home > architecture > rumah uda Manap

ethnography of rumah uda manap

Dr Anita Lundberg in a window of the Rumah Uda Manap.

Dr Anita Lundberg is an Australian cultural anthropologist whose work moves between philosophy and poetics. Each of her ethnographic studies emerges through an element. The Chinese element of wood forms the theme of her current project - thus inviting a critique of Western epistemological and ontological assumptions (ie. knowledge and being). Set in the compound of Rimbun Dahan, the ethnography considers the intertwining of human, material, and natural cultures. The element of wood draws together these interrelated cultures based on: the traditional Malay Kampong house, its Chinese carved features, the garden of indigenous trees, and rainforests.

"The project begins with the materiality of the century-old village house in which I live. Here I consider ways in which culture emerges through the daily lived experience of the house with its Malay plan and Chinese features. Several of the carved panels depict mythological animals whose symbolism informs the project.

"The house has an interesting but little known history that has encouraged mythological speculation. It was built by Chinese-Indonesian craftsmen at the request of a rich Malay man for his Indonesian bride and has been passed down the matrilineal line according to the wife's custom. The house became derelict and was transported to the compound of Rimbun Dahan and restored. When the house was moved the owner requested that a photograph of her grandmother, who died in labour, remain with the house. The history of the house emerges through my contemplation of this photograph.

"The house overlooks the garden of the Rimbun Dahan compound which is planted with indigenous trees. Inspired by this setting, I critically examine Western philosophical tropes based in arboreal images (roots as origins, with connotations of purity; trunks and branches as genealogies, with assumptions of patrilineal descent) and compare these to motifs in the Eastern knowledge systems which are embodied in the very wood of the house, specifically, traditional Malay (animist, Islamic) and Chinese (Taoist, Confucian and Buddhist) thought.

"Moving from nature as imaged through a garden compound, the ethnography opens onto discourses of rainforests. Western literature about forests invokes recurring motifs of disappearing: of becoming lost in wilderness, and of transcending this liminal state to return transformed. Again I critically consider this imagery in connection with Eastern philosophies."

This project is considered unique in that it emerges through a setting incorporating the very modern with the traditional and indigenous, and it takes this very specific and embodied experience of a house, its history and setting, as the material foundation through which to contemplate larger philosophical questions about the ways in which we understand ourselves to be in the world and to know the world around us. It argues that natural and material cultures are not inert, but, rather, they enable us to think of the world in certain ways and believe these thoughts to be 'natural'. Through them we imagine philosophical notions about life; they teach us about ways of being and knowing.

Maintaining an interest in the poetics of written, verbal and visual presentations, Anita's previous work (which was based on the element of water and set in a whale hunting village in Eastern Indonesia) has been recognised for its creative edge - whether in papers performed at conferences, writings for academic monographs and journals, or through three ethnographic exhibitions. Her current daily contact with the Rimbun Dahan artists-in-residence has sparked an interest in the potential of digital art as a way of exhibiting ethnographic material in new and exciting ways.

This ethnography is funded by a post-doctoral Evans Fellowship from the School of Anthropology at Cambridge University and is sponsored by the Hijjas Kasturi Foundation and the Institute of the Malay World and Civilization, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.

home · about · art · architecture · environment