Constructing the Phylomemetic Tree Case of Study: Indonesian Tradition-Inspired Buildings



Bhinneka Tunggal Ika

-Indonesian National Motto-

1. Background

Indonesia lives in the way of life described as unity in diversity (depicted in the national motto:
bhinneka tunggal ika). The diverse ways of life, ethnicities, religions, and even races have brought
the country to become the largest country in the world living with differences peacefully. A unique
geographical nature, the archipelago, has also played a major role shaping the face of Indonesia to
day. A lot of factors are intertwining shaping the diversity of Indonesian people and its culture which
in turn become the source of a great deal potentials for our further understanding for the human
kind cultural aspects in general.

Memetics studied the case of the growing human culture in the sense of inspiration from the
evolutionary perspectives. Everything that we see, feel, wear, enjoy emerges from an information
unit presented by our genetic evolution (
cf. Dawkins, 1978). Furthermore, the ways we behave
sometimes influence the way genetic evolution. This is the very essence of the perceived human
civilization.

As one of a place with the highest diversity in human culture, Indonesia is a very important place for
acquiring human understanding about themselves, yet, Indonesian people can also learn a lot on
how to maintain themselves by exploiting understanding from the evolutionary thoughts. The
diverse cultural objects in the social realm of Indonesia are opening wide doors to give us a lot of
explanation about humanity and its evolution in general.

A visualization of phylomemetic is aimed to see the rooted commonality between cultural objects in
their features. Phylomemetic tree shows the diagrammatic view of the similarities embedded in the
features of cultural artifacts while focusing in their differences. This is the very interesting features
of the phylomemetic diagram and become the theme want to be discussed deeper in the paper. We
will not discuss about the terms in the memetics but yet focusing on what we can study by
understanding meme as the smallest information unit in human mind as the source of their
productivity making cultural objects, be it songs, paintings, architectural designs, etc. Here, the
notion of memetics laid upon the realization that meme can be detected in the artifacts and cultural
objects. It is not laid in the artifacts, but one can observe meme by scrutinizing the artifacts
(Situngkir, 2004).

The paper is structured in the following. We discuss the methodological steps of building the
phylomemetic tree including some theoretical possibilities regarding to it, i.e.: the decisions for
choosing cultural aspects as the basic step to have the memeplexes, the way of to transform the
matrix of homology to distance matrix, and some ways to have the phylomemetic tree. As a case of
study, we construct the phylomemetc tree of Indonesian tradition-inspired buildings as shown in
Taman Mini Indonesia Indah (TMII) - a national park dedicated for Indonesian traditional and
cultural heritages. A discussions is then followed the diagrammatic visualization added with some
possible conjectures for future analytical works.



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