Papers

• Beyond Concrete: The Social and Cultural Value of Iron Wood Houses in East Kalimantan, Indonesia Michaela Haug Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology

  In many rural regions of the global south, vernacular houses are becoming less popular. Instead, people aspire houses built of concrete, as these often symbolize a modern lifestyle, progress and economic success. The high value placed on ironwood houses in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, which counters this trend is the focus of my presentation.

• How increasing land prices, changing state policies, and new urban planning paradigms transformed the planning and design of government-built flat complexes in Bangkok metropolitan Amata Jantarangsee Kasetsart University

  The development of government-built housing is influenced by a combination of political, economic, and urban planning factors, and therefore likely to change over time. However, most of the literature on government-building housing transformations focuses predominantly on political determinants. This documentary research explores transformations of low-income flat complexes in Bangkok metropolitan, Thailand through a more comprehensive lens. It does so by examining flats built under three consecutive housing programs operated by Thailand’s National Housing Authority (NHA) in three different periods (1960s, early 2000s, and late 2010s). The focus in particular is on transformations in building design, locational patterns, their relation to the city, and the causes for the changes observed. The study outlines that building structures have become increasingly compact, a back-and-forth spatial shift has taken place between central business districts and more peripheral locations served by the city’s super-block road system, and that the functions of low-income flat complexes have been adapted to suit different Bangkok urban planning schemes. The transformations observed are shaped by rising land prices and values, the dynamics of Thai government policies focusing on slum clearance and social welfare, the NHA’s evolving mission of solving social problems or generating profits, and global urban planning movements concerning urbanism and sustainable urban neighbourhood design. The study reveals that those operating government-built housing developments in Thailand over the years have given insufficient attention to social factors, such as the living experiences of the people they tried to help.

• Listening through houses in northern Laos Rosalie Stolz Heidelberg University

  Southeast Asia’s diverse built landscape has ranged prominent in the scholarly, most notably anthropological, studies of houses (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Sparkes and Howell 2003; Waterson 2009 [1990]). Indeed, houses are more than mere architecture in Southeast Asia are multi-faceted entities and have been studied in various relevant dimensions – including their cosmological aspect (Cunningham 1964), their role in shaping and enabling sociality and relatedness (Allerton 2013, Carsten 1997), their becoming remade as cultural heritage (Allerton 2003, Berliner 2012), or the aesthetic politics engrained in their design (Elinoff 2016) to name but a few themes.

  What received less attention, though, is the transformation of housing that is occurring all over Southeast Asia – albeit to varying degrees and at different paces. Concrete is certainly on the rise in Southeast Asia – not only for huge infrastructure projects but also for ordinary houses, thereby changing the design and our understandings of vernacular architecture in the region. How does transformation of houses occur? How are new materials, emerging aspirations and changing relations implied in and/or contributing to these transformations?

  This panel will address these questions systematically and based on empirical material related to Southeast Asia. The contributors are invited to engage with the topic from a diverse set of angles. Thus, emphasis may be given to kinship, the experience of space, to the political context, materiality, narratives of development, socio-economic change among other possible topics immediately connected to house transformations occurring in urban and, especially, rural Southeast Asia.

• Post-colonial transformations of Konyak polities. The house in a diachronic perspective (Nagaland, India) Rébecca Villaret Centre Asie du Sud Est

  The contemporary history of the Nagas, in Northeast India, was marked by a decades-long armed conflict between the newly independent Indian Union and the Naga ethno-nationalist factions. The post-colonial elaboration of a Naga national identity was mainly based on the development of a shared christian religiosity. During the contested creation of the federal state of Nagaland in the 1960s, the Konyak Nagas living in Mon district, experienced an unprecedent wave of conversions to baptist christianism. This has notably led to the end of inter-village warfare and the progressive anchoring of Indian administrative and governmental bodies.

Abstract

Keywords

• Architecture
• Heritage
• Housing
• Materiality
• Social Change