Ngadhu and bhaga

Bena and Wogo, Ngada, Flores

In a Ngada village square, in front of the rows of houses, stand pairs: a ngadhu, a carved post under a conical thatch cap, and a bhaga, a little house on short posts. One is a clan’s male ancestor and the other its female one, and every clan has both. Three things make them worth building here. The subject is a pair — two objects of different kinds that have to exist together, and one without the other is not a smaller statement but an unfinished one. The bhaga is a house at a size nobody can enter: the only size in this project taken from what a building depicts rather than from what it holds. And neither of them shelters anybody. The sun in this model is computed for Bena, 8.87° S and 120.98° E.

The carving is the most important thing about a ngadhu and it is not here: the post is carved along its length, and the forked arms at its head carry marks stating the clan and its feasts. Not modelled, for the reason the other packs give. Beyond that: the planted part of the post is declared and not drawn, because the core refuses parts below ground; bhaga vary a great deal from village to village and what is built here is the common form; the stone graves and figures that also stand in the square at Bena are not built; and not one figure here comes from a measurement — the sources are ethnography rather than measured drawings, though these objects stand in the open and could be measured in an afternoon.