Privacy? For what?

“Make sure your parents know where you are going.” “Why do you need to lock your bedroom door? What are you hiding in there?” In many Indian households, these questions are familiar. You may have a great deal of space around you, a house set within its own plot of land, with paddy fields stretching beyond it, and yet the boundaries within the house can be closely watched. This is perhaps especially true for the little coastal state of India, Kerala, where I come from. Space may be abundant, but privacy is another matter altogether.

It is possible to have plenty of space and still feel claustrophobic. Privacy, after all, is not simply a matter of how much space we have, but how we are accustomed to living in it. Having lived in Malaysia, I have often had friends from India visit me, and they are fascinated by the way houses are built here. Entire rows of near-identical houses stand side by side, sharing walls, with little space on the sides or at the back. My Indian friends inevitably have questions. Can the neighbours hear each other? Do people have to lower their voices? How do they live without feeling watched or crowded? These questions reveal something interesting, which is that what feels like a reasonable boundary to one person may feel like an intrusion to another. Neither response is universal; both are shaped by what we expect from a home. Yet one experience I had in Malaysia made me think beyond the houses themselves.

It was June 2025 when a friend from the Iban community in Sarawak, Malaysia, invited us to celebrate Gawai, their harvest festival. She told us about the longhouses where her community lived, but I couldn’t quite picture them. Then I saw one: a long, continuous stretch of homes, running across the landscape as though someone had taken an entire street and folded it under a single roof. Around 54 family dwellings stood side by side, each with its own space, yet all part of the same building. From a distance, it looked like a row of houses. Up close, it felt like an entire community under one roof. One long house.

I later began to understand that the longhouse has a history closely tied to how Iban communities have lived with the land. I have come to understand this history through accounts written in different times, some under colonial rule. They offer a window into the past, though never the whole view of the lives lived within these spaces. Iban settlement in Sarawak has historically been connected to shifting cultivation, particularly hill rice farming, and to movement from one area to another as communities established new settlements (Freeman, 1955). Rivers, forests and agricultural land shaped where communities settled and how they organised their livelihoods. In this landscape, the longhouse brought multiple families together while allowing each to maintain its own domestic space, with the shared ruai serving as a common area for gatherings and collective activities (Soda, 2000). Agriculture, mobility and security intersected in different ways across communities, and the longhouse changed alongside the people who built and inhabited it.

On my left was an open gallery, part balcony, part sitting area, where people gather and conversations unfold. On the right, a succession of doors that lead into separate family homes, one after another. Stepping inside, the contrast is striking. Each home is relatively narrow, extending only a room’s width across, with perhaps three or four bedrooms arranged along its length. The houses are modest in width but stretch on and on, joined together under one roof. What appears from the outside to be a single enormous building is, from within, a series of individual homes connected by a shared space. Each family has its own front door, but the corridor outside belongs to everyone.

The architecture becomes much easier to understand when you realise that each of these family spaces has its own place within the larger house. The individual family unit is generally called the bilik, while the long communal gallery in front of the family spaces is the ruai. There are also other spaces, including the tanju, which opens the house outward, and the sadau, traditionally associated with the upper part of the house. The arrangement varies between longhouses and has changed over time, but the basic relationship between the family space and the shared gallery remains important. The ruai can become the place where people meet, receive visitors, hold meetings and celebrate. It is therefore difficult to separate the architecture from the social life taking place inside it.

That is where I started thinking about privacy differently. Because if I looked at the longhouse from the perspective of the house I grew up with, then yes, there was very little privacy. But if I looked at it from the perspective of the people who lived there, then perhaps privacy was organised differently. Your family has its own space. You can close your door. You have a kitchen, bedrooms, and a domestic life that belongs to your family. Nevertheless, immediately outside that space is the ruai, which connects you to everyone else.

That distinction becomes particularly interesting because the bilik itself is not necessarily a completely fixed unit. Research on Iban longhouses shows how bilik family units can subdivide as families grow and change, and how the construction and expansion of the longhouse connect to changes in household composition. In other words, even the physical shape of the house responds to the people living inside it. A family grows, a new domestic arrangement emerges, hence, eventually the architecture has to accommodate it.

I had assumed that privacy would be hard to come by in a place like this, and three days of living there only deepened my curiosity. I was staying in house number 21 of the 54, and sometimes, if I pressed my ear close to the wall, I could hear voices from the other side. But whose voices were they? The people in my own house, or the family next door? Sound travelled across these thin boundaries, blurring the distinction between one household and another. After a while, I began to wonder whether privacy here meant something different altogether. Perhaps it was not simply about keeping the lives of others out, but about learning to live with the sounds of lives unfolding all around you.

The longhouse community has its own leadership, its own rules and its own relationship to the territory around it. In traditional Iban society, a longhouse was associated with a territorial domain known as the menoa rumah, where families cultivated their farms and followed shared rules and ritual restrictions. The longhouse therefore extended beyond the building itself. Its social world included the land, the farms and the people who depended upon them.

This is perhaps why calling the longhouse simply a collection of houses feels inadequate to me now. When I walked into house number 21, I thought I was entering somebody’s home. However, I was also entering a community that had its own history and relationship with the surrounding landscape. The building gave that community a physical form.

Traditional longhouses were largely constructed from timber and other locally available materials, while contemporary longhouses increasingly use concrete, brick and corrugated metal. Sarawak Museum material on longhouse development describes these changes as part of the wider transformation brought by modernisation and access to new construction materials. Looking at a modern longhouse, therefore, does not necessarily tell you what an Iban longhouse would have looked like several generations ago.

The people living in them have changed too. Education and employment have taken many younger Iban people away from longhouses, particularly towards towns and cities. Research on rural–urban migration among the Iban has documented how this movement has affected agricultural activity and the composition of longhouse communities, with some families spending longer and longer periods away from their longhouse. The effects are as social as they are economic. When younger generations leave, relationships between families and the continuity of particular family lines within a longhouse can also weaken. This puts forth the supposition that the closeness itself can become part of the way a community survives, even as the shared spaces that sustain it bring their own expectations and leave less room for expressions and solitude.

When a ceremony moves from the family apartment into the common gallery, the focus shifts from the family as a separate unit to its place within the longhouse as a whole. Robert J. Barrett (2004) describes how conversations in shared spaces can draw in other family members, turning an exchange between two people into a collective encounter. These spaces matter because a community cannot survive on family ties alone; those ties must also be lived, renewed and carried into the lives of successive generations. The ruai is therefore more than a place where people happen to gather. It is one of the settings in which separate families become part of a shared social world, and where the closeness that sustains a longhouse community can be continually renewed.

Would I be comfortable knowing that somebody might hear me through the wall? Would I want to walk out of my room and immediately see other people? Would I enjoy having so many people around me, even when I wanted to be alone? Then again, I don’t know whether I would have asked these questions had I grown up there.

Perhaps the problem is that I am bringing a very particular idea of privacy with me.

A house in Kerala gives you space because land surrounds it. A Malaysian terrace house gives you a wall between yourself and your neighbour. The Iban longhouse gives you a family space within a much larger shared structure. Each one creates a different relationship between the person and the people around them.

And maybe that is what architecture does more often than we realise and it teaches us what relationships are supposed to look like.

We tend to think of houses as things we build after deciding how we want to live. However, sometimes the house itself shapes the way we live. If the only way to get from your room to somewhere else is through a shared space, you will encounter people. If your neighbour lives a few metres away, you will know that they are there. If your house sits on a comparatively large piece of land, you may experience your family life differently.

I had gone to Sarawak thinking about houses, I came away thinking about how we decide what belongs to us.

A bedroom can belong to you. A kitchen can belong to your family. The ruai belongs to the people living around you. The land around the longhouse belongs to a wider history of settlement and cultivation. Even the longhouse itself carries memories of families who have lived there before and those who may eventually leave.

So perhaps the question of privacy is much bigger than whether somebody can hear you through a wall.

We think we know what it means because we have experienced it in one particular way. Then you enter another house, another community, another way of arranging people around one another, and we begin to see how much our ideas are shaped by the spaces we inhabit and the lives we lead within them, and suddenly the definition becomes much less certain.

Bibliography

  1. Barrett, R.J. (2004). Space, repetition and collective interlocution: Psychiatric interviews in a Borneo longhouse. Communication & Medicine, 1(1), 25–34.
  2. Freeman, J. D. (1955). Iban agriculture: A report on the shifting cultivation of hill rice by the Iban of Sarawak (Colonial Research Studies No. 18). Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.
  3. Sarawak Museum Department, Longhouse Model. https://museum.sarawak.gov.my/web/subpage/webpage_view/113 (Retrieved on 10 October 2026).
  4. Soda, R. (2000). Living Strategies of the Urban Poor in a Local Town in Sarawak, Malaysia: Population Mobility of the Iban between Urban and Rural Areas. Geographical Review of Japan, Vol. 73(2).