Your House Owns You — Here’s How.

“A ready-made environment fashioned by a previous generation and lived in long before it becomes an object of thought, the house is a prime agent of socialisation”.
 — (Carsten & Hugh-Jones 1991)

The role of the ‘house’ penetrates diverse aspects of the social order beyond a simple notion of material ownership. An anthropological approach and unpacking of the statement “people own houses, but houses also own people” calls for an analysis of the precise manner in which the house extends beyond the material realm and shapes — or reflects, as the case may be — an array of interrelations between people, nature and ideas. It is in this shaping of interrelations within both the domestic unit and society more broadly that houses are affective in ‘owning’ people. But in what manner do houses ‘own’ people? Ethnography and its’ subsequent anthropological literature suggests the house and the household plays both a performative and symbolic role in shaping society, particularly in terms of production and consumption, kinship and reproduction, gender, power relations, and the construction of a sense of place and identity.

Lévi-Strauss’ notion of the house society is an appropriate place to start in addressing this question. To Levi-Strauss, the connection of the house to social realm is the structural backbone of what he called ‘house societies’. The development of this ‘house society’ theory was born out of an approach to kinship and social structure, particularly in indigenous societies where there were significant anthropological ambiguities in understanding kinship systems and their relationship to indigenous practices (Gillespie 2000; 23). Being the key principle of social organisation in these societies, the house became the mechanism of a kinship system falling outside of descent groups or lineages and becoming its own category of kinship classification (González-Ruibal 2006). In his The Way of The Masks, Levi-Strauss examines the Kwakiutl community in the Pacific North-West, specifically regarding previous misrecognitions of their kinship systems. In reference to the little-understood indigenous kinship term ‘numayma’, Levi-Strauss comments that “this type of institution does not fit with any of the three modes of descent — unilineal, bilineal, undifferentiated — which more often than not are treated as separate categories, whereas institutions of the numayma cut across them” (Levi-Strauss 1983; 170). This raises questions for Levi-Strauss regarding how such strict formulated rules of kinship and succession can be applied so loosely. How could a human collectivity with its own explicit culture and formulated language be so invertebrate? It is here where Levi-Strauss proposes the notion of house societies using the example of the Yurok north of California, saying “…in reality, [structural] institutions that support Yurok society do exist: they are … the forty-four ‘towns’ among which the population distributed itself; and, above all, within each town, the ‘houses’” (Levi-Strauss 1983: 172). These houses move beyond a more simplistic material culture described by previous ethnologists and constitute jural entities.

Contextualisation for this notion of house societies can be found in the peasant societies of Highland Poland. Studying the Gorale community in post-feudal late twentieth century Europe, it is argued that the community has continued a form of house society despite being exposed to and integrated in a highly centralised and institutionalised nation state (Pine 1996). The continuation of these house groups over time is exhibited through marriage, fostering and adoption, and a high degree of ritual, forming groups and hierarchies structured around clearly identified house names rather than other kinship or political principles. Beyond forming the fabric of social organisation both within a village and between villages, the institutional role of the house extends its relations often in opposition to the established state and the Catholic church (Pine 1996: 445). The ability of this role of the house to endure despite pressures from an external political economy has been largely put down to a strong focus on ritual which reinforces house identity.

House identity among the Gorale plays a vital role in the construction of a self and social identity, as is explicitly seen the use of surnames. While surnames would be registered with local council records and be passed at marriage and to children, villagers would rarely adopt these names in everyday language as a form of address or identification. Rather, people would be identified with expressions which referred to their ‘housename’ which “indicates kinship and confers social identity, … the name by which a person is known to all other villages” (Pine 1996; 446). This practice reinforces the importance of naming physical space in Gorale society, as embodied in this naming of space is the formation of social groups, boundaries of kinship and affinity and the basis of social and economic structures within the village. The key questions behind a Gorale social identity are “where do you come from, whom do you belong to, and what belongs to you and yours?” (Pine 1996; 446). While Pine’s assessment of this community adopts Levi Strauss’ concept of house societies, it is distinguishable by way of not proposing a transitional society existing between kin and state-based societies, but is rather a legitimate ‘house society’ maintaining a shifting power relationship with the state. Despite this distinction, it provides strong examples of ‘houses owning people’ in that it directly highlights the ‘meta-material’ dimensions of the house.

An alternative angle of assessing how houses ‘own’ people is found in what is called the developmental cycle of the domestic unit, particularly that the idea of a social system implies a fundamental notion of its extension through time. This distinction, as detailed by Goody, is important when considering the role of the house in a social structure. The perpetuation of this social system rests on two pillars; human capital and social capital. Possessing inherent biological determinants, human capital is limited in ways concerning reproductive health and lifespan more generally. For “…a social system will not persist if the average lifespan of its members is too short for them to have offspring and to rear them to the age when they in turn can have offspring…” (Goody 1958). This generational process of replacement has dependence on the educational capacity of the social capital in the development and physical growth of the individual. These physical aspects of reproduction can be said to be embodied in the process of social reproduction, and by extension, the house.

The residential patterns of the domestic group play a key role in this process, of which ‘the house’ is influential as an institutional mechanism in the transmission of social capital and cultural education. In his introduction to Goody (1958), Fortes details how residential patterns are clear indicators of the developmental cycle of an individual rather than an indicator of the family ‘type’. Three main stages are described in this developmental cycle; a phase of expansion lasting from marriage through the period where all offspring are economically, affectively and jurally dependent the parents; an overlapping phase of dispersion where children are married which is directly translated into spatial arrangements of residence patterns, and a final phase of replacement that includes the death of the parents and the structure of inheritance to an heir who is tasked with taking over and continuing the family estate (Fortes in Goody 1958). For assessment, I will focus on the second phase. As children are married, social customs which are instilled during the first phase determine who relocates to live ‘who’s’ residence. The residential pattern of houses, in this sense, provides a mechanism through which reproduction and consumption is governed. The house embodies a network of external obligations and exchange beyond its internal form. From these thoughts on the developmental cycle of the domestic group, we get a brief sense of the manner in which the house is connected with structures of social capital such as kinship, descent, marriage and property rights, but more importantly the role it plays in acting as a culturally tailored environment within which evolves temporal and generational human capital.

This contextual sense of permanency between the house and the human life-cycle is worth exploring further in understanding how houses own people. In their examination of how house, body and mind are intimately linked, Carsten and Hugh-Jones offer it succinctly, saying “…a ready-made environment fashioned by a previous generation and lived in long before it becomes an object of thought, the house is a prime agent of socialisation” (Carsten & Hugh-Jones 1991: 2). In their volume, Carsten and Hugh-Jones take a more holistic approach to the anthropology of the house, focusing on links between architectural, social and symbolic significance. With Levi-Strauss’ work on house-societies revolving around kinship and descent, they are able to notice this limited scope and explore the ‘house in the round’, and in doing so, focus on the links between house and body, exploring the architectural realm and moving from descent theory to relatedness more broadly. “The house is an extension of the person; like an extra skin, carapace or second layer of clothes, it serves as much to reveal and display as it does to hide and protect” (Carsten & Hugh-Jones 1991; 2). Being an extension of the person, the house is also an extension of the self, frequently thought of as a body, sharing a common anatomy and a common life history. Carsten and Hugh-Jones describe this link between body and house as the “loci for dense webs of signification and affect, and serve as basic cognitive models used to structure, think and experience the world” (1991; 3). This connection between house and body is explored further in a homology between house, body and landscape, offering a connection between the immediate external environment of the house and social meaning.

Carsten explores an application on this notion of mind-body-house connection in her ethnography on kinship in the Langkawi Islands of Malaysia. The traditional Malay house is intimately connected with body and mind on all fronts and during all phases of the dwellings ‘life’, encompassing how the house is conceived in the mind before construction, the manner in which it is built and designed, and then how it is adorned and lived in. A strong example of this mind body association is the houses fundamental and intimate link with the female gender. This strong association is embodied into the construction of the house where the proposed mother of the dwelling holds the central post during its erection. The symbolic nature of this act is intensified with a sense of ceremony where the women wear their best clothes while the men bustle about her doing the physical constructing of the house (Carsten 1997). Functioning as the abode and logistical vehicle for house spirit, this central post — traditionally called the tiang seri — is associated with various parts of the female body, and is subsequently dressed in a particular manner to “look pretty”. The metaphysical pathway is also an avenue for spiritual attack and is thus adorned with items of value at the top (gold, silver, copper), and is constructed with iron at the base to aid in repressing such benevolent acts (Carsten 1997; 36). A connection between house, body and mind is further exemplified when we consider death within the domestic group. The intimate link between house spirit and women goes beyond a connection with the house and its female occupants to an idea about the house as an autonomous entity deeply associated with the mother of the dwelling. With this, if the mother of the house dies, the house is considered empty, for “houses are women” (Carsten 1997; 46), and the remaining husband must find another wife to continuing living in this house. Alternatively, if the husband passes, the widowed wife can continue living in the dwelling with no such expressed house-based concern for remarriage. In the same way that a sense of spirit occupies the body is fundamental to identity as a culturally appropriated human being, the woman within the house fulfils and legitimises the houses performative and cultural uses within community, for a house without a women is like a body without its spirit. This strong architectural and symbolic relatedness to the house expresses a direct extension of the self (as detailed by Carsten and Hugh-Jones), connected purely with the women of the house.

In establishing the intimate link between house and body, the natural processes concerned with the body are also concerned with the house. “Houses can be said to be born, to grow, to mature and die, to move and walk, to feed and be fed, and … to marry and copulate” (Carsten & Hugh-Jones 1991: 42). The hearth is provided as an example of these shared natural processes. With shared consumption being a basic indicator of kinship, the hearth is often described as the central point of a house, both symbolically and as a transformative process. The hearth is the part of the house where different elements enter — meat and vegetable, kin and affine, the like and the unlike — which are then mixed and blended. Bodies are fed food from the external environment and the house is fed relationships of those belonging to the dwelling and their attachments, the mixing of these interactions constituting a functional aspect of the society more broadly. Continuing with the example of the hearth, Carsten (1997) provides strong material on a connection with natural processes in the Malay process of conception, birth and siblingship, particularly concerning the primary role of the house and the hearth. Preceding birth each child exists to a set of symbolic siblings including the spirits of the house (tiang seri; as above), boat, rice and people; all of which are integral aspects of Langkawi culture. At birth, the child and the placenta are viewed as two siblings, forming a symbolic relationship in the womb which extends outside after birth. This placenta — seen as the younger sibling — is included in a process of ritual which spiritually and physically links the older sibling (the child) to the house and the hearth (Carsten 1997; 84). In achieving this, the placenta is washed, spiritually treated for protection and wrapped with engendered materials which are essential to the house and concern divisions of labour, before it is buried by the father directly under the hearth of the house. A fire is built over this burial place and lit directly from the hearth of the house. This fire is kept alight for one week and is intended to dry out the placenta — something which is directly linked to the health of the child. Therefore, the heat of the hearth is said to be a primary aspect in preventing sickness. This siblingship with the placenta continues into the child’s life and is intimately linked with their emotional state; “when a baby laughs … the afterbirth is saying pleasant things to it; when it cries, it is the afterbirth causing it distress” (Carsten 1997; 84). The house — and the hearth more specifically — acts as a physical and symbolic point in which a persons’ identity is anchored. The ‘placenta-sibling’ is sustained by the heat of the hearth, not unlike the domestic group; it is the imagined cause of emotion; it is closely linked with ideas of success concerning a future gendered identity; it becomes an integral part of the house. It is in this sense of intimate entanglement with the house that the house in which a child is conceived is performative in ‘owning its people’. It is a nexus of interaction and significance which defines, reinforces and perpetuates a sense of identity, forms the bounds of kinship and relatedness prior to and after birth, and serves as a symbolic point of cultural explanation for the otherwise unexplainable events of a newborn’s life.

The reinforcement and perpetuation of a sense of identity and belonging resides within the houses of Indigenous Australians. An ancestral undercurrent of a connection to ‘land as home’ saw traditional houses act explicitly as shelters. Primarily, these temporary shelters provided protection from the elements, animals, insects and magic, allowing for a traditional semi-nomadic lifestyle. Shelters were constructed from immediately surrounding materials and exhibited physical features including a touch on the ground which is both light and causes minimal disturbance to the land. This type of ‘house’ directly reflects the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of necessity in terms of obtaining shelter which is both practical and aligns with local cosmologies. Conversely, post-colonial societies in Indigenous Australia have had housing projects enforced on them in attempts of Western assimilation. All such projects have involved a concept of the house which culturally withdrawn from its understanding of everyday life in Indigenous culture. Highlighting the contrasts between how culture has been shaped or appropriated within these two different types of ‘houses’ serves to show the manner in which houses ‘own’ people.

Unlike other indigenous societies, traditional houses did not reflect status level in community, this was however found within the sleeping arrangements and segregation of the community into different spheres of occupancy (Memmott 2003; Musharbash 2008). While bands of hunter-gatherers were ever-changing in terms of their composition and the physical landscape they occupied, their camps always took the same highly-structured shape. In the Yuendumu community, this space was made up of yuntas (windbreaks), yarlus (a combination of windbreaks), yalkas (space between windbreaks and sleepers), and kulkurrus / yitipis (the position of the sleepers) (Musharbash 2008; 29). On a macro level, these camps were differentiated further on a basis of gender and martial relations; yupukarra for married people, jilimi for unmarried women and jankayi for unmarried men (Musharbash 2008; 32). The spatial dynamics between these camps both reflect and influence social norms and customs. Traditionally, yupukarra is at the centre, with jilimi to the west and jankayi directly to the east. Musharbash highlights links in this organisation with ritual organisation and a common cosmology that women are from the west and men are from the east. In fact, the polite way to refer to a woman is ‘karlarra-wardingki’ which translates to ‘those belonging to the west’ (Musharbash 2008; 32).

With these camps not featuring a house in the sense of an enclosed domestic space, it is useful to understand the manner a ‘house’ is conceptualised in traditional culture. The term ‘ngurra’ is used to refer to ‘a shelter’, however, this term embodies a variety of meanings covering a broad spectrum ranging from domestic space to cosmological concepts including a sense of time, ritual division, ancestral home, and family (Musharbash 2008; 34). Therefore, for the Yuendumu, the concept of ‘the house’ quite literally encapsulates emotional bonds to fundamental aspects of cultural identity. The house is family. The house is ritual. The house is land. Such deeply entwined ideas of the house, as well as core values of mobility, immediacy and intimacy distinctively clash with the segregated features of the archetypal Western house. Early attempts at government indigenous housing were born out of a hegemonic post-colonial policy ranging from matters of ‘child protection’ to ‘building codes’. Such early attempts were based on models of a Western nuclear family and failed to regard the design needs of a traditionally-orientated lifestyle. Some of the design features requiring consideration include differing daytime / night time behaviour patterns, seasonal behaviour patterns, complex kinship systems, changing spatial orientations, sensory communication between ‘households’, a sense of permanency / connection to land, and so on (Go-Sam 2008). Ultimately, the values of the underlying concept of ngurra have a fundamental clash with the values of privacy and permanency imbued into contemporary house design.

A resulting impact of the introduction of new housing has manifested particularly in the way in which the Warlpiri people of Yuendumu have engaged in the jilimi (single female) camp. Traditionally, this camp was highly gendered and served a single-purpose due to strict marital practices. From a young age, girls would grow up in their parent’s yupukarra until the age of eight or nine when they would move to the yupukarra with their first and much older husband. When widowed, they spend a significant time in jilimi mourning until they remarry and move back to yupukarra (Musharbash 2008; 48). This process continues and saw jilimi function primarily as a camp of mourning for widowed women transitioning between marriages. They were not a part of everyday Yuendumu life. The interjection of culturally insensitive Western housing into jilimi camps not only affected the manner in which Warlpiri people engaged with domestic space but also their ways of being in the world, including the composition of the jilimi. As detailed in her ethnography, Musharbash states that not only have jilimi now increased in numbers and size, but they have transformed from places of temporary residence for women only to “centres of sociality, not only for women but for children and men as well” (2008; 46). This type of fundamental change features a cultural inertia which permeates overtime, altering aspects of traditional life that are seemingly withdrawn from the physical aspects the house, but are nonetheless deeply enmeshed into a web of culture which penetrates all aspects of local cosmologies.

While people own houses, a critical exploration of how houses own people has served to show the manner in which the house extends beyond the material realm and shapes fundamental interrelations between people, nature and ideas. Houses have been used as a structural explanation for the relationship between kinship systems and indigenous practices where previous theories have failed. The house plays a primary role in shaping a social and self-identity, as seen in the contemporary house-societies of Highland Poland. Houses are a cultural sponges which perpetuate social capital. They are ready-made environments within which human capital is born, moulded and reproduced. An extension of the self, the house has a direct relationship with mind and body, a connection which embodies aspects of consumption, kinship, division of labour and identity. Through ethnographic example, we have been able to see how a dramatic and sudden shift in house-type can proceed to alter other cultural institutions that have been in place for thousands of years. The house is a physical and symbolic pillar at the heart of society. It bears the load of the domestic unit and — although its’ role varies with cultural relativity — is a primary medium that tells a story of production and consumption, kinship and reproduction, gender, power relations, and the construction of a sense of place and identity. It is in this manner that houses ‘own’ people.

References

• Carsten, J., 1997. The Heat of the Hearth, New York: Oxford University Press Inc.
• Carsten, J. & Hugh-Jones, S., 1991. About The House — Levi-Strauss and Beyond,
• Gillespie, S., 2000. Lévi-Strauss: maison and société à maisons. , pp.22–52.
• González-Ruibal, A., 2006. House societies vs. kinship-based societies: An archaeological case from Iron Age Europe. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 25(1), pp.144–173.
• Goody, J., 1958. The Developmental Cycle in Domestic Groups. American Sociological Review, 23, p.475.
• Go-Sam, C., 2008. Working With and Against Indigenous Design Paradigms. Architecture Australia, 97(5). Available at: http://architectureau.com/articles/indigenous-design-paradigms/.
• Levi-Strauss, C., 1983. The Way of the Masks, London: Jonathan Cape Ltd.
• Memmott, P., 2003. TAKE 2: Housing Design in Indigenous Australia, ACT: Royal Australian Institutue of Architects.
• Musharbash, Y., 2008. Yuendumu Everyday: Contemporary Life in Remote Aboriginal Australia, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
• Pine, F., 1996. Naming the House and Naming the Land: Kinship and Social Groups in Highland Poland. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2(3), pp.443–459.