House by Philip Thomas

? Encyclopedia of social and cultural anthropology, edited by Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer, Routledge, NY, 1996.

In the past the house has often figured in ethnographies as an item of material culture, as an object replete in symbolic meanings, or as the locus of the domestic domain and systems of house-hold production. Various studies have revealed ways in which aspects of architecture are used to symbolise social relations and categories, whilst others have shown how gender representations involve the house, through the division of domestic space and the role of women in the domestic economy, itself frequently moiled on the house. More recently however an anthropology of the house has emerged which aims to unite these diverse elements, combining an analysis of the house as built environment with the house as a category and idea central to the conceptualisation and practice of social relations.

Much of this work forms part of current attempts to rethink the anthropological study of kinship, adopting a cultural approach which is focuses on native categories as better basis analysing indigenous understanding of relationship, and in the process criticising various elements of established kinship theory. Studies from Africa, for example, have used the concept of the house to question the usefulness of descent theory, whilst the concept have been fruitfully employed by others working in Southeast Asia and Lowland South America. Although many draw inspiration from the writings of Claude Lvi-Strauss, 1

some see a need to move beyond his model of house societies, which is arguably mired in the sort of problems more recent work has attempted to overcome.( )

As well as attempting to bring together various domains of anthropological enquiry which often remain separate, recent work on the house has joined a more widespread critique of anthropology s own metaphors. In some of this work there has been a move away from seeing kinship in terms of a set of structured relationships lying at the heart of systems of descent and alliance, and an emphasis on the need to analyse native categories as a basis for understanding the practice and conceptualisation of relationships as an ongoing process. In many cases the house emerges as a category better suited to such analysis than our own metaphors of lineage and clan. That the house crops up so often that a metaphor of social relationships is perhaps not surprising, given that the house is the place where much that is usually taken to constitute kinship is practised. As Carsten and Hugh-Jones point out, kinship is about sleeping together living together, eating together and dying together, not just about bed but also about house, hearth and tomb. Nowhere are these relations more vividly realised than in some parts of the Austronesian world, where the house is a salient category and metaphor of social relations as well as being the dwelling place of the living built over the burial place of the dead.