East Asian ethnolinguistic phylogeography

A polyphyletic understanding of Asian linguistic diversity was first propagated in 1823. Since 1901, various scholars have proposed larger linguistic phyla uniting two or more recognised Asian language families. The most recent proposal in this tradition, Starosta’s 2001 East Asian phylum, comprising the Trans-Himalayan, Hmong-Mien, Austroasiatic, Austronesian and Kradai language families, is reassessed in light of linguistic and non-linguistic evidence. Ethnolinguistically informed inferences based on Asian Y chromosomal phylogeography lead to a reconstruction of various episodes of ethnolinguistic prehistory which lie beyond the linguistic event horizon, i.e. at a time depth empirically inaccessible to historical linguistics. The Father Tongue correlation in population genetics, the evidence for refugia during the Last Glacial Maximum and the hypothesis of language families having arisen as the result of demographic bottlenecks in prehistory are shown to be crucial to an understanding of the ethnogenesis of East Asian linguistic phyla. The prehistory of several neighbouring Asian language families is discussed, and the Centripetal Migration model is opposed to the Farming Language Dispersal theory.

Architectural Developments in Sungai Tenang, 1902-2013

This paper treats the architectural developments in Sungai Tenang since the occupation by the Netherland's Indies in 1902 until the present. During this time great changes have occurred, among them the virtual disappearance of the traditional houses with carved planks. At the same time, much of the architectural developments can be described as the evolution of a still basically Austronesian house structure. Both these changes and the continuities merit close scrutiny, since they together reflect the persistence of the house as a powerful symbolic form that is capable of expressing changing social structures and cultural values. Up to the present, architecture in Sungai Tenang, in spite of its often modern outward appearance, is still by and large vernacular in the sense that its constructive means, its symbolic forms and its uses are firmly rooted in local traditions.

Architectural Developments in Sungai Tenang, 1902-2013

This paper treats the architectural developments in Sungai Tenang since the occupation by the Netherland's Indies in 1902 until the present. During this time great changes have occurred, among them the virtual disappearance of the traditional houses with carved planks. At the same time, much of the architectural developments can be described as the evolution of a still basically Austronesian house structure. Both these changes and the continuities merit close scrutiny, since they together reflect the persistence of the house as a powerful symbolic form that is capable of expressing changing social structures and cultural values. Up to the present, architecture in Sungai Tenang, in spite of its often modern outward appearance, is still by and large vernacular in the sense that its constructive means, its symbolic forms and its uses are firmly rooted in local traditions.