Baileo

The negeri of Central Maluku · Central Maluku

A baileo is the negeri’s house: a raised, wall-less building where the saniri meets, where adat is stated, and where the ancestors are addressed. What makes it worth building here is its owner — there is none. The other fourteen buildings in this project belong to a household, and the question that a rank or a tally of families answers there is answered here by a count of the clans entitled to sit. Everything follows from that: one bay of floor, one pair of posts and one seat for each soa; one floor plane with no step, because the soa sit as peers; and no walls, because what is decided inside must be visible from outside. The sun in this model is computed for Central Maluku, 3.3° S and 128.8° E.

Baileo differ from negeri to negeri, and what is built here is the common form: a rectangular platform, no walls, a sago-leaf roof, and seats around the floor. The carving — which on many baileo is the part given the most attention, especially on the posts and the seat boards — is entirely absent, for the reason the other houses give: inventing members of a carving vocabulary belonging to particular carvers is worse than showing none. The naming of individual posts after individual soa is not modelled either, though in many negeri that naming is exactly what makes a post a clan’s. And not one figure here comes from a measurement.