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Rumah Adat
HISTORY & CULTURESbeginner
Definition
A generic term for traditional or customary houses built according to indigenous practices and governed by adat (customary law). Indonesia has over 300 ethnic groups, each with distinct rumah adat typologies that encode cosmological beliefs, social hierarchies, and ecological adaptations in their spatial organisation, structural system, and ornament. Rumah adat are living cultural documents — their forms are not arbitrary but carry meaning.
Example
The Tongkonan of the Toraja people in Sulawesi is one of Indonesia's most celebrated rumah adat — a boat-shaped house on stilts with a dramatically curved roof, oriented east–west to align with the cosmological axis of life and death significant in Torajan belief.