Hut
date: label: Accession Date
content: 3 Nov 2014
label: Collection Date
content: 2014
name: label: Donor Name
content: Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage
notes: label: Notes
content: A small house of the type and size used by a newly married Borana couple. The Kenyan government acquired the house from a Borana community in the Marsabit district and donated it to the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, for display at the 2014 Folklife Festival. At the festival, it was assembled by two Pokomo women, Malika Badiribu and Salma Maro. After the festival, it was disassembled and transferred to NMNH. Disassembled, the house includes several large fringed mats, ropes of various sizes and colors, and dozens of long sticks and poles.
label: Notes
content: For a description of the construction, symbolism, and social context of the hut, see: Dahl, Gudrun 1990. "Mats and Milkpots: The Domain of Borana Women" in A. Jacobsson and W. Van Beek, "The Creative Communion: African Folk Models of Fertility and the Regeneration of Life." Uppsala: Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology 15, p 129-136. "The mobile hut (min gela) of the Waso Borana is made out of a structure of curved roof supports, made from the branches and stems of the madera tree, dyed red with acacia bark and tied together with strings (garki) of wild agave (oroge). This structure [the mats?] is manufactured from leaves of the dompalm (kone, Hyphanae Crinita)... The mats are prepared in such a fashion that the outside appears "hairy" or haystack-like", for to one side of the mat are tied very thick fringes of grasslike straws of palm-leaf, while the inside is smooth. There you can see the narrow strips of palm-leaf neatly tied together, sometimes decorated with old strips of colored rag or metallic cigarette wrapping. It takes one week to make one mat, and as about 40 mats are needed for one hut, the amount of work a hut represents is quite substantial... "A woman is given all that is needed for building a house by her parents at the wedding, i.e. they provide poles, strings, mats, etc. Most of the things have been collected from various female relatives on both the paternal and maternal side of the bride, and sometimes the groom's family as well if they are old friends. As time goes by the mats wear out and the hut owner has the responsibility of replacing them herself by her own efforts. At the same time she is, of course, expected to contribute to the huts of younger women who are about to marry for the first time... "The plan of the hut is circular. In the middle of the hut, two dividing walls, usually made out of cowskin, differentiate the fore-room, which is open to guests, from the back room, dinka, which is ultimately the woman's own domain, to which she can deny even her husband access... The back wall of the hut is called borru... it is used to exhibit milk pots, and occasionally ritual paraphernalia... Under [the milkpots] there is universally a wooden box with a padlock, containing clothes, valuables, tea, sugar, etc. This is its owner's most private space..."
label: Record Last Modified
content: 17 Mar 2017
label: Specimen Count
content: 50
place: label: Place
content: Marsabit District, Kenya, Africa
topic: label: Topic
content: Ethnology
culture: label: Culture
content: Boran
setName: label: See more items in
content: Anthropology
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: NMNH - Anthropology Dept.
identifier: label: Accession Number
content: 2071083
label: USNM Number
content: E434930-0
objectType: label: Object Type
content: House