Browsing by Author "Brink, Yvonne"

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    Negotiating meaning and change in space and material culture : an ethno-archaeological study among semi-nomadic Himba and Herero herders in north-western Namibia
    (1995) Jacobsohn, Margaret; Smith, Andrew B; Hall, Martin; Parkington, John; Yates Royden; Webley, Lita; Brink, Yvonne
    This contextual archaeological narrative explores the relationship between material culture and social relations, with reference to social, economic, environmental and political changes taking place in Himba and Herero settlements in far north-western Namibia. A starting point is that changes in the organization of space and use of material culture cannot be understood as merely expressing changed social and economic conditions and/or changed value systems. It is necessary to examine how socio-economic conditions and cultural values and ideas work together to transform, produce and maintain cultural representations. By focusing intimately on one semi-nomadic herding community over a five-year period,(where domestic space has to be reconstituted, both physically and conceptually, each time a group relocates,} the study probes how meaning is differentially invested in the spatial order that people build and live in, how the material goods they make, borrow, lend, buy and use recursively come to have and hold meaning, and how and why this meaning changes. In mapping space and material goods at more than 100 wet season and dry season camps and homesteads, a number of discourses are tracked: changing gender relations, changing relations between different generations, people's relationships with natural resources, the spatial relations of former hunter-gatherers now living as herders, as well as material culture conformities and nonconformities between Himba and Herero households. A key concern is to re-empower social actors, past and present, in the creation of (archaeological) meaning. A number of case studies show that meaning is not inherent in space or material goods; people activate meaning by their strategic interpretations. This has implications for both method and theory in archaeology, as well as for the contemporary research and rural development process in Africa. While challenging assumptions about what is knowable from the past's material remains when such remains are, inevitably, recontextualized in a particular present, the thesis contributes to knowledge about material culture and social change and thus offers a number of research directions which could contribute to a more reflexive, dialogic and socially relevant archaeology.
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    Places of discourse and dialogue : a study in the material culture of the Cape during the rule of the Dutch East India Company
    (1992) Brink, Yvonne; Hall, Martin
    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.