Namju Choi is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Seoul National University. While wandering Indonesia in search of a field site for his master's thesis, he was received with hospitality by a Torajan family, with whom he formed a relationship of "family." It was a new family that appeared quite suddenly, at a time when he still had little sense of what family affection meant, or what it was to feel longing for a house and a hometown. In order to sustain this strange and stirring bond with his family, and to explore its depths, he chose Toraja as his field site. As an anthropologist, he thinks and writes about the relationship between Christianity and discourses of traditional culture in Toraja, as it is mediated by the "house." And as a person, he writes out of an aching longing for the houses and homelands he carries, in Toraja and in Korea. He hopes that this thinking and longing will lead toward the work of building a "house" for our dignity, a house that can hold itself steady against the towering waves of (post)modernity.
