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Posts from the ‘Vietnam’ Category

May 29

“Field Huts” Among the Upland Tai and Dai

I am presently reading a chapter in the monumental Fowler Museum exhibition catalog The Art of Rice: Spirit and Sustenance in Asia (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 2003). It is “Rice Harvest Rituals in Two Highland Tai Communities in Vietnam” by Vi Vǎn An and Eric Crystal. I was drawn to this essay because it contextualizes a kind of basket-like plaited bamboo object used in ritual contexts among the related Tai peoples of Southeast Asia and Southwest China. More on that eventually Here I just take a minute to make note of another material form of interest. The name that the authors of this catalog chapter use for it is “field hut” and that seems like a suitable English name. The authors picture one in their figure 7.2 on page as shown here:

Figure 7.2 in An and Crystal (2003, 120). “A field hut stands in the distance in a dry-rice field. “Photograph by Eric Crystal. Ban Ðôc, 2000. [See screenshot image above for the full Vietnamese diacritics.] On a pole to the left of the hut is the kind of woven bamboo item that I am studying. The house shown here is of concern to the authors because it is a focal point for a rice harvest ritual of one of the two groups of Tai that they discuss.

My photographs of such field huts in the uplands of Southwest China are often poor because they are taken through the window of a moving van or bus, but I have taken a stead interest in them throughout my visits to the region. Most recently, I saw many of them in the fields and tea tree groves on Jingmai Mountain in Pu’er [Prefecture-Level] City, Yunnan, China. The best example among my photographs from this most recent of my trips is probably this one:

A “field hut” in a mixed-crop truck garden lower down on Jingmai Mountain. Photograph by Jason Baird Jackson. Near Balao in a predominantly Dai and Hani area. December 27, 2023.

These kinds of buildings get mentioned here and there in the ethnographic literature for the broader region. I hope to return to them someday and here I note them as just another interesting aspect of the region’s vernacular architecture. Those who know me and know eastern Oklahoma will recognize my interests in such buildings in the comparative case of ceremonial ground and church family camps.