Pre-colonial dwellings conflated material building with meaning, never separating instructions from structure

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the colonial distinction between a building’s materiality and its ‘directions for use’ — a split the Kabyle house never performed.
• XREF: Connects to Bourdieu’s Kabyle house analysis in Outline of a Theory of Practice — the gendered opposition of male/female pillars re-enacting household union.
• DEEPTHINKING: The colonial re-framing splits materiality from meaning, a paradigm that reduces dwelling to a ‘device’ with instructions — dense and re-readable.