Reverse-Engineering Culture: Rediscovering intangible heritage & traditional craft practices of Malay housebuilding

 Introduction. 

Traditional Malay house is a dying craft in Malaysia as contemporary building materials and techniques predominate the construction industry. The Malay house, built over generations by Malay master-craftsmen, represents the indigenous of the Malay society often associated with abstract beliefs and symbolism. Based on UNESCO’s definition of cultural heritage, the Malay house constitutes both intangible and tangible aspect, acting as a symbol of Malay identity. While the latter delineate the preservation of the built form, intangible cultural heritage stresses the importance of the safeguarding, dissemination and reproduction of traditional craftsmen practices and knowledge in Malay house building.

A traditional Malay craftsman is bounded by the hierarchy of labour between a Master craftsman and its apprentices (Sennett, 2009), however as a forgotten trade, traditional Malay builders are now scarce, leaving a significant generation gap that is leading to the loss of knowledge in traditional making. In the past, practices of Malay house building include rituals and technical know-how which was based on an oral culture, hence the extinction of Malay craftsmen hints at an heritage processes of cultural stagnation (Alivizatou, 2012).

This study documents and evaluates a ‘reverse-engineering’ technique, an alternative view on knowledge transfer in contrast to the apprenticeship knowledge system. This notion was discovered during the author’s fieldwork with modern Malay craftsmen, which exploits the disassembly process of a Malay house as a tool to reveal evidence of rituals, indigenous and tacit knowledge embedded in each component of the house. By adopting the Material Culture Theory, the house becomes the narratives of intangible cultural heritage processes.