| Abstract: |
Houses, as substantial material constructions, represent permanence and continuity, and hence endow a metaphorical immortality on the social groups who identify with them and who ensure their perpetuity by continually rebuilding them, or, even when the buildings have vanished, by reverencing the empty places in which they once stood. Roxana Waterson explores this theme in her examination of the interplay between the living house and the lives of its inhabitants in Tana Toraja, South Sulawesi, Indonesia. The Sadan Toraja identify themselves not just with their own dwellings but with those of their forebears on both sides, and ultimately with the highly elaborated noble origin houses. The physical and spiritual components of house valuethe heirlooms, bones, and spirits of the dead as well as the placentas of the newly bornanchor people to place and to their ancestral origins. Peoples identities are thus grounded in the landscape, the physical house functioning as a material sign for the social memories that localize groups to certain places (houses, fields, tombs). Houses create simultaneous spatial and temporal networks for conceptualizing how social groups are linked to one another, because of their references to specific historical memories of descent and affinal relationships that are construed as relationships among houses. Watersons perspective thus moves from the individual house to the entire settlement, and from the individual social group to the language of kinship and affinity that connects social groups to one another in the larger community. Her explicitly diachronic orientation demonstrates how meanings of place are dependent on the changes that occur over time, resulting in a biography of built forms.
|
