@article{oai:minpaku.repo.nii.ac.jp:00004147,
 author = {平井, 京之介 and Hirai, Kyonosuke},
 issue = {3},
 journal = {国立民族学博物館研究報告, Bulletin of the National Museum of Ethnology},
 month = {Feb},
 note = {The Northern Thai word for "work" is ngan, which implies not only
what we generally assume to be work but also communal work and certain
sorts of rituals in the village. The literature on Northern Thai society
has not paid adequate attention either to the concept of ngan or to its
activities. However, the understanding of social relations in the Northern
Thai village greatly benefits from examining what the Northern
Thai mean by ngan, how they evaluate various types of ngan, and what
impacts interactions in ngan make on the community. The aim of this
paper is to answer these questions by exploring ngan interactions in the
village where I conducted fieldwork.
In the village there are three levels of geographically set social units,
compound, hamlet and village, which the villager recognises as different
levels of social groups. In the Northern Thai language ban is a noun
both for hamlet and village, between which the villager finds some continuity.
In the village, siblings often live in houses next to each other in
a parent's compound. The compound constitutes a hamlet with several
adjoining compounds. Calling each other pi norng (elder and younger
siblings) , the villager regards a member of the same compound as a
sibling, one in the same hamlet as close kin or an extended sibling, and
one in the same village as kin or a further extended sibling. The village
boundary is the most marked one, delimiting familiar kin's locality.
Thus, an individual family has threefold circles of social rela-
tions with different degrees of intimacy in village life.
However, birth or residence do not automatically define the relationships
between families in certain localities. In rice-cultivation, members
of the same hamlet would exchange labour, while ones in the same
village would accept each other's day labour. When one family held a
ritual, families in the same compound would co-operatively take the initiative
in the preparation, while families in the same hamlet would come
to help the preparation. All or some families in the other hamlets would
be invited for the ritual. Without such continual interactions, villagers
neither felt family intimacy nor recognised each other as pi norng or
members of mu diaw kan (the same group) . The history of performed
interactions in work and rituals determines the actualities of ties between
families. Solidarity in these ties is often mentioned by villagers as nam
caj and samagkhi.
After considering these interactions in detail, this paper emphasises
that villagers make an involuntary recognition of ngan by the relations
between the producer and the product. Activities whose products are
consumed by the individual or his or her own family are never
acknowledged as ngan. Ngan is an activity of creating social meanings
among villagers and constructing the community's living world.
The paper concludes that the village community is a historical complex
of social practices, including work and rituals. Playing a part
assigned by age and sex in this ngan means the declaration of the
villager's legitimate membership in the community. In Northern
Thailand, two types of activities which we call work and rituals are not
only labelled by the same word but are also two steps of one continual activity
of ngan.},
 pages = {527--584},
 title = {北タイ農村における「仕事」概念の一考察 : 相互行為と社会関係},
 volume = {22},
 year = {1998},
 yomi = {ヒライ, キョウノスケ}
}