THE TAJIN TOTONAC — PART 1 KELLY AND PALERM 



177 



Certain changes have come with time. Occa- 

 sionally, wire instead of liana is used as lashing. 

 Some of the more prosperous families build the 

 house frame of substantial, squared timbers, and 

 place on it a tiled rather than a thatched roof. In 

 such cases, the doors may be of wooden planks, 

 with commercial, metal hinges. Often a tiled 

 roof is combined with the usual wall of upright 

 bamboos (pi. 9, d) , but in a few cases, the walls are 

 of planks (pi. 9, c, /). Since there are no win- 

 dows and few doors, such houses have relatively 

 little ventilation and are far less comfortable in 

 hot weather than are the old-style, less preten- 

 tious structures. 



We have detailed information concerning 74 in- 

 dividual structures which are occupied by 39 fam- 

 ilies, more than half of whom have a menage 

 consisting of two or more houses. Most lie within 

 the /undo legal, where there is a much higher fre- 

 quency of tiled roofs and of plank walls than is 

 found on outlying parcels. Our data may be sum- 

 marized thus: 



Roofs : 



Palm : 



Palma redonda (No. 259). 



Palma real (No. 364) 



Palma redonda and real— 

 Unspecified palm 



Grass 



Leaves (misanteca, No. 169) _. 



Tile 



Walls : 



Upright bamboos 



Upright poles, various kinds of wood 



Either poles or bamboos (entry ambiguous) — 



Planks 



Various combinations : 



Poles and bamboos 



Poles and planks 



Poles, planks, and bamboos 



Number of 



liouses 



17 



20 



1 



2 



3 



2 



29 



74 



48 



14 



1 



7 



2 

 1 

 1 



74 



Walls of upright poles or bamboos predominate ; 

 of the 65 instances, 6 have a coating of mud plaster. 

 Planks enter into the composition of the walls of 

 only 9 of the 74 houses. In roofing, departure from 

 the presumed native type is more evident, and 29 

 of the 74 structures are tiled ; in 20 of these cases, 

 the tile is combined with pole or bamboo walls. 



All told, it would appear that the native type of 



house is holding its own. It has many advantages ; 

 all the necessary materials are available locally; 

 the technical demands are slight, and any Totonac 

 is able to build a house, sometimes with the aid 

 of only one other individual. Moreover, the house 

 is relatively inexpensive to build (pp. 185-186), 

 and is, on the whole, well suited to local needs. 



On the basis of our somewhat limited census, we 

 may guess that about one-third of the Tajin fam- 

 ilies live in a single dwelling. The others have a 

 cluster of two to four distinct buildings, at no 

 great distance f rom one another : 



Number of 

 families 



Single house, with or without interior partitions 13 



Two houses 18 



Three houses 7 



Four houses 1 



39 



When a family lives in a single dwelling which 

 does not have interior partitions, obviously the 

 same room is parlor, kitchen, dining room, and 

 bedroom. However, of the 13 single dwellings, 7 

 have interior partitions, from the floor to a height 

 of something less than 2 m. In two cases, there 

 are multiple rooms, and sleeping, cooking, and 

 living quarters are separated from one another. 

 However, these are sophisticated households, of 

 two local merchants, both from Papantla — one 

 Totonac, the other non-Totonac. Accordingly, 

 both households are atypical. 



Of the single dwellings, two have a partition 

 which separates the kitchen from the living room. 

 One f amily sleeps in the kitchen ; the other, in the 

 living room. The remaining three houses have 

 kitchen and sleeping quarters divided hj a parti- 

 tion ; either serves as a living room, where the 

 family congregates and where guests are received. 



When there are two separate buildings per 

 household, one invariably is the kitchen and the 

 other, the living room. Some (8 families) sleep 

 in the living room; some (7) in the kitchen ; ami 

 the rest (3) sleep both in living room and kitchen. 



There are seven households whose domes! ic ac- 

 tivities are spread over three separate buildings. 

 As usual, one building is the living room, another 

 is the cook house (5 families sleep in the former; 

 1, in both living room and kitchen; 1, in neither). 

 The third building is utilized as follows: 



