Composite soundscape of daily life in a Bosavi village, Papua New Guinea.
Sound
Composite soundscape of daily life in a Bosavi village, Papua New Guinea.
Recorded by Steven Feld in 1982.
Christine Heliwell
Space and Sociality in a
Dayak Longhouse
Gerai Dayaks, Borneo
Lawang:
the inner space – sleeping space at the back, then eating space, and then cooking space.
Sawah:
the outer space – space where rice is pounded, space where rice is trampled, Malay (outsiders) cooking space, Malay (outsiders) sleeping space.
“During my first two months in Gerai, while living with a household in its longhouse apartment, I was unable to understand why my hostess was constantly engaged in talk with no one. She would give long descriptions of things that had happened to her during the day, of work that she had to do, of the state of her feelings and so on, all the while standing or sitting alone in her apartment. To a Westerner, used to the idea that one’s home stops at its walls, and that interaction beyond these involves a projection of the voice or of the self which makes impossible the continuation of normal domestic chores, her behaviour seemed eccentric, to say the least. It was only much later, on my second field trip, that I came to realise that the woman’s apparent monologues had always had an audience, and that they were a way of affirming and recreating ties across apartments that made her a part of the longhouse community. In addition, I recognised with time that she had been responding to questions floating across apartment partitions that I, still bewildered and overwhelmed by the cacophony of sound that characterises longhouse life, had been unable to distinguish”.
