominate the acoustic environment, understood broadly (Samuels et al.
2010; cf. Schafer 1994)3. Yet the aim is not to pursue an anthropology of
sound (Cox 2018; Feld, Brenneis 2004) more widely but to approach the
qualities of (acoustic) sensations in relation to social processes, local
meaning-making and social commentary (cf. Stasch 2013).
   This focus is an outcome of my ethnographic experience of the changing
sensory qualities of concrete houses in contrast to bamboo and wooden
houses, as well as of the local renderings of this difference, also in
connection to additional rumours that surround ideas and valuations of
boundaries and permeability, drawing inspiration from works that use
reflexive accounts of the ethnographer’s perception of relational aspects of
house materiality (Allerton 2013; Helliwell 1996, 2006), I will relate to my
own experience by comparing the impact of living in a wooden and a
concrete house in the field. Since 2013, I have been conducting research in
an upland Khmu village in northwestern Laos and have lived most of the
time in a small wooden house, together with my son and husband, and,
during later stays, I have lived with closely related interlocutors in their
wooden, sometimes bamboo houses, and, most recently, in a concrete house.
It is the awkward mixture of feeling both familiar and unfamiliar with this
new sensory environment of the concrete house that I will use to reflect
upon sensory and relational expectations cultivated in the field and those
reminding me of my home expectations beyond the field4. Before discussing
these shifts in the sensory experience of houses, the ethnographic setting
and the transformation of vernacular houses will be briefly presented.

Khmu housing change
   Until recently, among the Khmu, Mon-Khmer speakers in upland Laos,
houses have commonly been built on stilts. Their walls and floors have been
made either of woven bamboo mats or, more recently, of wooden boards;
they have been covered with either leaves, bamboo mesh, corrugated iron or,
recently, modern roof panels. Houses usually consist of one main room

3. In this sense, the term is used as heuristically here, not necessarily implying that there is
such a thing as a soundscape comparable to a landscape; see Tim Ingold’s critique of the
concept (Ingold 2007).
4. Early research was funded by a doctoral scholarship from the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for
the Humanities Cologne and recent fieldwork by a postdoctoral research stipend granted by
the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. Elsewhere, I have elaborated on the connection between
houses and kinship (Stolz 2021b), and on the importance of my family’s residence for the re-
search process and our becoming in the field (Stolz 2020).

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158                                                                          ROSALIE STOLZ


which is sparsely furnished with a shelf, a few low wooden stools, nowadays
often a TV, and sleeping mats that are rolled up against the wall during the
day5. Kitchens are either detached rooms that are connected to the main
room by a veranda or, in continuation with local building traditions (Évrard
2006: 128; Tayanin 1994: 36f.), the hearth is included in the main room.
Nowadays, separate kitchen buildings may also be built next to the new
concrete houses. Although the main room often does not have visible
divisions, there are important distinctions: Access to the house for guests
and the places of ancestor worship are based on the directions
uphill/downhill (for more details see Stolz 2021b: 43-47). More than an
architectural object, a Khmu house is also a social entity that embraces and
unites its residents, the house group, and connects them with other houses,
ancestors, and house spirits (ibidem: 47-53; for the neighbouring Rmeet see
also Sprenger 2006). It is not uncommon to say that “the house of Ta Man”
participated during harvesting, rather than spelling out the names of the
individual members of this particular house. While certainly not in all
contexts, in some more pronouncedly ritual contexts, persons are seen and
behave as representatives of the houses they belong to. Accordingly, the
local word for house (kaaŋ)6 denotes the physical object as well as the house
group it shelters.
   Concrete is becoming highly attractive, and not only in upland Laos. In
Pliya, an upland village in northwestern Laos that was characterised by a
variety of bamboo and wooden houses until only a few years ago, the shift to
concrete is remarkable. In fact, given the accelerated pace with which local
inhabitants envisage concrete house building projects, concrete appears to
be the key future building material. Concrete houses appear to manifest and
underline most visibly the inhabitant’s aspirations, their success and
progressiveness. Although the earlier move from bamboo to timber (for a
discussion, see Stolz 2021c; for the neighbouring Rmeet, see Sprenger 2021)
already entailed many transitions related to work, technology, monetary
resources, rituals, and gender, the shift to concrete appears particularly
noteworthy – in terms of construction work, the shifting articulation of
aspirations (Stolz 2021a), associated and wider socio-economic change, and
last but not least also in terms of the daily experience of living in concrete
houses.

5. There has been a recent yet moderate increase in furniture. A few households have inves-
ted in manufactured shelves that are offered irregularly by mobile vendors coming through
the area. Apart from this, home-made shelves are the main items of furniture.
6. Foreign words in italics are Khmu terms. The transcription of Khmu terms largely follows
Svantesson et al. 2014.


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LISTENING THROUGH HOUSES                                                                  159




 FIG 1: A particularly refined exemplar of the now popular concrete houses in Pliya. Photo by
 Rosalie Stolz (2020).


   Concrete is surely one of the iconic materials of modernity (Forty 2016:
14) and is celebrated and disapproved of at the same time. In the present,
while Western architecture is turning to natural and renewable building
materials in search of a sustainable architecture, concrete is conquering ever
more areas in which such building materials have reigned until now. There is
some irony in the contrast between the attitude towards bamboo among
scholars of vernacular architecture, on the one hand, who regard it as a
“sustainable building resource for the future” (Vellinga, Oliver and Bridge
200: 33), and among my Khmu interlocutors, on the other hand, for whom
bamboo houses are largely associated with the past and have become an
index of poverty (Stolz 2021a). However, bamboo houses will continue to
exist as long as the house owners lack the means to replace them. Commonly
equated with modernity (Archambault 2019: 692; Forty 2016: 14ff.), cement
has produced a contrast with local, now backward appearing building
materials (Gowlland 2020: 127) and is a major factor in the “aesthetic
politics” in which house building projects are involved (Elinoff 2016).
Discussing this change in rural Isan, Thailand, Claudio Sopranzetti (2018:

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160                                                                ROSALIE STOLZ


94) states that the Isan villagers now come to see their wooden houses as
“incomplete houses, waiting to be contained by cement walls”. Indeed, the
inclusion of concrete parts is a trend to be observed in Laos as well, as Holly
High has shown with regard to southwest Laos and Pierre Petit for the
northeast (High 2014: 75; Petit 2020: 177ff.).
   Concrete houses appear to fix residence much more than timber houses
do. As they cannot easily be deconstructed and moved, they are much less
flexible in terms of their life-cycles. Before the usage of concrete, the
physical house was subordinate to the housegroup (khon kaaŋ) and its cycle:
when a housegroup ceased to exist, for instance when a widow living on her
own died or a couple moved elsewhere, the house was deconstructed.
Bamboo houses, in particular, can be erected rather quickly and, in general,
can quite flexibly mirror the developmental cycle of the housegroup.
Unoccupied houses, until now, did not exist. Now, with substantial
investment being made in apparently more permanent concrete houses, the
question arises as to whether the life-cycle of the housegroup will be
predicated upon the changing life and durability of the physical concrete
house. Concrete not only cements particular social relations and appears to
give them a more durable form, but it might also cement socio-economic
differences (Stolz 2021a). Yet concrete also shapes the experience of the
living space that it encloses.

The experience of living spaces
   One of the general tenets of the anthropology of the house is that houses
are more than mere physical shelter (Carsten 1997, 2018; Carsten, Hugh
Jones 1995; Howell 2003; Janowski 1995; Sparkes, Howell 2003; Waterson
2009 [1990]). It is also “an ordinary group of people concerned with their
day-to-day affairs, sharing consumption and living in the shared space of a
domestic dwelling” (Carsten, Hugh-Jones 1995: 45). The social processes
unfolding in, at and against the background of houses are tied to the
physical form of the house. Taking a processual view, the processes of
kinship and sociality and the process of the house can be intimately
connected (ibidem: 40). This has been illustrated by Maurice Bloch’s (1995)
study of the house among Madagascar’s Zafimaniry: the choice of wood used
for the house mirrors the stages of the lifecycles of its inhabitants; the
houses of newlyweds were described by Bloch as relatively flimsy, permeable
buildings when compared with the more stable, less permeable, hardwood
plank houses of established families. With time, hardwood planks will be
added, and the house is said to harden, to acquire “bones” – thereby drawing
an analogy between human bones and the dark core wood (ibidem: 78). The


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LISTENING THROUGH HOUSES                                                         161


shape and set up of buildings have been described as being closely tied to
images of human bodies (Blier 1983, 1987; Carsten, Hugh-Jones 1995: 3-4).
This might extend beyond the anthropomorphism of the house (Blier 1983)
and might quite literally mean that the house is to some extent alive as well.
Roxana Waterson (2009) thus speaks of “the living house”.
   The materiality of the house, as increasingly argued, thus not only reflects
but has noteworthy effects on the social processes taking place in and
around houses (Gillespie 2000). Materials can trigger aspirations
(Archambault 2018), can entail dangerous qualities, for instance, of blood
that one needs to get rid of (Zuckerman and Enfield forthcoming), and they
certainly leave an imprint on the experience of the living space. The case of
the potentially perilous effect of “blood” in houses particularly highlights
that the experience of materials and especially house materials is intricately
tied to locally cherished perceptions and qualities, as well as local notions of
“substances” and their connotations. One cherished aspect of vernacular
houses in Southeast Asia is their permeability.
   Wooden and bamboo houses have received the most attention with regard
to the sensory experience of living spaces – with an emphasis on their
permeability. The permeability of timber and bamboo houses is a feature
that is directly connected with the experience and practice of sociality. This
permeability “allows an almost unimpeded flow of both sound and light”
(Helliwell 2006: 52), but also of other substances, or, as Catherine Allerton
points out, for smells and spirits. In her study of Gerai Dayaks of Borneo,
Christine Helliwell (1996, 2006) speaks of a “community of voices” that is
established within and across the permeable bamboo and wooden walls. She
recounts how she was puzzled and irritated by the fact that her host
appeared to be constantly talking to herself, only to find out that her host
was, in fact, engaged in conversations with neighbours and passers-by
(ibidem). In other words, conversations do not stop at walls.
   Given the permeability of houses, floor plans accentuate walls more
strongly than they are truly relevant, as Catherine Allerton (2013: 51) has
argued. Floor plans might only be of limited help in the understanding of
social boundaries, for a wall might not be a barrier in the social and sensory
sense – at least not when walls are permeable. Indeed, this is especially the
case for house walls made of bamboo mesh, which do not hinder light,
sounds and smells from entering. As can be seen in Figure 2, a bamboo house
does not entirely shield those inside the house from the outside. Sitting
inside this house during a wedding feast, one can still talk to those who are
outside. The gap between the floor and wall mats allows things to be handed
over from the outside into the house. In any simple floor plan, sketched by
an anthropologist who is at least as untalented at architectural drawing as I

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162                                                                       ROSALIE STOLZ


am, this gap would be omitted. But as well as really crossing the “boundary”
of the walls, light comes in and bathes the room in soft light and, as I wish to
focus on more in detail, it also allows sounds to enter and leave and does not
trap them inside.




 FIG 2: A wedding scene in a relatively permeable bamboo house. Photo by Rosalie Stolz
 (2020).


   Though allowing less light and sound to enter than bamboo houses,
wooden houses are relatively permeable as well. The generous gaps between
the wooden boards allow glimpses of the outside and vice versa, as well as
conversations across walls. Especially in a bamboo house, but also in a
wooden house, the sounds of the daily rhythms of activities are to be heard
everywhere in the village. The cock crows, there is the early sound of water
from the well hitting the empty plastic buckets hard, the sound of rice being
winnowed each morning and evening, the noise of splitting firewood at the
hearth, the later sound of machetes being sharpened on the wet stone. All of
these sounds contribute to the rhythmisation of village life (see Allerton
2013: 50 for a similar and vivid description of the sounds of village life on
Flores, Indonesia). The village is perhaps best captured, to borrow and


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LISTENING THROUGH HOUSES                                                             163


expand Helliwell’s (2006) expression, as a community of sounds pertaining to
the village soundscape that enters every home. This community of sounds
comprises not only the voices of persons but also the sounds of handling
tools, the sounds of animals but also of spirits. Paying attention and
listening to sounds is an important element of navigating this community of
sounds7. Part of this navigating is the detecting of uncommon, significant
sounds: at night, the usual amount of dog barking does not lead to any
reaction, but notable intensive dog-barking will be inquired into either by
peering through the planks and boards or by descending the staircase with a
torch. Many can tell any passer-by by the sound of his footsteps.
   Gauging and evaluating the meaning of sounds takes place as well. The
sounds of animals, especially the cry of raptors, are listened to and evaluated
in order to inquire into whether this is “a normal raptor’s” cry or whether
this sound rather indicates the presence of the tiger spirit (see Stolz 2018; cf.
Bubandt 2014). A baby crying incessantly at night is also listened to with
heightened awareness; and soon, some neighbours will be heard to open
their doors to go and check on the infant. One night, our neighbour’s small
child, Aay Man, was plagued by a serious cough and was heard crying at
night. His classificatory grandmother came to us in order to ask for remedies
against the diarrhoea that he had developed as well. When his crying did not
stop and I heard several more doors open, I went myself to see what was
going to happen. Entering the house of Aay Man8, I was astonished to find
not just a few neighbours but almost the whole neighbourhood and even
close kin from other neighbourhoods assembled, all sitting and watching
poor Aay Man and his mother. Anyone who had a charm or healing power
tried to give it to Aay Man. In this case it was not so much the cough that
concerned these neighbours and close kin, but the fear that the tiger spirit
might try to get hold of the baby (for more background on this case see Stolz
2018). When Aay Man suddenly stopped crying and sucked his mother’s
breast, this was to the relief surely not only of those who had come to the
house upon hearing the incessant crying, but also of others who had not
gone but who were still paying attention to what was happening. This
participation in the lives and problems of others is expressed in the local
normative notion of “watching (over) each other” (sŋəəy yᴐ) – which entails
cooperative and supporting acts but also simply the taking notice of and
interest in what happens to others. Yet, in such a dense community of
sounds, selective ignoring of sounds is quite important as well.

7. For the role of sounds and listening in multispecies encounters see Feld 2012 and Kohn
2013.
8. All names have been changed.

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164                                                               ROSALIE STOLZ


   Permeability can also have its downsides. For one, “[k]nowledge of the
gaze of others” (Helliwell 2006: 56) might be a constant aspect of behaviour
and a source of continuous social control. Within a village of bamboo and
timber houses one can rarely be sure of being beyond the earshot of
neighbours and passers-by. There is a notable difference between my
interlocutors’ more intimate accounts when beyond the village, in field and
forest, and the accounts verbalised in the village, in which an element of
diplomacy and awareness of potential listeners is involved. Permeable
bamboo and wooden houses might also enable spirits to sneak in (Telle
2007: 201), and unripe blood in its metaphoric quality may stick to parts of
the house (Allerton 2013: 37; Zuckerman, Enfield forthcoming). The
materiality of the house and its ascribed properties (not all of which are
tangible), as these examples hint at, extend beyond the control of its
residents. This is also mentioned by Kari Telle (2007: 202), who states that
an “often overlooked aspect of material things is that they cannot be fully
mastered”.
   Given that permeability is mentioned here with its potential of fostering
social ties, making up the community of voices, occasionally with harmful
potential, as in the case of spirits potentially sneaking in, the shift to
concrete is likely to inhibit the diffusion of sound and light, with
implications for social interactions within and across walls. Geoffrey
Gowlland has discussed the sociopolitical context of the shift from slate to
concrete (and back) among the Paiwan of Taiwan (Gowlland 2020), but also
what he calls the “atmosphere of living spaces”. The latter includes not only
sensory qualities, but also the experience of temperature and air circulation.
Concrete, according to Gowlland (2020: 138), “creates a sealed, impermeable
envelope” that is “a more efficient, impermeable barrier between the inside
and outside of homes”. This barrier, as Gowlland (ibidem) argues, impacts
the subjectivity of residents, who begin to think of themselves as modern
Sinicised subjects. This connection between aesthetic decisions by
housebuilders, their subjectivities, conceptions of citizenship and political
world-making has been drawn by Eli Elinoff. Elinoff (2016) has argued that
in northeastern Thailand “a house is more than a house”, but that it is a site
and medium for forging identities and belonging ingrained with politics:
“[T]he aesthetics of the house and the rearrangements of its materiality
construct new modes of political and moral being and belonging that
remake, but do not completely disassemble, existing hierarchies of power”
(ibidem: 612f.). As Kari Telle (2007: 212) shows for concrete houses on
Lombok, “[o]pting for this [modern, concrete] style, people signal adherence
to the value of independence associated with modernity”. The physical and


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LISTENING THROUGH HOUSES                                                         165


sensory barrier of concrete walls might reinforce the resident’s ideal of or
striving for selective disconnection and personal autonomy. Choosing
cement, on this basis, is about much more than choosing a popular building
material but appears to be connected to the cultivation of a subjectivity that
is deemed modern, as Gowlland (2020) and Elinoff (2016) argue, to a shift in
values, as Telle (2007) suggests, as well as in the relational nature of
dwelling in a changing community of sounds, as I wish to show in the
following.

“There are no winds”
   The number of concrete houses in Pliya has risen over only a few years;
where there were only 2 houses with concrete elements in 2015, in 2020 21
houses had already been built with concrete. The diversity of these new
concrete houses is striking, varying from villas to two-storey houses.
Astonished at the rising and apparently uncontested popularity of concrete
houses, in daily conversations during my more recent research stays in
September 2019 and January and February 2020 I asked the residents of the
new houses what they found particularly “good” (lə) about living in their new
houses. Actually, not many advantages were related to me in a clear-cut
manner, apart from the fact that these houses were better because concrete
was widely regarded as preferable generally. What I was told by Eem Sen and
others was that in the new concrete houses “there are no winds” (pəə a
hntrəəy). Arguably, there is more to wind in these statements than air
circulation. As mentioned above, the striking feature of wooden houses, and
even more so of bamboo houses, is their permeability for sounds, smells, and
often also glimpses. Anyone living in a house of wooden boards or plaited
bamboo is aware of the fact that what happens inside can either be seen or
heard outside or both. Arguably, the locally circulating remarks that the nice
thing about concrete houses is that winds (hntrəəy) cannot easily enter them
refer as much to sounds as to ventilation.
   A concrete house is like an envelope, producing a perceptible boundary
between the outside and the inside, and shielding the inside from the sounds
outside. Compare the impression of the interior of the bamboo house (Figure
2) and of a new concrete house (Figure 3): while there is a certain sense in
which the interior of the bamboo house during the wedding is marked as
separate from the outside – it is not just anyone who is allowed to enter and
the socio-spatial dimensions of the interaction in the interior are predicated
on relative kin ties – the interior cannot be said to be completely shielded off
from the outside. The permeability of the walls brings the outside to the
attention of those inside and the other way around. When all the doors and

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166                                                                              ROSALIE STOLZ


windows of the concrete house are closed (windows being non-existent in
bamboo houses), the main room is in relative darkness and, in general,
appears to be set off from the outside in a way that cannot be experienced in
any of the other vernacular houses that the villagers of Pliya were used to.
While the sounds from outside are muffled, the noise level during ritual
negotiations seems even higher inside the concrete houses.




FIG 3: The interior of one of the new concrete houses. The smaller rooms are separated from the
main room by concrete walls and proper and lockable wooden doors. Photo by Rosalie Stolz
(2020).


   Interestingly, Ta Sɛɛn, an old man whose son had just build a semi-
concrete house, mentioned to me, sitting in front of his new house, that the
annoying thing about the new house is that small animals – chickens in
search of stored rice, and even free-roaming pigs – need to be prevented
from entering. This is not immediately related to concrete itself but to the
ground-level construction of these houses. Ta Sɛɛn, a couple of years ago,
was still emphasising that bamboo houses, which are now built only by those
who cannot afford a “proper” wooden or simple concrete house, were


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LISTENING THROUGH HOUSES                                                        167


thatched with leaves and were pleasant to stay in during the sticky months
of the hottest periods of the rainy season, but comfortably warm in the
coldest months, which can become quite chilly. While praise for bamboo
houses is becoming rare, in fact, those who can afford it prefer to reconcile
the old comfort of wooden houses with the new desire for concrete: several
houses are a hybrid mixture of the two, such as a two-storey house with a
concrete room on the ground floor, where guests are received, and an upper
floor of wood where the house group sleeps.
   Yet not only do winds not enter easily, but nor do guests. As far as I heard
and could observe during my recent stays, people’s reservations about
entering other houses is even greater with concrete houses. Entering other
houses generally is not exactly forbidden, yet it is uncommon to enter other
houses without obvious reasons to do so, unless this is a close relative’s
house. In the past, workhouses – which are houses for communal purposes –
were the places in the neighbourhood where villagers, mainly male, met,
sharpened and repaired their tools and traps, and held rituals and
negotiations. Women visited one another in their homes, but commonly
only after dark – which a close interlocutor, Ta Loŋ, explained to me in the
joking phrase “one went to see one another, when one did not see one
another anymore” (“priaŋ yᴐh pɨp yᴐ yam plᴐ pɨp yᴐ”). With the decreasing
importance of communal houses and the spread of more spacious timber
houses, visiting close kin and neighbours who possess a television has
become quite common – alongside visits to workhouses and fireplaces in the
open spaces in front of the houses.
   As if concrete houses were not as inviting, there was an obvious decrease
in such visits. My main point of experience is one particular household with
which I have been familiar since 2013. I stayed and spent many days and
evenings in their earlier wooden house and, in 2020, in their new concrete
house. While their wooden house was regularly full of guests, who sat on the
mats reserved for visitors to watch television, to do handicrafts under the
neon lights, and to chat, the new concrete house was deserted except when
ritual or other purposes required a discussion or meeting indoors. While
especially the house father, Ta Khwaay, preferred to spend his evenings
inside in his earlier wooden house, at the new concrete house he mainly sat
at the fireplace outside, where neighbours occasionally came to sit down and
chat. When I talked to Ya Sii about the new house of Ta Sɛɛn, she mentioned
that others would not go there anymore, out of embarrassment. The two-
storey houses, she explained, were too large and too uncommon for them to
enter. In fact, the number of open fires where the residents of the newly
built concrete houses sat appeared to be increasing. We can only guess as to


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168                                                                ROSALIE STOLZ


whether this is a temporary moment in which the villagers, though keen to
build their houses in concrete, have not yet become accustomed to the
privacy and isolation of concrete houses, and thus prefer to sit at the log
fires outside, where they find neighbours and kin to chat with.

Unfamiliar familiars
    Living in a wooden house, and even more so in a bamboo one, one is
constantly aware of what is happening outside. With the sound of the
cockcrow, at the latest, the increasing number of sounds reminds one to
start one’s own early morning routines. The sound of water buckets being
filled at the village’s wells, the sound of someone fetching firewood from the
store beneath the house, the squealing of dogs being chased away, fill the
village’s soundscape. The sounds of rice being pounded, of machetes being
sharpened on grindstones, the sounds by which the pigs are called for their
meal, characterise the early mornings and early evenings. Only the torrential
rains of the monsoon season, especially when one is living in a house with a
corrugated iron roof, make the typical sounds of the village fade into the
background. Leaving the village after the morning routine to head to field
and forest also means leaving behind the soundscape of the village and
entering the soundscape of the forest, where the sound of birds, macaques
and other animals are skilfully read by the skilled ears of the villagers.
    At night, the sounds of barking dogs, who are flushed out by wandering
adolescents paying each other secret night-time visits, or by malevolent
spirits roaming around the village, can easily enter one’s sleeping place. But
the sounds of coughing neighbours, of crying babies and quarrelling couples
can also be heard well. Whether one wishes or not, one cannot help noticing
the village surroundings, of which one is perceptually a part. Given this aural
connectedness of the villagers, I was always amazed at some of our
neighbours’ abilities to pretend, without any hint at irony, that they had not
heard this or that sound, even including the sound of a gun that was shot in
the village. They inquire into which direction the barking of a dog comes
from, and in which direction footsteps are moving away. Yet noticing a
sound and publicly acknowledging one’s taking notice of the sound are
sometimes two different things. An infant crying incessantly for no apparent
reason at night, as already mentioned, is always taken seriously, and often,
then, the sound of tripping footsteps and the entering of doors can be heard
– especially as closely related women go to see what is happening.
    Finding that I had become used to the aural permeability of bamboo and
wooden houses, the new concrete house of Ya Khwaay, into which I moved
in early 2020, had something awkwardly familiar and at the same time


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LISTENING THROUGH HOUSES                                                         169


unfamiliar to me. It was familiar because it reminded me of the privacy I am
used to in my German home. At the same time, it was highly unfamiliar
because it was so different from my usual experience of staying in houses in
Pliya – including the wooden one in which I had lived for more than a year.
When working on my fieldnotes in Ya Khwaay’s new concrete house, she
advised me to shut the windows and keep the doors closed. The dark interior
thus became a place shielded from the outside, where my doings where
invisible and not to be heard by others. And, in fact, I felt more separated
from my surroundings than I had ever felt when staying in wooden houses.
   While the wooden-cum-bamboo workhouse in which I used to stay was
located in the midst of a neighbourhood, where several paths crossed and led
into different neighbourhoods, Ya Khwaay’s new concrete house was located
on the dirt road that connected this and the neighbouring village. In fact, if
the (re)building of a house is planned in concrete, it is done either close to
the main road or on the comparatively spacious paths in the village, if
possible. Although four-wheeled vehicles, for which access to the main road
is advantageous, are still rare in the village, their future existence appears to
be anticipated, at least. Set at some distance from the middle of the village,
passers-by on the dirt road could be observed, and there were a few
neighbours who regularly sat at the fireplaces together, but still, the above-
mentioned relative lack of visits produced a feeling of distance. In the
workhouse we were frequently visited and never sat alone for long.
Furthermore, we were constantly aware of the social gaze of others and,
when we briefly forgot about it, such as when we slept in after daybreak
following a long night of ritual, neighbours would peek through the gaps of
the plank at my sleeping place and speak in a louder voice than necessary:
“Ma Ayton [my local name], haven’t you got up yet?”. This was unthinkable
in the concrete house, because no one knew whether I was in the house or
not. While I could work alone and concentrate on my fieldnotes, the feeling
of distance remained awkward to me. I remembered Ya Khwaay’s house a
few years earlier as being a meeting place for several neighbours, where
gossip reached one’s ear easily and in which ad hoc meetings took place,
because at that time her husband was still a headman. Now their television,
in front of which the guests used to gather in the evenings in their previous
house, was broken, and no one bothered to replace it as visits to their home
had become rare anyway.
   At the same time, a new type of unwelcome visitor has entered local talk
and gossip, the thief, and door locks have found a ready market. My hosts,
who a couple of years ago had always left their house unlocked – which is
quite convenient with few keys but many residents – now urged me to lock


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170                                                                 ROSALIE STOLZ


the door behind me every time I left. In fact, keys attached to necklaces, that
is, fibre strings, almost ubiquitously adorned the schoolchildren’s necks, so
that they would be able to enter their homes after school. Whereas in 2015
only a few villagers locked their doors, by 2019 door locks had become
omnipresent. Among the new, conspicuous concrete houses, one can find
impressive exemplars of door locks and handles. Thus, over a relatively short
period of just four years, locking one’s door has changed from a rarity –
often commented upon depreciatively in gossip (“what do they have to
hide?”) – to a self-evident fact that today no one questions. When I voiced
my surprise about this sudden change, an interlocutor, Ma Sen, noted that
things were quite different from when I was there before. “These were
simply different times,” she proclaimed. “Back then we did not have so many
thieves as we do today.” No one was short of stories of how even the best
hidden valuables had been stolen by unidentified thieves. A neighbour
disclosed to me where she kept her money these days: she had a pouch tied
around her belly, just like tourists’ belt pouches, that she would always take
with her when leaving the house.
   Who were these “thieves”? With the increasing traffic on the improved
dirt road that bypasses the village, foreigners nowadays regularly come
through the area, including Chinese entrepreneurs and adolescents from
neighbouring villages, and the fear of thieves has obviously also come into
the village. Yet, whereas former talk about thefts, with few exceptions,
centred around the theft of small livestock such as chicken and goats kept in
the village, for which unnamed foreigners were mainly held responsible, now
the subject of suspicion seems to have encroached on the intimate space of
the house. This phenomenon is grounded, I wish to suggest here, first of all
in an increasing detachment of the domestic space. The fear of theft,
rational or not, seems to be the other side of the coin of the new, concrete
houses, which are otherwise cherished for their keeping “winds” at bay – a
promise they do not seem to keep.
   Not only does the fear of theft increase despite the more elaborate doors
and door locks, but sounds are also increasing. More motorbikes, the sound
of electric rice mills, an increasing number of vehicles passing by the village
on the dirt road, have led to an increase in the sound level. During my last
stay in January 2020, a local shop opened where school children could buy
noodle soup at midday and where, especially during weekends, the village
youth spent their money on beer and listened to the thumping sound of Thai
and Lao pop music. The shop, a provisional, ground-level bamboo hut, is the
last building on the side of the dirt road, close to the village primary school,
and thus set at some distance from the village interior. Though located at

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LISTENING THROUGH HOUSES                                                                171


the edge of the village, the noise, and the roaring of the motorbikes of the
enthusiastic and often also inebriated young men, entered the village. Even
the concrete house, which was not far from the shop, could not shield us
fully from the party sounds. Though young men and women are allowed to
enjoy themselves, they are expected to do so out of sight and earshot of
others. Memories abound of the joyful days when youths sang and played at
the distant field huts while watching the ripening rice, or in the distant
barns while hunting rats. Now, the sonic presence of the youth is a notable
indicator of a generally changing present, in which concrete walls muffle the
village’s soundscape, which consists of the “sound of modernity” (Colombijn
2007: 266) to an increasing degree.
   Discussing the changing rural soundscapes in Southeast Asia, Nathan
Porath states that
      [s]tate development projects have forced people to live in designated areas and
      in timber or concrete dwellings, usually strung along the side of roads. For
      those for whom the permeability of sounds was a necessary component of
      social living, the new arrangements are potentially debilitating in relation to
      social intercourse, blocking the flow of sounds between households (Porath
      2019: 37).

   Obviously, the relative separation and isolation of being able to live in
concrete houses, beyond the sight and earshot of others, is cherished.
   However, this trend has to be seen in relation to the nightly flourishing of
open log-fires outside, in front of the houses, and at the workhouses, where
neighbours can meet on casual terms. When discussing the changing
experience of living in concrete houses in contexts such as Pliya, where
people commonly do not spend much time in their houses during the day, it
is worth taking into consideration their experiences beyond houses as well.
Sitting in vernacular public spaces certainly continues to shape the (sonic)
experience of village sociality.

Conclusion: (Not) listening through houses
   In this article, I have taken the Carstenʼs argument (2018) quite literally.
One can metaphorically listen to houses, which may mean taking them
seriously – for instance by giving attention to the intersection of the
experience of living in houses and their materiality, as Giacomo Pozzi and
Paolo Grassi state in their introduction. We often take the experience of
living in houses for granted and have not devoted that much anthropological
attention to the everyday effects and perceptions of living in houses, as was
noted, for instance, by Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones (1995). Yet, in
fact, many inhabitants of houses among whom we live as anthropologists

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172                                                                ROSALIE STOLZ


also take their own experiences for granted. When the materiality of houses
changes, however, as it does rather drastically when replacing bamboo or
timber with concrete, the changing experience of living in the house comes
to the attention of the inhabitants.
   When I inquired into the changing experience and evaluation of living in
concrete houses, the notion of the lack of winds was reiterated by several
interlocutors. Arguing that this statement can be extended to include the
lack of diffusion not only of wind but of sounds as well, I have proceeded to
unfold some of the meanings of the term and attempted to set them in
relation to the comparative experiences of living and observing social
interactions in wooden or bamboo houses on the one hand, and concrete
houses on the other. Though concrete walls obviously have an effect of
enveloping those who are inside, as Geoffrey Gowlland argued (2020), (fears
of) encroaching thieves do not seem to stop at walls – just as conversations
and the soundscape of the village do not stop at the plaited bamboo walls.
   Paying attention to the sensorial experience of being in a house and to
embodied engagements in the sensorial environment of houses, as well as
with the wider community of sounds, is a fertile pathway for inquiring into
the implications of changing house materials. While the sensorial qualities
of houses in Southeast Asia have been described in terms of the permeability
of wooden and bamboo houses (Allerton 2013; Helliwell 1996, 2002), the
walls of the new concrete houses appear to produce a barrier where there
was a permeable wall before. Based on local comments and valuations it can
be shown that permeability is still discussed, albeit in different terms: while
guests are not yet accustomed to entering concrete houses, “thieves” are
feared for intruding into the increasingly detached domestic space. Yet the
acoustic environment itself is also changing, with an increase of sounds
associated with modernity, such as the sounds of vehicles and canned non-
local music.
   This article thus considered the ways in which one can listen through
houses or not. It should be noted, however, that houses – which are certainly
of key importance in societies such as the Khmu of northern Laos – are not
the places where local villagers spend most of their time. Work means, more
often than not, walking through field and forest (for a few residents it means
driving to an office for work), spending the midday rest at a fieldhut, and
only returning in the evening to the village, where the sociable part of the
evening is regularly spent at open fireplaces in front of the houses and in
other vernacular public spaces. Giving emphasis to the experiential and
socio-processual nature of houses also entails, finally, not only listening to
them, but also to the wider environment, built or not, of which they are part.


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LISTENING THROUGH HOUSES                                                             173


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LISTENING THROUGH HOUSES                                                           175


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 ROSALIE STOLZ, PhD University of Cologne, is Postdoctoral Researcher at the
 Institute of Anthropology at Heidelberg University. In her ethnographic research,
 focused on Southeast Asia (and Laos in particular), she specializes in the topics of
 houses, kinship, sociality and socio-economic change. As well as being published
 recently on kinship, spirits and houses, she is co-editor of Being a Parent in the
 Field: Implications and Challenges of Accompanied Fieldwork (Transcript 2020), and
 author of Living Kinship, Fearing Spirits: Sociality among the Khmu of Northern Laos
 (Nias Press 2021)
 rosalie.stolz@fu-berlin.de




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Rosalie Stolz
Listening through houses: Changing communities of sounds in northern Laos
2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2021: 155-176.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4560
