Ede House, Vietnam Museum of Ethnology

Ede House

Ede long house

The Ede long house is 42.5 meters long and 6 meters wide and sits on one meter high stilts. It was reconstructed at the Museum in 2000 by 16 Ede Kpa people in two and a half months. It was originally built in 1967 and belonged to Mrs. HDish Eban’s family in Ky village, Buon Ma Thuot city, Dak Lak province in the Central Highlands.

The house is oriented in a north-south direction according to Ede tradition. The north side is the front with the main entrance. The south end was where families lived. As a house of a powerful family, it was built with big columns and beams, on which many decorations were carefully carved. It original staircase, over one meter wide, was carved from one large wooden board.

Traditionally, extended matrilineal families lived in long houses. The more people who lived in a house, the longer it was. Some houses were 200m long. In the 1970s three were still houses 50m to 60m in length. Since the 1980s, extended families have split into nuclear ones that live in smaller house.

Guest room

This space, called gah, occupied more than half the area of the house. Its architectural features, columns, and girders were carefully 5haped and decorated with designs incised and carved on the wood surface. The room was decorated and arranged with furniture and benches made from solid wood. The presence of other utensils, drums, gongs, jars, and large copper pots showed the economic status of the house owner.

This space was for receiving guests, holding meetings, and performing family rituals. For big events and banquets people played gongs and drums and drank wine together, sipping through tubes from a common jar. Singe, widowed, and divorced men of the family slept in this room following matriarchal traditions. There was a separate room for female guests at the end of this guest room.

Private space

The ok was a private space for bedrooms, food preparation and storage. It was separated from the guest room by a partition.

Traditionally each extended matriarchal family, including two or three generations with common ancestors, lived in one long house. They worked together and shared common property, which was managed by the grandmother or her oldest daughter. Each family was a single economic and social unit. Couples had their own rooms where they slept with their young children, their heads facing east. They kept personal possessions, mostly clothing, in these rooms. They could light cigarettes and warm themselves in winter by the cooking fire inside their room.

In this long house, 16 people of Mrs. HDiah Eban’s family lived together forming three small, semi-inde-pendent homes, each with their own kitchens in the common corridor. Space for the matriarch was at the end of the house. Other rooms were for her daughter’s families.