The Living House: 2nd edition: an Anthropology of Architecture in South East Asia

Roxanna Waterson’s The Living House, originally published in 1990, is a pioneering study of the house within the social and symbolic worlds of South‐east Asian peoples. Although primarily a work of anthropology, this is also a study of vernacular architecture, an until recently neglected area of research. As such, this book will be of interest to architects, designers, anthropologists and scholars specialising in South‐east Asia.

The central theme of the book is that kinship systems of island South‐east Asia can be re‐analysed as house‐focused systems. Waterson had been studying the Sa’dan Toraja people of highland South‐west Sulawesi and became...