crannog, adobe, manor.
Wickiup, villa, lean-to, abbey.
Hacienda, barrack, lodge, shanty.
Pithouse, penthouse, pueblo, condo.
In the Kalahari Desert, !Kung San women construct veldt-brush windbreaks for their families in less than an hour, a dwelling abandoned in a few days when the foraging band moves on.
Among the Toraja of Sulawesi, the saddleback roof and sweeping facades of noble “origin houses” (tongkonan) link generations of kinfolk and spatially anchor rituals shared by members of “house societies.”
And in Beverly Hills, the home of the late television producer Aaron Spelling was put up for sale in March 2009 and finally sold in July 2011 for a discounted price of $85 million to the 22-year-old British heiress, Petra Ecclestone. Generally considered the largest home in Los Angeles County, the 56,500-square-foot, 123-room mansion on six acres includes such amenities as four wet-bars, a screening room, a bowling alley, a giftwrapping room, parking for one hundred cars, and a 17,000-square-foot attic containing a beauty salon and a barbershop. Built in a “French chateau style,” the Spelling house is nonetheless only one-fourth the size of the Palace of Versailles.
All these places are homes.
The social anthropologist Timothy Ingold has written about the difference between “animal architecture” and our buildings. Comparing, as an example, beaver lodges to human dwellings, Ingold notes that “wherever they are, beavers construct the same kinds of lodges…. Human beings, by contrast, build houses of very diverse kinds, and although certain house forms have persisted for long periods, there is unequivocal evidence that these forms have also undergone significant historical change.” As the instinctual expression of the beaver’s evolutionary legacy, “the beaver is no more the designer of the lodge than is the mollusk the designer of its shell…. Human beings, on the other hand, are the authors of their own designs, constructed through a self-conscious decision process—an intentional selection of ideas.”1
The human creation of home—as dwelling, as social unit, as metaphor—is extraordinarily varied; every home is a constructed compromise. As the architectural historian Joseph Rykwert has written, “Unlike even the most elaborate animal construction, human building involves decision and choice, always and inevitably; it therefore involves a project.”2
Such projects counterpoise decisions about different issues—cost, material constraints, environmental stresses, functions, style, social statuses, and symbolic contents, among others—and then express a specific resolution of those issues in architectural form. This is true of all buildings, whenever and wherever humans have constructed them.
And this is particularly true of homes. In addition to their basic and fundamental function of providing shelter from natural elements, dwellings are powerful and complex concentrates of human existence. More than passive backdrops to human actions, our dwellings reflect and shape our lives. Dwellings are powerful condensers of meanings, second only to the human body as a model for thinking about the world. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,” and those webs thickly drape our homes.3
This is all relatively obvious: humans build and occupy a diversity of dwellings, those constructions require assessing multiple factors, and dwellings are a pivotal place around which humans construct cultural meanings. Yet, two facts make these relatively noncontentious propositions challenging.
First, the specific constellations of dimensions and meanings encoded by dwellings are extraordinarily variable and complex. And this truth was made abundantly clear to me during a long and confused conversation with a campesino in far northern Peru.
Since 1996 I have conducted archaeological investigations in the Department of Tumbes, on Peru’s tropical northern frontier. A distinctive type of vernacular architecture is built in Tumbes known as tabique. The building technique uses natural materials from the dry scrub forest, a thicket of thorn-covered shrubs, vines, and cacti interspersed with kapok and algarobbo trees. Although the vegetation is dense, few trees grow sufficiently tall or straight to be sawn into boards.
Tabique buildings accommodate these material constraints. The dwellings are rectangular in plan, framed by upright posts planted in the corners and at 1- to 2-meter intervals along the wall. Horizontal paired lengths of split bamboo are tied or nailed onto the inside and outside of the uprights posts, leaving a 5- to 10-centimeter gap into which sticks are jammed. The wedged sticks form the fabric of the wall, which may be left as a ragged comb of sticks or—if the residents can afford it—a plasterer is hired to slather the tabique wall with daub mixed from clay and steer manure.
In 2003 we were excavating a small site, and I was walking near the site when I saw a man making adobe bricks. The man recognized me as the gringo archaeologist, and we began to chat.
FIGURE 1. A tabique house, Tumbes, Peru, 2003.
The man already had a house made from tabique, so I was curious why he was preparing to build another house of adobes. In the tropics, wooden structures are usually felled by rot and termites, so I assumed that the tabique house was approaching the end of its use-life. This simple assumption was profoundly wrong.
The man and I exchanged “buenos días” and then I said the obvious:
“I see you’re making adobes.”
“Yes, señor.”
“Is your tabique house very old?”
“No, señor, it is only a few years old. It’s a good, solid house.”
“So, why are you making adobe bricks?”
“Because there is no work around here.”
I paused to digest this information. “Are you going to sell the bricks?”
“No, I am going to build a new house. My wife left me.”
Another pause.
“Do you think she will come back if you build a new house for her?”
“No, señor. She ran off with that son-of-a-bitch, Guillermo Flores.4 She’s never coming back.” He shook his head in disgust.
“So, why are you building a new house?”
“Because there is no work around here.”
At this point I was completely confused: “I’m sorry—I don’t understand. Why are you building a new house?”
The man gave me a look reserved for the mentally challenged: “There is no work around here. I have to go to town to find work. My wife left me, so there will be no one here to watch over my belongings. Anyone can break into a tabique house. So I have to build a stronger house of adobe bricks.”
It was an ethnographic encounter reminiscent of the story of the Three Little Pigs.
In a marvelously pragmatic but complex way, this man’s decision to build a house of adobes was based on his own technical expertise, his access to raw materials, regional socioeconomic factors, security concerns, and his matrimonial tumults. Far
