Aproximación Conceptual a la Problemática del Adolescente en Situación

Since the early 1970s we have seen the gradual adoption of the adjective ‘traditional’ to describe buildings that have previously been termed ‘primitive’, ‘folk’, ‘indigenous’ or ‘vernacular’. Tradi-tional Domestic Architecture of Japan by Teiji Itoh (1972), Susan Denyer’sAfrican Traditional Architecture (1978), Traditional Architec-ture of Afghanistan by Hallett and Samizay (1980), Friedrich Schw-erdtfeger’sTraditional Housing in African Cities (1982) or Anita and Viera Larsson’sTraditional Tswana Architecture (1984) are cases in point; to these we can add books by Lewcock and Freeth (1978), Kaj Blegvad Andersen (1977) and others. (We might also note the broad acceptance of ‘architecture’ to describe buildings in which architects as designers played no part, but that is another matter.) Implicit in the titles and the texts is the assumption that we are agreed on what ‘traditional’ means in terms of architecture; there is little in the way of explanation of its use and application in these works.

‘Tradition’ is defined inThe Concise Oxford Dictionary as ‘opinion or belief or custom handed down from ancestors to posterity’; as

‘doctrine supposed to have divine authority but not committed to writing’; and as ‘artistic or literary principles based on accumulated experience or continuous usage’ (1954). The problem with these definitions, insofar as they are relevant to architecture or to the uses to which buildings are put, is that they are as applicable to a Mayan temple or a Gothic cathedral as they are to any of the kinds of building represented in the books mentioned above. We may observe though, that belief, custom, doctrine or principles refer to conceptsabout the ‘traditional’ (‘pertaining to tradition’) rather than to material artefacts.

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Edward Shils, in one of the very few works devoted to the subject, argues that ‘tradition – that which is handed down – includes    all that a society of a given time possesses and which already existed when its present possessors came upon it and which is not solely the product of physical processes in the external world or exclu-sively the result of ecological and physiological necessity. TheIliad, in a recently printed English translation is a traditum; so, is the Parthenon’ (Shils, 1981). In this all-embracing definitioneverything that is cultural and inherited is atraditum, an exemplar of tradition.

Whereas this means that every vernacular building, every indige-nous tool with which it was built, is an element of the tradition, it also means that every painting, every poem and every product of former architects and engineers are alsotradita. Here too, ‘traditional archi-tecture’ becomes a term to describe all buildings from the past that survive to the present. Clearly, this is not what was meant by the authors cited, nor by the organizers of the International Symposium on Traditional Dwellings and Settlements: Traditional Contexts. Of course, we may argue that ‘traditional architecture’ is that which is built by the members of ‘traditional societies’ – a designation which Shils averred ‘has come about by misdirection; “traditional” has seemed to be a less pejorative term than “primitive”, “heathen”,

“savage”, “backward”, “pagan”, “barbarian”, and “simple”’ (Shils, 1981). Whether the term is used for this reason or not, it begs the question as to what is meant by a ‘traditional society’.

An uncomfortable distinction was made by Robert Redfield between the ‘great tradition’ and the ‘little tradition’. Explained by his co-worker Milton Singer these terms ‘distinguish thecultural con-tent of those aspects of a culture that are regarded as “higher” from those that are considered “lower”. The higher aspects are usually more reflective and more systematically presented and embody the greatest intellectual and aesthetic achievements of the culture. As such, they tend to be stored in “texts” of various kinds – oral, writ-ten, inscribed, carved and painted, sung and acted’ (Singer, 1972).

Redfield wrote that he thought of the ‘two traditions not as ideal-types    I think of them as concepts for separating out, in any old-established civilization with important orthogenetic features, the content, roles and offices, media and process of one system that cultivates a reflective component with other unreflective systems in local communities’ (Redfield, 1956). With urbanization, Redfield and Singer argued, the little tradition becomes transformed into a great tradition. While we may feel less than content with the qualitative and hierarchical implications in Redfield’s formulation, the concept of anelite tradition, reflective and self-aware, and a popular or folk

HANDEDDOWNARCHITECTURE:TRADITIONANDTRANSMISSION(1989) tradition which shares much of a common culture but which is non-reflective and unselfconscious in nature, is helpful in broad outline.

To an extent, it corresponds with Max Weber’s views. He perceived a level of authority or a system of ‘imperative co-ordination’ which he considered traditional, ‘if legitimacy is claimed for it and believed in on the basis of the sanctity of the order and the attendant powers of control as they have been handed down from the past, “have always existed”’. He also recognized a level of ‘strictly traditional behaviour’ which lay ‘very close to the borderline of what can be justifiably called meaningful action, and indeed often on the other side. For it is very often a matter of almost automatic reaction to habitual stimuli which guide behaviour in a course which has been repeatedly followed.’ But he was aware that ‘attachment to habitual forms can be upheld with varying degrees of self-consciousness and in a variety of senses’ (Weber, 1947). We can recognize that what we term ‘traditional architecture’ falls more into the realm of the unreflective, unselfconscious sector of the total culture than that of the reflectiveélite. Fixity and persistence in plan, the sanction and legitimacy of precedent in design, the formalizing of techniques and processes in construction and the use of spaces in accordance with the dictates of custom, typify traditions in buildings which operate as a co-ordinated system. But with adherence to known and tried techniques, the codifying of behaviour and the pursuit of building methods because ‘this is how they are done’, they crystallize as behaviour norms. Eventually, they are accepted uncritically, becom-ing matters of habit and of established values.

Dependency on tradition is a bulwark against change. A Lud-dite mentality which protects thestatus quo and is in conflict with innovation out of fear of the displacement it may cause, is far from uncommon. But this is not the only reason for resistance to change.

The isolation of remote communities in many parts of the world, insulates them from outside influence and reinforces their depen-dence on the security of what they know, and have inherited. The alien is a source of suspicion and the new is an affront to the values of the elders. Hence, we may find building methods and types in, let us say, Borneo or West Irian, which have remained the same over many centuries, and which have only been subject to change in recent decades through increasing contact with other cultures. While resistance to major changes in conservative societies persists, variations from common practice are frequently encoun-tered, although they may be modest departures from the traditional norms. In an introduction to a study of deliberately invented tra-ditions, the historian Eric Hobsbawm drew a distinction between

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Figure 10.1

A traditional Iban Dyak longhouse, raised on piles, and withbileks, or domestic units, fronting on to shared spaces covered by a common roof. Sarawak, Borneo island.

tradition and custom. ‘The object and characteristic of “traditions”’, he wrote, ‘is invariance. The past, real or invented, to which they refer imposes, fixed (normally formalized) practices, such as repe-tition. “Custom”    does not preclude innovation and change up to a point    (it) cannot afford to be invariant because even in

“traditional” societies life is not so’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983).

Stated in semiological terms, tradition as interpreted here is the rule system, thelangue, while custom is the manner in which it was prac-tised or exercised, theparole. It can be argued that there can be no change without tradition; that tradition provides the matrix within which any changes may be introduced. Even so, the rate of change may be virtually imperceptible, as small innovations and modifica-tions are tried, repeated and proved to be effective and gradually incorporated into customary practice, or are found wanting and

HANDEDDOWNARCHITECTURE:TRADITIONANDTRANSMISSION(1989) Figure 10.2

A modern Iban longhouse with areas corresponding with thebileks identified by different colours and access ladders. Brunei, Borneo.

dropped. The deliberate solution of problems encountered in spe-cific construction contexts and the devising of skills to meet them, occur in every part of the world. As Malinowski demonstrated many years ago, all societies change, however slowly (Malinowski, 1945).

Yet, if some changes are brought about by subtle influence or modest innovation, others may be sudden and brutal. Military con-quest may bring in its wake dramatic changes which may lead to the colonization of building styles. One need go no further for examples than the pervasive Turkish architecture in Albania, or the presence of Venetian houses on Greek islands. There may be change as a result of religious conversion, such as the adoption of North African plans and forms by Islamized West Africa. Change may be induced by edict, Henry VIII’s requirement that timber houses should be built with box frames so that more trees could be saved for the building of the fleet, being one such instance. Or it may be the result of the deliberate initiation of a new technology, like the introduction by the British in the Sudan of fired bricks, using the clamp kiln.

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Figure 10.3

Diffusion: A Toba Batak house which has the characteristic saddle roof. Northern Sumatra, Indonesia (see also Figures 3.5 and 7.6).

While such forms of induced change may be effected by conflicting with local traditional practices, eventually they are likely to become accepted traditions in themselves.

Isolation notwithstanding, the processes of borrowing and adap-tation by contiguous societies, of elements which are acceptable or seem appropriate to their needs, may be traced in many cultures.

They may be of a purely practical or structural nature, or they may be of symbolic or decorative import; sometimes a combination of both, like the distribution of ‘saddle’ roof structures in south-west Asia (Domenig, 1980). ‘Culture is transmitted geographically as well as chronologically, in space as well as in time, by contagion as well as by repetition’ wrote A.L. Kroeber, ‘the spread in area is gener-ally calleddiffusion, as the internal handling through time is called tradition’. Kroeber, in fact, placed less importance than some other

HANDEDDOWNARCHITECTURE:TRADITIONANDTRANSMISSION(1989) writers on thetraditum. ‘The terms “social inheritance”, or “tradi-tion” put the emphasis on how culture is acquired rather than what it consists of ’. Culture, he argued, ‘consists of conditioned or learned activities (plus the manufactured results of these); and the idea of learning brings us back again to what is socially transmitted, what is received from tradition, what is “acquired by man as a member of societies.” So perhapshow it comes to be is really more distinctive of culture than what it is’ (Kroeber, 1923).

Definitions of ‘tradition’ have much in common. ‘Generally speak-ing, “tradition” covers the total cultural heritage handed down from one generation to the next’, summarized Kazimierz Dobrowolski (1958) when writing on peasant culture in southern Poland. Like other writers, including some quoted above, he used the phrase

‘handed down’ to describe the process whereby the continuity of tradition is maintained. It is persistently used to describe the pro-cess whereby tradition is maintained – there is hardly any definition of ‘tradition’ in which it does not appear – ‘handing down’ is almost always used metaphorically. With the exception of certain ritual con-texts, such as the transfer of a symbol of office or rule, a sceptre perhaps, to a new political or spiritual leader, or the giving of a trousseau or dowry where parents may pass on family heirlooms, little is literally ‘handed down’. Even here, ‘handed on’ might be a better term. Yet, if the metaphor is an overworked one and often thoughtlessly applied, there is general agreement that a fundamen-tal characteristic of tradition is that it istransmitted from one group to another, or from an individual to another. Usually, the process is assumed to have a temporal, rather than a spatial dimension, and to be diachronic rather than synchronic. Diffusion apart, the trans-mission of a tradition, ortraditum, is most often seen to be from its guardians to their successors.

If transmission is of the essence of tradition, it would seem imper-ative that its nature is given serious attention. ‘In all the great cultural undertakings of the human race, the oral transmission of tradition plays a great role’, Edward Shils observed. ‘In the produc-tion of material objects such as sculptures, paintings, and buildings, the instruction of the novice must to a large extent be oral, even though observation and empathy also provide guidance, as do writ-ten manuals, drawings, and models’ (Shils, 1981). But Shils had far less to say on the subject of oral transmission than he had on transmission through texts, and less to say on the traditions of the common people than he had on the esoteric knowledge of priest-hoods and intellectual elites. With his concern for the culture of the peasantry, Kazimierz Dobrowolski gave more attention to the

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processes of transmission, noting that the passing of the social her-itage by speech or other stimuli, which are received by the sense of hearing, or which are visually perceived demonstrations of actions and objects, always involves direct human contact. Transmission media of a mechanical character, including print, musical scores and phonographs, relieve the producers and receivers of the cultural content from such contact and establish only an indirect and imper-sonal relationship. Observing that ‘traditional culture’ is customarily used by ethnographers to mean ‘cultural contents and valueswhich are transmitted orally’, he noted the conservatism and stabilizing

‘propensity for the preservation and maintenance of the existing social order’, within peasant traditional culture. The past ‘supplies a pattern for living and provides a model for human action’. Oral transmission, in his view, had a limited capacity for cultural transfer from one generation to its successors, affecting the quantity and quality of what was passed on. This resulted in a decline in the public memory, opening the way for the slow processes of change and replacement, older usages falling irrevocably into the ‘limbo of social oblivion’.

Against this loss of folk memory, peasant craftsmen had their own defences. The village carpenters of Podhale used neither drawn plans nor written calculations: ‘their entire technological knowledge was based exclusively on memory and was reduced to the repetition, in practical action, of a few basic models    a larger, two-roomed house, and a smaller one having one room only, with certain vari-ants which consisted of adding summer-rooms and stores (kamora)’.

The family likenesses between artefacts and buildings so frequently noted and admired in the architecture of preliterate societies, is thus seen as the outcome of the need for the survival of a technological tradition and a control against change. Dobrowolski concluded that there was a relative paucity of different examples of material culture when these were compared with the highly developed system of behavioural patterns. ‘On the one hand we have a limited number of such material arrangements as types of houses, plans of the interior, furniture, dress, ornaments, etc., and on the other, a great number of highly differentiated social situations, each demanding a spe-cial, customarily prescribed form of conduct’ (Dobrowolski, 1958).

Though some may not agree with this view, Dobrowolski’s analysis of the effectiveness, strengths and limitations of the transmission of tradition in peasant societies is a key text in an inadequately studied field. Oral transmission was of the essence of peasant traditional culture in Dobrowolski’s discussion; and it may also be seen to be a distinguishing characteristic of most traditional societies. Yet, in

HANDEDDOWNARCHITECTURE:TRADITIONANDTRANSMISSION(1989) spite of the large number of volumes and articles on such peoples and their culture, the nature, kinds and extent of oral transmis-sion – or indeed any other form of transmistransmis-sion – has been seldom researched in any depth.

In spite of the fact that there is an increasing literature on ‘oral history’ (there is an Oral History Association in the United States, and an Oral History Society in Britain), the bulk of the material gath-ered and discussed has been the result of oral transmission between interviewer and interviewee. Its purpose is the documentation of the culture of the nonliterate, which ‘offers a challenge to the accepted myths of history, to the authoritarian judgement inherent in its tra-dition. It provides a means for a radical transformation of history’, Paul Thompson wrote, claiming that ‘oral history gives history back to the people in their own words. And in giving a past, it also helps them towards a future of their own making’ (Thompson, 1978). It is a proud claim, but a dubious one. Oral history is not about oral transmission within a culture, where history does not need to be

‘given back’. It is through internal oral transmission that the people move towards a future of their own making, and not through doc-umentation by scholars. Even when they describe their techniques of building to specialists in vernacular architecture, craftsmen may use neither the means nor the terminology that they employ when instructing a novice. Oral and other forms of transmission of tradi-tion within cultures have vehicles about which we know little. The Belgian historian and anthropologist Jan Vansina is singular in hav-ing devoted a complete work to the subject. Even he is largely concerned with oral traditions as historical sources, and is interested in the reliability of ‘historical information that can be derived from oral testimonies’ (Vansina, 1961). Perhaps for this reason he does not make a clear enough distinction between transmission among members of a society, and transmission from informant within a society to external interviewer. Nevertheless, the extent of his field-work and the breadth of his study make it a valuable guide to the processes of oral transmission.

Important sections of Vansina’s work identify many of the char-acteristics of oral transmission: the chain of transmission, the struc-ture of testimony, esoteric traditions and mnemonic devices; and many of the problems – failure of memory, the personality of the informant, the bearing of cultural values on informant and testi-mony. But these are factors which may differ in diverse contexts.

Overriding them are the vehicles used to communicate testimony.

Vansina proposes a typology based on criteria that include the pur-pose, significance, form and manner of transmission. He divides

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oral tradition into five categories: Formulae, Poetry, Lists, Tales andCommentaries, some having subcategories (official and private roles for poetry; historical, didactic, artistic and personal

oral tradition into five categories: Formulae, Poetry, Lists, Tales andCommentaries, some having subcategories (official and private roles for poetry; historical, didactic, artistic and personal