About the House.

In his celebrated autobiographical work Tristes Tropiques, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss describes the village of the Bororo people in Brazil, which is circular, with a men's house in the middle surrounded by a ring of family houses held by women and distributed according to clan. The village is divided by an axis into two moieties, or marrying groups, so a boy brought up on one side, having moved to the men's house at puberty, is obliged to marry a girl from the other half and to move in with her. Levi-Strauss goes on to describe how missionaries persuaded one group of villagers to rebuild their huts on a. grid layout, whereupon their social structure fell apart. This suggests a potent connection between architecture and society, for the form of the village evidently did not merely express or symbolise the social order, but embodied it and carried its memory. Yet it is also clear that this only worked because of a shared understanding of what it meant, including a shared concept of what constitutes an ideal village.

`Village', or `house' can refer equally to a building or a group of people, and is still used as in the phrase `the House of Windsor'. But the relationship between physical house and house as social group turns out to be a complicated business. In his later writings, Levi-Strauss developed a theory of `house societies', drawing parallels between the noble houses of medieval Europe and various examples from the Americas and the Far East. He defined his concept house as `a moral person holding an estate made up of material and immaterial wealth which perpetuates itself through the transmission of its name down a real or imaginary line, considered legitimate as long as this continuity can express itself in the language of kinship or affinity, and, most often, of both.' About the House is the outcome of an anthropological conference held in Cambridge in 1991 devoted to an examination of Levi-Strauss's concept by applying it to a range of examples mainly from Southeast Asia and South America. They reach no firm and simple conclusions, but there is much fascinating discussion of the interaction between real and notional houses, which throws new light on the relationship between buildings and society. Also there are many references and a decent bibliography which will make this a good starting point for students of all kinds. The technical passages about kinship structure - the anthropologist's stock-in-trade - are hard-going, and for architects the most rewarding essays are likely to be those that deal most directly with buildings. Stephen Hugh-Jones, for example, presents a wonderfully rounded account of life among the Tukanoan people of Amazonia, not only explaining layout and ritual operation of their longhouses, but also the symbolism of various parts and the way it relates to their mythology and idea of the cosmos. This must excite anyone concerned with origins of architectural iconography and its significance in pre-literate cultures.

The case studies in the book are often enlightening because they break with an order of things that one tends to take for granted. Maurice Bloch's essay about the Zafimaniry in Madagascar, for example, shows how householding can be not so much the expression of a marriage as the constitution of it. When a teenage couple decide to cohabit, he builds a basic house and she brings to it the cooking utensils, but there is no formal marriage. She becomes pregnant, but returns to her mother's house for the birth, whereupon he has to woo her back to live with him. Only the third child can be born in the house, and this marks the permanent establishment both of marriage and of house. All the while, the boy adds material to the house, and gradually woven walls are replaced by hardwood planking from the forest. The house is said to harden as it matures. It gradually becomes a holy house, and when passed on to the next generation, carries an ancestral memory.

In the introduction to the book, Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones comment on the important link between body and building, regretting anthropology's neglect of architecture. From the architectural side we should equally regret our neglect of anthropology, which has so much to reveal about the way in which people inhabit buildings and give them meanings. The many references in About the House to personified columns, for example, deserve the attention of anyone researching the origins of the orders. Even though this book is particularly devoted to the subject of house, there is a disappointing paucity of precise visual and spatial information. Most of the essays are illustrated only with one small black-and-white photograph, and where plans are provided at all, they are unscaled and hopelessly diagrammatic, not even maintaining the same drawing conventions. It seems a pity when an anthropologist goes to live with some tribe for a year or two, learning their language and analysing their every movement, that a day or two cannot be spent with a tape-measure making an accurate survey. We also need to know how the buildings are constructed and by whom, as this too reflects their meaning. Perhaps anthropology students should be taught to draw, or perhaps architecture students should visit them in-situ to help create an accurate record.