Kabyle spatial order works through 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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The order of the Kabyle house, or what we would call the organisation of its space (none of these terms is sufficient or appropriate) can better be thought of as this kind of attentiveness to the world’s fertility or potential fullness. Such potential or force plays as the rhythm of life, a life made up not of inert objects to be ordered but of demands to be attended to and respected, according to the contradictory ways in which they touch and affect each other, or work in harmony and opposition, or resemble and oppose one another. Thinking of the life of the house in these terms, which have little to do with magic or myth in the pejorative sense of such words, enables us to begin to see the limits of the French engineers’ provocative technique of order, and the political mythology to which it gives rise. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 180 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Since any system of representation is itself a fixed spatial construct, it automatically converts the fluid, confused, but nonetheless objective spaces and time of work and social repro­ duction into a fixed schema. ‘Just as the map replaces the discon­ tinuous patchy space of practical paths by the homogeneous, con­ tinuous space of geometry, so the calendar substitutes a linear, homo­ geneous, continuous time for practical time, which is made up of incommensurable islands of duration each with its own rhythm.’ The analyst, Bourdieu continues, may win ‘the privilege of totalization’ and secure ‘the means for apprehending the logic of the system which a partial or discrete view would miss,’ but there is also ‘every likelihood that he will overlook the change in status to which he is subjecting practice and its product,’ and consequently ‘insist on trying to answer questions which are not and cannot be questions for practice.’ By treating certain idealized conceptions of space and time as real, Enlightenment thinkers ran the danger of confining the free flow of human experience and practice to rationalized con­ figurations. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1608 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The Kabyle house’s order is attentiveness to force, not arrangement of inert objects — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 180; House spatial layout encodes oppositions that function as polar forces, not fixed categories — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 175; Kabyle associations are contextual traces, not symbolic codes (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• House spatial layout encodes oppositions that function as polar forces, not fixed categories #corroborates (0.97) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 175
• The Kabyle house’s order is attentiveness to force, not arrangement of inert objects #corroborates (0.93) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 180
• Fixed spatial representations inevitably distort the fluid practical spaces they depict #complicates (0.71) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1608