House spatial layout encodes oppositions that function as polar forces, not fixed categories
Evidence
Thus described, the particular layout of the house could be given what we and the French engineers would call a functional explanation. But Bourdieu suggests that distinctions between the different parts of the house and the different places where things are kept or activities carried out correspond to a series of associations and oppositions, which are not to be dismissed as ‘merely symbolic’, as they would be in a functional explanation. … The lower, dark, nocturnal part of the house, the place of damp, green or raw objects – water jars set on benches on either side of the stable entrance or against the wall of darkness, wood, green fodder – the place too of natural beings – oxen and cows, donkeys and mules – and natural activities – sleep, sex, birth, and also death, is opposed to the light-filled, noble, upper part: this is the place of humans and especially the guest, of fire and fire-made objects, such as the lamp, kitchen utensils, the rifle – the attribute of the male point of honour (nif) which protects female honour (hurma) – and of the loom, the symbol of all protection. … The house is organised, Bourdieu explains, according to a set of homologous oppositions: between fire and water, cooked and raw, high and low, light and shade, day and night, male and female, nif and hurma, fertilising and able to be fertilised. But to say ‘the house is organised’ in this way is misleading for two kinds of reason. First, the house is not in that sense a neutral space in which items or persons are arranged. The space itself is polarised, according to the oppositions Bourdieu describes, and the polar oppositions invest every activity of the house, including even the way in which the house is built. Considered, moreover, in relation to the rest of the village, the house becomes just one polarity, the ‘female’, in a larger world: ‘The same oppositions are established between the house as a whole and the rest of the universe, that is, the male world, the place of assembly, the fields, and the market.’ The oppositions are not fixed categories into which items and spaces can be organised; they are an effect not of spatial coordinates but of polar forces. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 175
Categorization
- XREF: Bourdieu’s Kabyle house analysis connects to Levi-Strauss structuralism and to Mitchell’s larger argument in this book about representation and order; also echoes the body-as-map ideas in Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger.
- DEFINE: Clarifies that nif (male point of honour) protects hurma (female honour), and how homologous oppositions structure the house.