Pre-colonial dwelling treated building and meaning as inseparable, not as plan and material

Evidence

The model village, it seems, introduced a distinction between the materiality of the buildings and the set of ‘directions for use’ required to live in them. This was something new; such a distinction was unthinkable in the Kabyle village described by Bourdieu, which I suggested could be taken to typify the ways of building, dwelling and thinking that the colonial order sought to replace. As we saw, there was nothing in the building or the life of the Kabyle village that could be artificially distinguished as the mere ‘material realization’, as we say, of a separate set of directions, meanings or plans. The very building of the house was not the realisation of a plan but the re-enactment, in such processes as the joining of a ‘female’ pillar to the ‘male’ roofbeam, of the union that formed the household. The house was never a mere device, and did not present its inhabitants, like a modern device, with separate instructions for use. Nothing was set apart in distinction to its mere materiality as the realm of the symbolic, of the cultural code as anthropologists sometimes say, or the directions to be learnt. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 314 (#expands, via linked claim)

In the order of an exhibitional world, such as Lyautey’s Rabat, each building and each object appeared to stand for some further meaning or value, and these meanings appeared to stand apart as a realm of order and institutions, indeed as the very realm of the political. The effect of meaning, however, as we might expect from the discussion of language in the previous chapter, actually arose not from each building or object in itself but out of the continuous weave of buildings and objects in which an individual item occurred. So although ‘Finance’ had not yet been built, it already existed as a ‘logical place’ in the process of intercalation. To create the effect of a realm of meaning, this differential process was to mark every space and every gap. It was to extend across the whole city, as continuous as a system of disciplinary power, to include even the ‘native town’ portrayed on the European postcards. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 507 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Meaning in colonial cities arises from gaps and interrelations, not individual objects; Pre-colonial Cairo’s order was a dynamic of enclosures, not a fixed spatial framework; Pre-colonial dwellings conflated material building with meaning, never separating instructions from structure — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 314 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Pre-colonial dwellings conflated material building with meaning, never separating instructions from structure #expands (0.95) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 314
• Rebuilt housing architecture fixed and made permanent a codified social hierarchy #complicates (0.78)
• Colonial cities produced meaning through differential interrelation, not individual structures. #complicates (0.75) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 507
• Preindustrial cities merged work and residence within single dwellings #complicates (0.75) — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 228