Houses in Lesu: The Historical Anthropology of a New Ireland Society

Abstract

This historically inclined study examines features of habitation and domestic symbolism originally encountered in fieldwork in New Ireland in 1929-1930 by Hortense Powdermaker. It aims to reconstruct important aspects of early social life with a focus on houses as mundane institutions and expressive devices. The examination concerns the organization of shelter into continuous groups and social communities. Men's houses and women's houses stood out as symbolic topoi, each evoking a main cultural modality. The respective iconic narrations of these two possible worlds offered radically different solutions to the existential problem of continuity.