Constructed shelters connect to the individuals, societies, cultures, and ecosystems that meet and manifest in them. Papers in this session describe and analyse buildings as sources of information about the living beings, groups, creations, environments, and relationships across time and space of which they are a part. Oceania’s architectural traditions vary tremendously. Beside recently developed and introduced structures, ancestral forms range from massive stone monuments such as Pohnpei’s Nan Madol to brush shelters like Aboriginal Australia’s lean-tos. Some keep in the warmth, like round houses of the New Guinea’s Highlands, while others invite cool breezes, like the Samoan fono and New Guinean treehouses. Some sort people by gender, age, physiological condition, or other locally recognised statuses and concerns, such as men’s clubhouses, taboo spirit houses, menstrual houses, and birth houses. Houses are technical achievements that reflect political, religious, and other ideas and assumptions current among the people who build, renovate, and use them. Some shelter entire communities under a single longhouse roof, while others divide people into smaller groupings, separated by walls or freestanding buildings with varying degrees of space between them. In short, the shelters of Oceania vary in form, style, complexity, formality, materials, construction methods, partitioning, placement in relation to one another and to landscapes, uses, meanings, and many other ways. What can be learned of the bodies and ideas of their builders and occupants from the comparative study of specific ecologies, technologies, and styles of houses, and vice versa? Participants of diverse disciplines are invited to share and ideally integrate ethnographic, linguistic, archaeological, human biological, or other data and analyses centred on Oceanic houses of particular regions and time periods.
Paper submissions are closed
