The Kabyle house operates through sympathy and homology, not object-meaning relations

Evidence

Whatever happens or presents itself in the world Bourdieu describes, happens, I suggested, as a potential for fertility or barrenness, for the fullness of life or its emptiness. Practical life is lived as an attending to this potential. It demands an attentiveness to the practical ways in which one thing could affect or excite another, the ways in which things that are juxtaposed could displace or intermingle with one another, how something could produce strength in one thing and weakness in another, how things penetrate or allow penetration. In other words one needs to understand the relations of sameness or sympathy between things, and of antipathy and disagreement. One needs to understand the homology between the bitterness of gall and the bitterness of wormwood, or between the seed that swells in the ground and that which swells in the woman’s womb. Such relations are not the relations between an object and its meaning, as we would say, or between a symbol and the idea for which it stands. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 204

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the Azande witchcraft literature on sympathetic relations as an alternative to the Western symbol/meaning ontology.