Houses and the Built Environment in Island South-East Asia: Tracing some shared themes in the uses of space

Abstract

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. 1 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).