“Friends Who Don’t Throw Each Other Away”: Friendship, Pronouns and Relations on the Edge in Luang Prabang, Laos - Chapter 7

Aug 24, 2026

Study of WhatsApp-based male friendships in Luang Prabang, Laos shows how the “friends who don’t throw each other away” ideal is enacted through language, interaction, and platform-mediated communication. The chapter follows the group’s rapid formation and sudden disintegration after conflicts and deletions, then analyzes how egalitarian self-understandings coexist with aggression. Using “loose structures” to frame peer relations, it links perceptions of siaw1 bonds with the pragmatic work of bare pronouns kuu3 and mùng2, entangling intimacy with masculine hostility.

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Friends Who Don’t Throw Each Other Away

Friendship, Pronouns, and Relations on the Edge

The Substance of Siaw1

C H A P T E R 7 “Friends Who Don’t Throw Each Other Away”: Friendship, Pronouns and Relations on the Edge in Luang Prabang, Laos* Charles H.P. Zuckerman “As the Thai build their simple bamboo houses so that they can be readily modified and quickly dismantled, so too they build their groups.” – Lucien M. Hanks (1972, 80) The messenging program WhatsApp became important during the final months of my research in Luang Prabang, Laos. When I returned to the city after a break, the “group” or kum1 of male friends (siaw1) with whom I was spending time had started a chat “group”(again, kum1) using it.1 WhatsApp allowed us to effortlessly trade photos and messages. The kum1’s name in the app, phùan1 bòøthiim5 kan3 or “friends who don’t throw each other away”, referenced a thenpopular Thai love song. The song’s chorus howls,“we promised not to throw each other away!”, a line that the bunch of us would often sing, drunk, late at night, and as loudly as possible. But soon after I joined the WhatsApp group, one friend Dii sent a frustrated message.“Where did everyone go? If no one is going to chat, I am going to leave the group!”And he left. Another friend, Muu, then pasted an image of a poem—a“gift” he called it: “One good friend with worth is better than many friends who are jealous; one friend with compassion is better than many friends without heart.” The group administrator responded with the English word “destroy”, and Friendship, Pronouns and Relations on theEdge in Luang Prabang, Laos 139 then removed almost everyone. With that, the group—a digitally crystallised social structure, a consciously constructed communicative channel—disintegrated. I joked to Dii and Muu later that the “friends who don’t throw each other away”had, in the end, thrown each other away, discarded one another into the digital heap. They laughed. It was funny because it was true. Figure 1. The image Muu sent to the group The men in “friends who don’t throw each other away” called one another siaw1 (close friends of the same in age) and understood themselves as equals. In Luang Prabang, siaw1 friendships are set-off as fundamentally different from other relationships, which like relationships across Southeast Asia tend to have a hierarchical tilt, especially legible in language (Scupin 1988; Simpson 1997; 140 Charles H.P. Zuckerman Howard 2007; Enfield 2007b, 117). In a sea of linguistically encoded hierarchy, siaw1 stand as self-styled egalitarian islands. In this chapter, I track the dissolution of “friends who don’t throw eachother away” to explore the “problem of peers”(Sidnell and Shohet 2013, 623) in otherwise hierarchical Laos. My argument draws a parallel between how siaw1 relations are imagined and enacted, and ideologies surrounding the“bare” pronominal forms these men use to refer to one another and themselves. Borrowing from a classic anthropology of “loose structures”, I show that both ideas about siaw1 relations, generally, and the bare pronouns siaw1 employ involve a mixture of aggression and solidarity. Siaw1 alternately represent and enact their friendships as perduring, stable, and sturdy social knots, bound “to the death”, and as delicate ties that might unexpectedly fray or snap. These ambivalent forces contradict one another, but they also work together to prove the resilience of friendships. In acting in ways that might otherwise be taken as offensive, siaw1 make their friendships more meaningful (see, for comparison, Keane 1997 on“risk”; Stasch 2009, 206–7) . The same analysis illuminates the pragmatics of the bare first- and second-person pronouns kuu3 and mùng2. Many have described these (and similarly “low” pronouns cross-linguistically) as having two separate expressive forces—one intimate, the other aggressive. But in siaw1 friendships, kuu3 and mùng2 serve to entangle intimacy with masculine aggression, such that“aggression” is not distinct from “solidarity” but, rather, a means for expressing it. The Sub

FAQs

How does the WhatsApp group shape the male friendships described in the chapter?

The WhatsApp group enables easy exchange of photos and messages, and it becomes a concrete communicative channel that can rapidly crystallize social relations and just as quickly disintegrate after conflict.

What is the role of the Thai song referenced by the group name?

The group name cites a popular Thai love song whose chorus promises not to throw each other away, and members often sing this line together as a shared affective reference.

How does the chapter explain the relationship between equality and aggression in siaw1 friendships?

Siaw1 are presented as egalitarian peers, yet the chapter argues that aggression and solidarity work together. Bare pronouns and interactional practices entangle intimacy with masculine hostility, making the friendships more meaningful through risky or offensive ways of acting.

Aug 24, 2026

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