ABSTRACT
The province of Jambi is situated on the east coast of central Sumatra, and is formed around the basin and tributaries of the Batanghari river. The provincial capital is Jambi city, and the district known as Seberang comprises a group of villages strung out along the north bank of the river opposite the city centre. The people who live in Seberang describe themselves as Malays and their houses are Malay houses. This area is thought to have once been the site of the capital of Melayu, a kingdom which sent delegations to the Chinese court in the seventh century AD, and which had links extending to India in the west (see Ferrand 1922: 157–158). Contacts with the Arab world, India and China have left their mark on cultural practices in the villages, a syncretic amalgam resulting from trade and immigration over many centuries. The paper attempts to explore what it is possible to learn about the Malay culture of Jambi from a study of some aspects of house structure and use in this area, based on data obtained during several periods of field research in the district in 1995 and 1996. Though the houses in Seberang are built in a variety of shapes, styles and materials, and though local interpretations of the elements which make up the house cover a range of ideas, sometimes conflicting, sometimes overlapping, and reading the elements in a number of different ways, the paper argues that useful conclusions can still be drawn about the attitudes, values and social organization of those who live in them.
