Joglo

Joglo names a roof form and not a house form: a tiered roof rising at the centre, carried on four saka guru posts bound by the stepped bracket assembly tumpang sari. That arrangement carries the roof load to four points, so the space beneath needs no walls.

The front of a Javanese house, the pendhapa, exploits this: roofed and unwalled, used for receiving guests, for performance, and for selamatan. Behind it the pringgitan — where wayang is performed, from ringgit — and the enclosed dalem, with the senthong tengah at its centre, which is not used for sleeping. The front-to-back sequence runs from most open to most closed, and the division states a guest's standing by how far in he is invited.

Because its frame is joined with pegs and tenons without nails, a joglo can be dismantled and re-erected elsewhere. That property served its owners in the past and has become a problem in the present: since the 1990s old joglo houses have been bought from villages in central and eastern Java, taken down, and re-erected as holiday houses, restaurants or hotel buildings in Bali and elsewhere.

The trade proceeds at prices large to the seller and cheap to the buyer, and it breaks nothing. Its effect is legible in the villages: the buildings that give a village its shape move elsewhere, and what remains is empty ground. This encyclopedia records it because it is a movement of cultural objects occurring domestically, without a foreign intermediary, and therefore out of reach of the much more discussed conversation about returning colonial objects.