| Abstract: |
The social hierarchy that characterizes house societies is materially manifested in various ways, often most obviously by the elaboration of the house itself, but it can take other forms. Susan McKinnons elegant analysis of the wooden ancestral altars (<i>tavu</i>) that once graced the interiors of noble houses in Indonesian Tanimbar reveals the intricate means by which they objectified high status and quintessentially symbolized the unity of contradictions that Lévi-Strauss originally suggested the house should represent. Links to ancestral origins are embedded in the physical form of the altar and are enacted in the practical behaviors associated with it. The ancestors are the root (<i>tavun</i>) of the house as a social unit, and are represented by the <i>tavu</i>, the image of a standing human figure with upraised arms that seemingly supported the frame of the house itself. The head of the house sat upon the bench at its base, representing thereby the tip that developed out of its ancestral root. The living house head, physically juxtaposed with the image (and also the physical and spiritual essences) of his ancestors, forms a human icon for fundamental concepts of growth and continuity (the future) since the houses ancestral founding (the past), a time depth that is prerequisite for noble status. A hard, enduring object that abstracts the human form, the <i>tavu</i> further indicates the ability of the noble houses to generalize and objectify their relations with allied houses that ensure their noble standing, something that commoners are unable to accomplish. As an image of growth, the <i>tavu</i> represents the tension within any house between the obligation to concentrate value and the strategic desire to invest value in the form of marriage alliances to ensure the social reproduction of the house.
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