Van voorouderschrijn tot souvenir : huissymboliek in de Indonesische archipel

Abstract

Ancestral shrines and souvenirs at first sight would appear to belong to completely different spheres. At closer inspection, however, a rather telling relationship is made manifest. At least in the Indonesian archipelago, where the traditional dwelling and its central role in the way the built environment of old is symbolically dealt with as well as experienced are seen to relate the sphere of the ancestral shrine to that of the souvenir. This particular way of symbolically dealing with the built environment and of experiencing it, are here, in this Ph.D. thesis, defined as house symbolism and constitute the starting-point of an investigation into the traditional vernacular architecture of some ten ethnic groups living in the archipelago.