Places of discourse and dialogue : a study in the material culture of the Cape during the rule of the Dutch East India Company

The main object of study in this thesis is the architectural tradition commonly known as "Cape Dutch". The aim is to make sense of this architecture by answering questions about its coming into being, the people who created it, and their reasons for doing so. Contrary to the suggestions of most existing works on Cape Dutch architecture, an earlier substantial form of domestic architecture, which resembled the town houses of the Netherlands, underlies the tradition. Analysis of existing literature, archaeological excavation, and inventories, indicates that gradual changes towards the basic traditional form during the first decades of the eighteenth century took a dramatic leap during the 1730s. Moving away from the shapes of the dwellings to the people who changed them involves a major theoretical shift, away from formalism towards poststructuralist theory: discourse theory, literary criticism, feminism. These frameworks enable me to identify contradictions underlying historical events; to deconstruct documents, thus revealing their rhetorical devices for constituting subjectivities and establishing social hierarchies; and to see the architecture as a body of works or texts - a discourse. From 1657 free burghers were given land to farm independently. These farmers were an anomalous group whose view of themselves no longer coincided with the lesser subjectivities structured for them by Dutch East India Company (VOC) documents. Together the latter constituted a discourse of domination against which the anomalous group, in the process of establishing new identities for themselves, developed a discourse of resistance. Since the VOC maintained a strict monopoly over the word, the discourse of discontent was manifested in other forms of inscription, most notably in free burgher architecture. Using a particular type of gender theory, it becomes possible to envisage the two discourses in conversation with each other. The theoretical component of the thesis involves, first, writing historical archaeology into the gaps of existing post-structuralist perspectives which were not designed for archaeology; second, demonstrating the two discourses at work in the practice of their everyday existence by the people concerned.

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Department of Archaeology

Year dc:date.issued

1992

Author dc:creator

• Brink, Yvonne

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Hall, Martin

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/22580

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/22580