Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to identify the forms of farm household relations within the rural community of the Lowland area of Lao in view of the market-oriented economy of recent times. By comparing two hamlets, different forms of mutual cooperative reliance among neighboring farm households are brought to light with the help of the “sociometry” method. Dependency was found to be based on the traditional norms of organizational hierarchy in one of the hamlets. The other hamlet, however, was characterized by individual and flexible partnerships and multiple activity connections. In other words, a new type of hamlet-based cooperative dependency is coming to the fore under the market-oriented economic conditions of recent times.
