Making home visible: language, memory, and spatial belonging in Indonesian domestic visual cultures

Budhi Santoso

doi:10.67490/ijls.v1i3.1016

Authors

Budhi Santoso Universitas Islam Negeri Raden Fatah Palembang Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.67490/ijls.v1i3.1016

Keywords:

domestic visual culture , homemaking, Indonesian domesticity, linguistic landscape, spatial belonging

Abstract

Background: Indonesian domestic visual culture remains underexamined within linguistic-landscape and spatial-visual scholarship, although homes, thresholds, interiors, objects, and mediated household images function as crucial sites where language, memory, identity, and belonging become publicly readable. Objective: This study examines how Indonesian domestic spaces make home visible through linguistic signs, vernacular forms, memory-bearing objects, spatial arrangements, and mediated practices of homemaking. Method: This study uses qualitative multimodal discourse analysis, linguistic-landscape interpretation, and spatial-semiotic reading of twenty-two publicly verifiable domestic visual units drawn from official tourism pages, cultural-heritage records, and peer-reviewed academic sources. Results: Domestic visibility is most strongly organized through vernacular and heritage house forms, including named typologies, roof structures, facade orders, and culturally coded spatial sequences. Memory and belonging appear through ancestral houses, ritual spaces, gendered domestic labour, adaptive kinship, work-care routines, digital homemaking, and psychological attachment. Spatial belonging is negotiated through thresholds that connect private dwelling with tourism, heritage governance, public representation, and mediated circulation. Implication: This study shows that Indonesian homes should be read not as static private containers but as layered semiotic environments where cultural continuity and social transformation are visibly arranged. Novelty: This study extends linguistic-landscape inquiry inward by integrating domesticity studies, visual semiotics, and spatial belonging within one Indonesian corpus-based framework

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