Table of Contents
The place of architecture in people’s lives is a subject which anthropologists have, to a surprising degree, been guilty of neglecting. The extent of this neglect was highlighted recently by Caroline Humphrey (1988) in a review of Paul Oliver’s (1987) Dwellings: the house across the world. Oliver is one writer who has consistently and creatively crossed the boundary between architecture and anthropology, and his work should inspire greater efforts to make good the many areas of neglect still existing in the anthropology of architecture. The Austronesian world provides one of the richest fields for enquiry into this topic, and one which promises to yield new insights into other aspects of social life and organization.
Architectural styles can change rapidly — but they can also maintain continuity over surprisingly long periods. The antiquity of some aspects of architectural style in the Austronesian world is undoubted. Elements such as pile building and the saddle roof with its extended ridge line are first to be seen on the bronze drums of the Dong Son era, but to judge from their appearance in regions as distant from the mainland as Micronesia and New Guinea, it is reasonable to assume that they are much older than their earliest surviving pictorial representations: in other words, that this style is a genuinely Austronesian invention. What is intriguing about the pursuit of meaning in Austronesian built form, however, is what it reveals to us about the continual recurrence and re-use, not just of material forms but of more abstract themes and ideas.[2] Such themes mould the way that people live in the buildings they create and their relations to each other. Ultimately they concern ideas as fundamental as the nature of life processes themselves. This paper attempts to summarize briefly some of these themes, as I have come to perceive them over five years of research into the vernacular building traditions of South-East Asia; a fuller treatment of them is to be found in Waterson (1990).
Dutch visitors to Indonesia often recorded disparaging impressions of the buildings they saw. Not only did these buildings strike an unfamiliar note aesthetically since they often lacked walls and windows, being dominated instead by roof, but in addition their interiors were perceived as dark, smoky, overcrowded, dirty and insect-ridden. It was rarely noted that the inhabitants spent little time in these buildings during the day; the principle function of the house being as the origin-site, and storage-place for heirlooms, of a group of kin. In fact, a number of structures in the island South-East Asian world have been designed to complement the enclosed form of the house itself and provide shady open spaces for daytime use: from the tagakal-roofed platforms of the Yami of Lanyü Island, through the pavilions of the Balinese house courtyard, to the platform underneath the granaries of the Toraja of Sulawesi and the Ema of Timor. Understanding built form thus requires, among other things, a consideration of the relations between different types of structure and the distribution of functions between them. In addition, we need to study the motivations behind the buildings, which in island South-East Asia would appear to have a great deal to do with the interweaving of kinship structure, rank and ritual.
The function of the house as dwelling is relatively insignificant in some of these societies. One finds numerous examples, from Madagascar to Timor, of houses or origin-villages left empty save for important ritual occasions. It is their importance as origin-places which causes those who trace ties to them to spend sometimes large amounts of money on their upkeep, and to return to them from great distances for the celebration of rites. Occasionally, as among the Merina of Madagascar (Bloch 1971:131) or the Nuaulu of Seram, houses are continually in process of construction, but rarely ever finished. For the Nuaulu, says Ellen (1986), ‘there is a notion of an ideal house which is only temporarily realized, but which people are always striving toward’ (p.26). For the Toraja, rebuilding is the process which transforms an ordinary dwelling into an origin-house, and the more times it is repeated, the greater the house becomes. It is because of this fusing of habitation and ritual site that some houses come to have the nature of temples, and to be referred to as such in the literature. In most of the indigenous religions of the region, we find an absence of permanent buildings set aside for sacred purposes, but the house itself is charged with the power of the ancestors and of the sacred heirlooms stored within it. Granaries too may serve sacred as well as practical functions, for rice is typically treated with great deference. House, granary and sacred site may even be fused into a single structure, as among the Ifugao, Donggo or Alorese.
The same ambiguity or fusing of functions pertains to ‘public’ buildings. Such structures, again, are absent in many South-East Asian societies. Borneo longhouses combine public and private spaces within a single structure; among the Toraja, the platforms of privately owned rice barns are utilized for public functions, as sitting-places for guests at ceremonies or for elders hearing a village dispute. Structures called bale, or variants thereof, though extremely widespread throughout the archipelago, are by no means uniform in their appearance and function. Two predominant meanings of the word appear to be ‘an unwalled building’ and ‘a meeting-hall’, but in some instances bale refers to a dwelling, and the range of referents which has developed in eastern Austronesia is very wide. Certainly it seems illegitimate to generalize, as Rassers (1959) did, that ‘public’ buildings are ‘men’s houses’; this is actually a rare institution in Indonesia. Where public buildings do exist, their use may articulate a distinction not simply between men and women but between the married and the unmarried. Most communal structures are used as sleeping-places for unmarried males, and one can find one or two unusual instances of structures built especially for unmarried girls or boys. On Siberut, according to Kis-Jovak (1980:26), Sakuddei boys sometimes build themselves a special house in adolescence, while Loeb (1935:56) reported the existence of communal girls’ houses among the ‘southern Batak’, where girls spent the night with an older woman as chaperone, and were allowed to receive their suitors for conversation and an exchange of betel-nut. The kusali of Tanimbar is a curious instance (which may have existed only in myth) of a structure in which a very high-ranking girl might be secluded, surrounded by ‘female’ valuables, for a period before her marriage (McKinnon 1983:28).
Houses, then, rather than public buildings, must be viewed as the dominant structures in the organization of the community. In many instances there is something of a continuum between ‘public’ and ‘private’ buildings, ‘temple’ and ‘house’, while the significance of dimensions such as sacred/profane, male/female and married/unmarried requires critical examination in each instance. Rather than a too hasty categorizing of structures themselves, a close consideration of the distribution of functions proves a better way of understanding the interrelation of built forms.