Men's house (community house)
The men's house is in many so-called primitive peoples the meeting house of men. Children and women are not allowed in. It often serves as a storage place for cult objects such as masks or musical instruments and as a meeting place, among other things for consultations or cultic acts. It is also often used as a hostel by strangers passing through.
The earliest forms of these meeting houses are proven to date from the Neolithic . Since in some cultures it was the home of the unmarried men of the village, the term “man's house” is often used in ethnographic literature for these meeting houses used by men . The men's house was the social and cult center of the village. The skulls of chiefs were often kept in the men's house as a symbol of the connection between the living and the dead. Most of the time the house was located in the center of the village, was usually a stand-alone building and protruded in size from the surrounding buildings.
While in some cultures the men's houses as youth houses were the home of unmarried young men, in other cultures the men's house has developed into the cultic center of secret societies.
Except in Central and North Asia, men's houses were or are common in numerous patriarchal cultures. We can still find men's houses in cultures in Oceania , Indonesia , India , East Africa , western North America and the Amazon region .
The house types showed a wide range of variation. In the Indian tribe of the Natchez z. B. It was in the middle of the central village square, the cultic center, surrounded by four large houses next to the ball playground. In Melanesia , too, the men's house differs from the surrounding huts in which the families live. Here it is often only a platform, and at least the side walls are often missing; but it tends to be richly decorated with carving and painting.
Remarks
- ^ Men’s house , in: Brockhaus Enzyklopädie . 17. Completely rework. Edition. Vol. 12: Mai-Mos. Wiesbaden: FA Brockhaus Verlag, 1971, p. 97
- ^ Assembly house , in: Herrmann, Joachim (ed.): Lexicon of early cultures . Vol. 2. Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, 1984, p. 380
- ↑ Birket-Smith, Kaj: History of Culture. A general ethnology. Munich: Südwest Verlag, undated, p. 299
- ^ Distribution and social consequences compare Birket-Smith, Kaj: History of Culture. A general ethnology. Munich: Südwest Verlag, undated, p. 300
- ↑ Lindig, Wolfgang / Münzel, Mark: The Indians. Cultures and history of the Indians of North, Central and South America. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1976, p. 74
- ↑ [1]
