Tswana Ways of Dwelling and Missionary Impact

Missionaries traveled widely in southern Africa and focused their efforts on the densely settled conurbations, or metse, that were found across the region. These urban centers had a hierarchical political organization with a paramount chief, or kgosi, at the head, providing an intuitive point of contact for Europeans interested in inserting themselves into Tswana communities. Despite variation within and between the different Tswana polities, missionaries predominantly interpreted them in terms of the nucleated settlements they knew from Britain, translating the concept of motse (pl. metse) as ‘town’. What this obscured was the way in which metse were inextricably wrapped up with the authority of chieftainship. The kgosi’s central position was echoed in the idealized concentric layout of the settlement. At the heart of the motse lay the chief’s ward, composed of a roughly circular arrangement of house compounds with the chiefly court (kgotla, pl. dikgotla) and the chief’s cattle at its center. The kgotla and the chief’s ward were surrounded physically and conceptually by the other wards of the settlement; these in turn were ringed by agricultural fields, then pastureland, and finally the wild uncultivated land of the bush (Reference MaggsMaggs 1976, 277; Comaroff and Reference Comaroff and ComaroffComaroff 1991, 128–30).

Ethnographic research carried out in the twentieth century has been important for conceptualizing Tswana communities in the nineteenth century. Isaac Schapera described Tswana wards in the early to mid-twentieth century as the most basic unit in the administrative system. The number of wards in a settlement depended on its size, with the smallest villages having only one (Reference SchaperaSchapera 1984, 46–47). Each ward was broadly kin related and administered by its own headman and his senior associates drawn from the male family heads. All wards were organized along similar lines to the kgosi’s, with houses in a circular arrangement around the open space of the kgotla (Reference SchaperaSchapera 1935). Wards had their own agricultural lands and local political organization, but the headman also answered to the central chief of the motse. This gave rise to political and economic strains in the life of the motse that Christopher Morton has characterized as a tension between centripetal forces converging on the central meeting place (kgotla) and centrifugal forces pulling people out to the edges of settlement following their cattle and fields (Reference Morton2004, 348). Architectural forms reproduced the circular form of the ward, with circular-plan houses clustered in compounds. Found in front of the house was a semipublic walled courtyard (lolwapa, pl. malapa) that acted as “the point of articulation between the domestic unit and the encompassing structures of the polity” (Reference ComaroffComaroff 1985, 58). Behind the houses were more private yards (segotlo), associated with women and where household grain was stored. The central meeting space of the kgotla was associated with men and with their cattle, which were corralled there when not at the cattle posts outside the town. In the nineteenth century, women were not included in political meetings at the kgotla, but they did have a role in religious activities there (Reference KinsmanKinsman 1983, 50–51). They also oversaw the cultivation, threshing, and storage of crops. When not at their fields, women’s productive activities revolved around the house and its courtyard; they were also responsible for house building. Although in some cases men erected the exterior wooden roof supports and door, women always built the walls of the house, using a mixture of clay and dung, sometimes with stone foundations (Reference Hall and KentHall 1998, 247; Reference SekgarametsoSekgarametso 2001, 30–31; Comaroff et al. Reference Comaroff, Comaroff and James2007, 75–81).

Gary Okihiro (Reference Okihiro2000) has criticized the use of twentieth-century ethnography to reconstruct nineteenth-century Tswana ways of life, arguing that it masks historical change and fails to take account of the variation in Tswana experiences. For example, he emphasizes the role of immigrants in the formation of the Kwena polity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, also suggesting that women’s association with grain cultivation was established during this period (86–89). Equally, Paul Landau has detailed changes in the consumption of sorghum beer over the eighteenth and nineteenth century that were tied to transformations in politics and gender relations (Reference Landau1995, 83–95). Missionary accounts describe how during the nineteenth century women’s produce was drawn upon by men to maintain their political position, both in the form of beer and through agricultural surplus, which was used with cattle to build and maintain alliances and pay bridewealth (Reference Gaitskill and WalkerGaitskill 1990; Comaroff and Reference Comaroff and ComaroffComaroff 1991, 135–38). This shifted with the introduction of Christianity. Landau shows how the kgosi of the Ngwato polity, Khama III, banned the consumption of sorghum beer as a way of controlling political meetings that could pose a challenge to his rule.

Landau is critical of the “diagrammatic vision of tradition” that is often presented for nineteenth-century social and spatial organization (Reference Landau1995, xxi), and similar criticisms have been made by archaeologists of attempts to use twentieth-century ethnography as a model to understand the deep past of the region. The layout of towns and villages in southern Africa has been remarkably consistent over time, and archaeologist Thomas Huffman argues for the material persistence of a “Central Cattle Pattern” as evidence of an accompanying worldview that goes back as far as a millennium (Reference HuffmanHuffman 1982, Reference Huffman1986, Reference Huffman2001). While this model has been a powerful tool for interpreting past southern African settlements (papers in Hall et al. Reference Hall, Avery, Margaret, Wilson and Humphreys1984; Reference PistoriousPistorious 1992; Reference HuffmanHuffman 2007), it has also come under sustained criticism for its static and homogeneous view of past communities, which leaves little room to understand how the model itself emerged and changed over time (see, e.g., Reference HallHall 1984, Reference Hall1986; Reference LaneLane 1994–95, Reference Lane2004; Reference MaggsMaggs 1994-95; Reference BeachBeach 1998; Reference LandauLandau 2010, 45–47). More recently, research on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has integrated historical texts, oral histories, and archaeology, in order to look more carefully at local dynamics and the particular constellations of any particular area and period (Swanepoel et al. Reference Swanepoel, Esterhuysen and Bonner2008; Delius and Reference Delius and MarksMarks 2012). Work carried out at the abandoned Tlokwa capital of Marothodi has, for example, drawn upon oral histories, archaeology, and historical texts to write a history of the town that is embedded in its particular local context (Reference AndersonAnderson 2009; Boeyens and Reference Boeyens and HallHall 2009). Archaeologists are more alive to the nuances of history (Reid and Reference Reid and LaneLane 2004; Behrens and Reference Behrens and SwanepoelSwanepoel 2008), and historians have argued forcefully for the importance of material evidence in the composition of historical narratives (Reference MortonMorton 2004). The work of John and Jean Comaroff has been vitally important in shifting the ground of historical studies to open up the possibility of more discussion among ethnographers, archaeologists, and historians.

As missionaries arrived into the dynamic and changing landscape of southern Africa, they were perturbed by Tswana ways and forms of dwelling. Although individual missionaries made some adjustments to the radically different milieu of the mission field (as shown, e.g., by Reference HovlandHovland 2007), Jean and John Comaroff have argued that a common feature of the missionary encounter in southern Africa was the rejection of the landscapes and landscape practices that missionaries encountered as sinful and immoral (Comaroff and Reference Comaroff and ComaroffComaroff 1997, 279–86; see also Reference GroveGrove 1989). Efforts were made by missionaries to reorganize dwelling practices along lines that echoed or transformed those that they knew from home (Comaroff and Reference Comaroff and ComaroffComaroff 1991, 205; Reference Comaroff and Comaroff1997, 288–96). The need to relocate converts into Christian space was common to missionary efforts throughout southern Africa and to missionaries of different denominations. Although early travelers commented on the tidy, well-swept forecourts of Tswana houses and were not overly critical in their descriptions (Comaroff and Reference Comaroff and ComaroffComaroff 1997, 279–80; Reference AndersonAnderson 2009, 5–21), a distinction quickly emerged in the discourse of missionaries between heathen “huts” and Christian “homes” (Reid et al. Reference Reid, Lane, Segobye, Borjeson, Mathibidi and Sekgarametso1997, 385–86). The work of the missionary was seen to extend into reworking the very space that people inhabited: “how arduous is the work set before native women in changing that heathen kraal into a Christian home,” wrote an Anglican correspondent in the Bloemfontein Mission Quarterly Paper for October 1875, echoing the sentiments of LMS and Methodist missionaries (quoted in Reference Labode, Bowie, Kirkwood and ArdenerLabode 1993, 126). One of the ways in which the Comaroffs argue that this was expressed was in attempts by missionaries to encourage people to live in rectangular-plan houses. Square buildings embodied British values of privacy and the divided and gendered taskscape of the domestic home.

It was not just houses that had to be made rectilinear in a bid to order what often appeared to missionaries as chaotic and immoral. Jean and John Comaroff show that this concern extended to field boundaries, roads, and markings across the wider landscape. The seasonal movement of women from village to fields and the quotidian movement of men inward toward the court and kraals at the center of settlement, where political decisions were made and exercised, expressed the important symbolic connection between center and periphery in Tswana communities. This movement was described by missionaries as “most unnatural” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 137). Focusing on built form, they aspired to replace and rework local architectural forms and practices of inhabitation, seeing “the concentric arcs of Tswana circular settlements … as material impediments to ‘healthy individualistic competition’” (Comaroff and Reference Comaroff and ComaroffComaroff 1986, 13). These disordered spatial arrangements were associated by missionaries with filth, disease, and sloth; local houses and villages became viewed as dirty and unhealthy places to live (Comaroff and Reference Comaroff and ComaroffComaroff 1992, 279–80). This response seems to have grown in tandem with later nineteenth-century notions of progress, which located Christian civilization as the idealized end point of an evolutionary trajectory of social and political development. As missionary presence grew over the nineteenth century, changes in habitus were inculcated through the creation of mission stations, houses, and boarding schools that taught young people the appropriate domestic tasks necessary to create a Christian home (Reference Labode, Bowie, Kirkwood and ArdenerLabode 1993). In establishing “homes,” missionaries hoped also to establish familiar and morally ordered gendered behavior (Reference Gaitskill and WalkerGaitskill 1990; cf. Reference Skeie and MiddletonSkeie 1999).

Clearly, missionaries did not operate in isolation from other European actors, and, as Okihiro emphasizes (Reference Okihiro2000), Tswana towns were neither homogeneous nor insulated from other southern African communities. In the earlier nineteenth century, Tswana settlements were affected by social unrest and political upheavals that troubled the entire region. This period, known as the difaqane (or mfecane), saw increased violence and raiding, as well as the displacement and movement of people across the region (Omer-Cooper Reference Omer-Cooper1966; Reference CobbingCobbing 1988; Reference HamiltonHamilton 1995; Reference EtheringtonEtherington 2001). For the purposes of this article, however, I focus narrowly on the effect of the European and missionary encounter on Tswana townscapes, attending particularly to the conjunctures of the second half of the nineteenth century, rather than tracing the changing relationships to emerging structures of colonial governance (see, e.g., Reference PorterPorter 2004; papers in Chima and Reference Chima and NjokuNjoku 2007) or to the wider social and political landscape of southern Africa. My focus is also mostly on Tswana architectural changes rather than on those of the missionaries. However, although I do not explore these issues here, I do want to note that there were a variety of different orientations toward place among missionaries, as there were with other European incomers (e.g., Reference PrattPratt 1985; Reference MortonMorton 2004, 360). These differences were important in how the various missions were established and developed. Indeed, it should be remembered that not all missionaries were European and that native evangelists played an important part in the spread of Christianity (Reference HodgsonHodgson 1982; Reference ElbourneElbourne 2003, 19–20; see also Reference PeelPeel 1995). Within the community of Europeans, missionary interpretations of place depended as much on individual positioning within relations of gender, class, and nationality as on personality and political agenda (Reference BeidelmanBeidelman 1974). All of these were expressed and altered in interaction with the people and places they encountered (e.g., Reference CrosslandCrossland 2006; Reference HovlandHovland 2007).Footnote ⁴ Along these lines, John D. Y. Peel cautions against overplaying the degree to which Christian belief and nineteenth-century capitalism were aligned (Reference PeelPeel 2000, 5–6; see also Reference ElbourneElbourne 2002). With these caveats in place, I return now to the question of signs and practices in Tswana encounters with mission.

Material Signs

Coming back to Peirce’s semeiotic, I begin here by outlining his sign relation, before moving on to consider what it can offer to understanding Tswana reworkings of place at the end of the nineteenth century. Peirce’s sign relation is complicated, awkward to grasp, and nowhere published in full and complete form.Footnote ⁵ His “labyrinthine reasoning and runaway terminology” (Reference WattsWatts 2008, 187) has perhaps contributed to the relative unpopularity of a Peircean approach in anthropology, at least in comparison to the semiology of Saussure and his descendants. Peirce was insistent that his sign relation was irreducibly triadic, composed of sign, object, and interpretant. He paid careful attention to the relationships among these three elements, detailing, for example, three modalities through which a sign can relate to its corresponding referent, or “object.” These are through similarity (icon), relation (index), and convention (symbol), discussed in more detail below. This dimension of Peirce’s analysis is perhaps the best known aspect of his semeiotic. It has been drawn upon by a number of archaeologists to think about the constitution of past material signs (Graves-Brown Reference Graves-Brown1995; Reference KnappettKnappett 2002; Reference JonesJones 2007; Reference LiebmannLiebmann 2008). Here I am more concerned with the material aspects of the third dimension of Peirce’s sign relation, the interpretant (see, too, Reference BauerBauer 2002; Reference LeleLele 2006; Reference WattsWatts 2008). The interpretant may be understood as another more developed sign, a tendency toward habit, or, ultimately, a habit change that emerges from and interprets the sign-object relation. For Peirce, semeiosis only takes place when an interpretant acknowledges or is elicited by the relationship between sign and object.

The possibilities offered by the interpretant open up ways to address some of the critical commentary on the Comaroffs’ work. Sherry Ortner, for example, has suggested that their focus on African agency concentrates on questions of power at the expense of intentionality. She asks after the projects, purposes, and desires of different Tswana individuals and groups as located within a framework of Tswana terms rather than one imported by missionaries (Reference OrtnerOrtner 2001). Similarly, Akhil Gupta asks, “under what conditions of colonial syncretism and transgression does the encounter not produce starkly binary identities, or even binary ascriptions of identity?” (Reference Gupta2001, 45). What space is there, in other words, for finding projects and concerns that were relevant to Tswana people but perhaps invisible to or downplayed by missionaries? In what ways might Tswana projects have cut across the categories of “Tswana” and “European”? Paul Landau pursues this issue in his authoritative account of mission among the Ngwato polity under Khama III and subsequent rulers (Reference Landau1995). He explores how Khama imagined a new form of polity, a form of “ecclesiastic statehood,” from the ideas and practices imported by missionaries. In doing this, Landau traces how the Christian Word, or thuto, was inserted into the space of the kgotla, physically and conceptually, in the process allowing new possibilities for men and women to rework political power and claim new forms of authority. Like the Comaroffs, Landau also considers how thuto was incorporated into Ngwato ways of life “consumed in teas and soaps, and enacted in other behaviors” (xvii). Gupta suggests that it is here that one might find the voices of the colonized, not in sentences and words but “in styles of dress, practices of agriculture etc.” He wonders how we might incorporate these “voices” through “senses other than the auditory” (Reference Gupta2001, 45). Here, I explore how a Peircean alternative not only extends the scope of semiosis to bring words and things within its compass (see also Preucel and Reference Preucel and BauerBauer 2001; Reference CipollaCipolla 2008; Reference WattsWatts 2008) but also shifts the terrain of interpretation, providing space to investigate archaeological and architectural traces as forms of interpretation alongside feelings, practices, and words.

Missionary concern with the organization of the house provides an excellent example of how a Peircean orientation can redirect the focus of analytical attention. First, we can consider the sign of the house as it appears in experience and may be recognized as conforming to expectation. Second, when it differs from expectation, the house thrusts itself into consciousness, forcing an energetic physical response. In so doing, it acts on those dwelling within it and challenges habitual practices and beliefs. Third, the house works semeiotically on inhabitants through the sign relations that are formed and reproduced within the context of these affective and energetic responses. These divisions are not arbitrary but are grounded in Peirce’s identification of three “modes of being” that he argued comprise all experience (Reference PeircePeirce 1868a). These may be described as “feeling” (first), “relation” or “reaction” (second), and “habit” or “mediation” (third). Whether or not one accepts Peirce’s metaphysical claim for the reality of his categories, they provide a useful point of entry for considering the effects of mission among the Tswana. Peirce’s conception of experience foregrounds the prejudices and expectations that are brought to any understanding of the world. These have their basis in established habits that are developed recursively in relation to the experienced world. Peirce suggests that any element of the world is first given to experience prereflexively as “feeling.”Footnote ⁶ His discussion of the dynamic ability of the material world to change and alter representations (“relation”/“reaction”) anticipates much of the recent interest in materiality (as Watts [Reference Watts2008] has explored). Finally, his discussion of “habit” or “mediation” has some similarities with Bourdieu’s conception of habitus that I will explore below. Space precludes any detailed elaboration of Peirce’s categories here, but it should be noted that the categories are refracted in Peirce’s description of the sign relation.Footnote ⁷ They provide a useful way to think through the different aspects of semeiosis, in particular, the question of how the sign-object relation invites particular affective, energetic, and habitual responses and how the material instantiation of signs and objects may be manipulated to precisely this end.

Given the emphasis in the literature on missionary efforts to rework place, I start here by using mission architecture as an example to sketch out Peirce’s sign relation, before turning to look in more detail at ways of dwelling among Tswana communities of the nineteenth century. The remains of David Livingstone’s house at Mobatsa (where he was based before moving to live with the Kwena) reveal the internal divisions of space that were so important to British missionaries in defining interior space and structuring dwelling practices (Comaroff and Reference Comaroff and ComaroffComaroff 1992, 280–81; Reference Comaroff and Comaroff1997, 288–92). The rectilinear and divided space of the ruined house shows how private, hidden places were created and maintained within the house. Neither bedroom nor library could be entered from the exterior (the house at Mobatsa is sketched by Livingstone and reproduced in Reference SchaperaSchapera 1959, 105). The Comaroffs suggest that missionaries worked along two axes to rework space: they made efforts to create an exemplary model for dwelling practices and also “sought, by their own deeds, actively to intrude their designs onto the local terrain and into local habits and habitations” (Comaroff and Reference Comaroff and ComaroffComaroff 1997, 288). In Peircean terms, these actions can be understood as signs with different relationships to a similar object, one iconic and the other indexical. Mission stations attempted to reproduce the spatial patterning of British towns and villages, with enclosures and gardens and separate places of burial. In this sense, they were in an iconic relationship with remembered houses and villages back home and, as the Comaroffs have shown, provided a model for living.

Michael Taussig (Reference Taussig1993) has explored how such a model gains its potency from the original that it copies, taking on some of the force and power of its progenitor. However, this was a model that could only be fully appreciated by those who could identify the iconic relation and already had some familiarity with the idealized British original. The morality that was inscribed in the house was clear to the British missionaries, and it was especially clear at moments when it was transgressed through inappropriate actions. Richard Parmentier has shown that the patterned social relations that are inscribed through performances in place are not simply iconic descriptions of a cultural ideal (as Landau critiques) but that the instantiation itself is meaningful. He argues that such spatial models act as “instruments of limited self-representation” (Reference ParmentierParmentier 1987, 125–27). If the model was evident to the missionaries, it was opaque to the people who encountered it in southern Africa, at least at first. Such a model needed to be experienced to be properly understood. Within the cluster of iconic sign relations that the house offered, indexical signs were needed to indicate how the space should be negotiated. Such sign relations were distributed throughout the house and the performances that took place within it, for example, the proffering of a chair or a teacup to drink—not only might these objects be gestured toward, indicating the proper place to sit or to sup, but the affordances of the objects themselves acted as indexical signs of the appropriate way to sit or to grasp a cup and drink (cf. Reference Knappett, DeMarrais, Gosden and Colin RenfrewKnappett 2004; Reference KockelmanKockelman 2005, Reference Kockelman2006). A closed doorway that blocked entrance to the private and sequestered parts of the building can also be understood as an indexical sign whose object was to restrict the movement of people. Such indexical signs establish a connection with their objects, asserting some kind of real or existing relationship. They are also located in a particular place and time, making indexical challenges to Tswana dwelling practices more restricted in scope and effects. People had to actually experience the interventions of missionaries on a case-by-case basis to understand their indexical power to demonstrate new ways of dwelling.

Peirce also outlined a third mode, of symbolic relation, in which the object of a sign is defined through habitual association. A biblical verse above the mantelpiece relied on conventions of language and writing in order for its object to be understood. Different forms of dress for men and women were established conventionally and through training and upbringing. Symbolic relations rely on familiarity with historically and culturally specific traditions of practice to be understood, and, as Parmentier has explored, they are oriented toward the future “in that this semiotic relation is essentially a processual regularity” (Reference Parmentier1985, 840). Symbolic relations resonate with expectation and anticipation, while also being unreadable to those who are not familiar with the conventions under which they are specified. As these examples indicate, the three modes through which the sign specifies its object rarely operate in isolation. Both iconic and indexical sign relations have conventional dimensions, for example, and it is the way in which these conventions are assumed or unrecognized that gives iconic and indexical signs their apparent force, on the one hand, and room to be misunderstood, on the other. Indeed, the semiotic richness of the house as a model for living comes from the dense interplay of shifting sign relations. The recognition by missionaries of the powerful semeiotic effects of the house as both a model and a demonstration may be seen in their efforts to bring Tswana individuals into mission spaces as a step toward their conversion.

The field of interpretation that grows out of the sign-object relation was explored by Peirce in terms of a new, more developed sign that he called the “interpretant.” Peirce was quite clear that the interpretant is not restricted to cognitive entities.Footnote ⁸ Altering Peirce’s terminology slightly, the interpretant may be glossed as an unexamined affect or feeling (an “affective interpretant”), a material or physical response (an “energetic interpretant”), or a cognition or habitual disposition (a “habitual interpretant”).Footnote ⁹ Peirce viewed the tendency to habit as the most developed form of interpretant, itself embedded within affective and energetic responses (Reference PeircePeirce 1868b, Reference Peirce1868c). While Peirce’s notion of habit has much in common with Bourdieu’s description of habitus, it subsumes Bourdieu’s concept, in that habit for Peirce is not tied to the realm of the human. Instead, it refers to a tendency toward generality and mediation that may be found within the world as a whole. In this sense, the inclination of humans to establish habits of thought and action is simply one form of habit among many. Human semeiosis differs from other forms of biosemeiosis, as E. Valentine Daniel has pointed out, in that the human predilection for habits also includes the special habit of habit change, of reflecting on one’s dispositions and of altering them (Reference DanielDaniel 1996, 190–99). Peirce’s conception of habit, therefore, incorporates a more dynamic sense of an unfolding process than Bourdieu’s habitus, which can seem somewhat stable and resistant to change without the intervention of outside influence, as Jean Comaroff has discussed (Reference Comaroff1985, 5). Equally, it allows for some exploration of how reflexive, “discursive” activities might operate within “practical” consciousness, as I explore below.

The unexamined feeling of recognition (or affective interpretant) of a space and of the practices that are ordered within it depends on a habitual and embodied sense that emerges from past experience. This practical understanding of how to “go on” that Pierre Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu and Nice1977, Reference Bourdieu1990) and Anthony Giddens (Reference Giddens1984) have explored is usually unchallenged and unreflexive until it is disrupted or something calls attention to it. Bourdieu has outlined how the organizing principles and dispositions that comprise habitus are learned through a lifetime’s experience and are produced from particular material conditions of existence (Reference Bourdieu and Nice1977, 72). These dispositions are drawn upon creatively in order to act effectively, as people adjust to the semeiotic worlds they encounter. The embodied understandings of place that missionaries brought with them derived from a universe of undisputed and implicit principles (19) that seemed intuitively right, proper, and therefore moral. The house that David Livingstone grew up in, in Blantyre, Scotland, would have been experienced by him and accepted unreflexively for the most part. The missionary encounter, therefore, has the potential to dislocate both missionaries and the people they proselytize, as they discover new ways of living and acting within the world that do not conform with those they know. Peirce suggests that is only when some unexpected element of experience surprises us into acting or doing something differently that we actively notice elements of the world (e.g., CP 1.358–405, ca. 1890): for example, a curved wall where a corner might be expected, a body buried in the yard outside a house instead of in a graveyard.Footnote ¹⁰ Here the “brute fact” of existence is brought into relation with the experiencing body and forces itself on it, eliciting unanticipated responses. Peirce said of this, “We are continually bumping up against hard fact. We expected one thing, or passively took it for granted, and had the image of it in our minds, but experience forces that idea into the background, and compels us to think quite differently” (CP 1.324, 1903). The knowledge of how to act, learned and drawn upon from childhood onward, is necessarily challenged through the encounter with foreign people and landscapes, but it is also adjusted continually in the course of day-to-day encounters with the dynamic habits of the material world, including those of other people.

As missionaries brought local people into relation with the architecture of the house, embodied energetic interpretants were elicited, which while reinscribing practices of movement and timekeeping for British occupants, also encouraged the formation of new habits of dwelling in those who visited. In this, the indexical and relational qualities of the house—the way in which a wall or a door encouraged or prevented movement for different people and at different times of day—were perhaps more powerfully felt than any iconic model of an invisible ideal. Equally, symbolic and linguistic signs would be more difficult to grasp without knowing the conventions under which they were formed, but in any modality the shock of the unexpected could bring these new sign relations into discursive awareness and encourage reflection and debate, or perhaps laughter and ridicule. Conflict could arise when the divergent habitus of missionary and potential convert created from different ways of living within the world “cause one group to experience as natural or reasonable practices or aspirations which another group finds unthinkable or scandalous” (Reference Bourdieu and NiceBourdieu 1977, 78). Practices could also be misrecognized with consequences for the success of the mission. David Chidester outlines the risk of translating Christian concepts into Setswana equivalents, observing how Tswana “comparativists” recognized a relation of similarity between reading the Bible and their work of divination, a move that was unacceptable to missionaries.Footnote ¹¹ Chidester describes how in instances where Africans “found no equivalence between the religion of the mission and local tradition” missionary claims could provoke shocked laughter and advice to refrain from repeating such statements (Reference ChidesterChidester 1996, 195). Missionary reactions to living and building practices could also elicit laughter. Denbow and Thebe quote LMS missionary Robert Moffat’s advice to women preparing to thatch a newly built house. “They ought to get their husbands to do that part of the work,” he suggested, observing that “this set them all into a roar of laughter” (Reference Denbow and Thebe2006, 95). Here “facts” that did not fit with expectations were dismissed or held aside rather than seriously evaluated. The missionary encounter was characterized by attempts to make sense of these semeiotic shocks. We see these attempts in letters and journals sent home by missionaries, but where might we look for similar attempts among local people? How might a Peircean perspective provide ways to explore how both representation and practice were enrolled in ongoing and reflexively monitored habitual semeiotic processes?

Tswana Projects

Despite the upheavals caused by the introduction of Christianity and colonialism, there were remarkable continuities in local forms and practices of dwelling. As John Comaroff has observed, both politically and architecturally Tswana communities have been “remarkably persistent in the face of dramatic external change” (appendix to Reference SchaperaSchapera 1984, 71; see also Comaroff and Reference Comaroff and ComaroffComaroff 1991, 203–4). This continuity constitutes another strand in the history of hybrid forms that emerged from the encounter. The tenacity of local architectural techniques, and the persistence of the preexisting spatial layout of Tswana villages and towns, points to the stability of local ways of dwelling, but it also suggests some ways in which changes unfolded. This was not the missionaries’ hoped-for inculcation of Christian beliefs and practices and the habitus that went along with it. Instead, Christian beliefs and practices were incorporated in a variety of ways into local ways of dwelling, depending on the particular circumstances of the encounter.

The LMS mission at Phalatswe (Old Palapye), occupied from 1889 to 1902, shows how Christian belief and practices were incorporated architecturally at the Ngwato capital of chief Khama III. Khama converted to Christianity and, after his baptism, rejected many of the practices of his people such as the rainmaking ritual and the consumption of alcohol (Reference ParsonsParsons 1998, 46–47). Despite Khama III’s apparently full conversion, Paul Landau argues that he took great care to control the influence of the LMS mission (Reference LandauLandau 1995, 34), drawing on Christianity and literacy in order to extend his authority into regions that previously had been relatively independent (xxvii). In this way, the structure and organization of the churches controlled by Khama were incorporated into political strategies of authentication and authority. As Reid et al. point out (Reference Reid, Lane, Segobye, Borjeson, Mathibidi and Sekgarametso1997, 386), the missionaries themselves and the buildings they constructed and furnished were a material resource to be drawn upon in the reinvigoration and continuing effectiveness of chiefly authority. Khama claimed transformation in building for himself and co-opted it at the heart of the motse. He directed the construction of new churches, often personally sponsoring and opening them himself (Reference LandauLandau 1995, 179). His architectural investment in the center of the town meant that the motse took on a more stable and permanent material presence. One effect of this was to make it more difficult for settlements to be relocated when deemed necessary, as outlined by Christopher Morton (Reference Morton2004). Morton explains that the growing need for fresh grazing land enticed the population away and placed pressure on Khama to move to a new site. Despite his investment in place, the chief risked losing his support if he failed to comply (353–54). The fractal-like form of the town and its political organization provided opportunities for wards to detach themselves and relocate under the control of their headman or in alliance with another. This made the risk of the town fragmenting a very real possibility to be negotiated by the kgosi. The decision to move the settlement from Shoshong to Phalatswe was financially draining for both Khama and the missionaries, as the stone church had to be taken down and moved over eighty miles to the new town. Cattle, sheep, and grain were sold in order to move the church, demonstrating how it had become a focal point for displays of surplus wealth and the maintenance of political ties and allegiance (Reference LandauLandau 1995, 179; Reference MortonMorton 2004, 351). The subsequent movement of the motse from Phalatswe to Serowe took place despite great disruption to the mission and the colonial administration. Serowe proved to be the final move, however. In this, the recalcitrant materiality of its stone buildings contributed to the motse’s sedimentation in place as much as the demands of missionaries and colonial authorities.

Morton observes that this tension between “competing material and social forces” is important to understanding the pressures on Khama and the way that settlement change played out (Reference Morton2004, 353). Morton’s careful attention to these different dimensions shows clearly how Europeans mischaracterized Tswana towns as sedentary settlements, as well as demonstrating the importance of attending to the material dimensions of nineteenth-century Tswana politics. However, in placing the material resistance of the town on one side of the equation and the social pressure to maintain supporters on the other, this analysis plays down the imbricated nature of these different forces. Below, I consider how a semeiotic approach might destabilize these categories of the social and the material and in the process capture something of what Bruno Latour (e.g., Reference Latour1993, Reference Latour1999, Reference Latour2005) has framed as the creation of hybrid networks composed of heterogeneous elements.

The sensuous model that the town presented was a complicated set of sign relations with many dimensions. As people continued to live and work in the wards around Khama’s central ward, the activities of daily life worked as habitual interpretants that acknowledged his innovatory and creative chiefly power. These practices recognized Khama’s primary role at the center, which he made visible both indexically and iconically through his innovations in building. However, there was a tension between the indexical sign of Khama’s power (through his investment in place) and the iconic sign of his position (through his location in the center of his people). The pressure on Khama to move the town and the difficulties that this posed show how indexical signs can be awkward to manipulate because of the ways in which they are associated with or linked to their objects. In affirming the power and importance of the center through building elaboration, Khama also allowed himself less semeiotic agency over where and when such an indexical sign could be deployed (see Reference KockelmanKockelman 2007, 380).

However, if indexically grounded signs allow less control over where and how they are deployed, then the ability to manipulate them despite these constraints itself becomes an indexical sign of power and control. Although the investment in place made through the building of churches and European buildings meant that the movement of towns became more difficult, it also meant that the maintenance of the habit of moving the town, despite the material difficulties of doing so, acted as a powerful interpretant of Khama’s spiritual force and political authority. Large hilltop towns and abandoned stone ruins of older settlements were a striking feature of the southern African landscape, dating back to the seventeenth century (Reference HuffmanHuffman 1986; Reference HallHall 1995), suggesting that the tension between investment in place and the need to relocate had a long history. The relatively frequent movement of metse in the precolonial period reinvigorated the spiritual authority and efficacy of the chief, in the process reconceptualizing and remaking the landscape around the new town and locus of power (Reference LaneLane 2004, 289). The successful move and the reinscription of the model of the town in a new location co-opted the whole people into the sign relations specified by the chief, in a communal energetic interpretant of his place and of Christianity at the center of the town and of social life. Equally, if a ward were to detach itself to establish a new settlement elsewhere, this would be a demonstration (an energetic interpretant) of the kgosi’s diminished power and an attempt to establish a pattern of habitual interpretants around a new center. Here the quasi-fractal nature of Tswana townscapes beautifully illustrates Peirce’s conception of semeiosis, which is itself often described as fractal-like (e.g., Reference BrentBrent 1998, 333). As each interpretant buds off from the previous sign-object relationship, it in turn becomes the starting point for a potential new sign relation to form. Thus, the detaching of a ward and the constitution of a new town may be seen not only in terms of signifying practices but as itself a semeiotic process that incorporates people and architecture in one dense but evolving semeiotic cluster or bundle (cf. Reference KeaneKeane 2005).

In interpreting Khama’s position through the movement of the entire settlement, the people and town re-created an established habitual interpretant and anticipated the future continuation of these relations. Khama did not allow Europeans to build freely at his capital and carefully controlled the construction of missionary buildings, churches, and other European-sponsored structures (Reid et al. Reference Reid, Lane, Segobye, Borjeson, Mathibidi and Sekgarametso1997, 385). His son Sekgoma also prohibited the adoption of European-style housing among his people (385), showing that the potential to transform the ways in which houses were built was not equally available to all members of the population and depended to a large degree on the precedent set by the kgosi. Paul Lane (Reference Lane and Insoll1999, 162) observes that, consistent with this concern to restrict new forms of dwelling, there is little archaeological evidence of change in house construction at Phalatswe (although house traces are not well preserved at this site). This suggests that there were few opportunities for innovations in house form by the population at Phalatswe (Reid et al. Reference Reid, Lane, Segobye, Borjeson, Mathibidi and Sekgarametso1997, 381). At least at first, the missionaries had less success in changing the ways in which people built their houses among Khama’s people, despite his commitment to their desired form of Christianity. Khama seems to have wanted to fold Christianity into his central position as king of the new “ecclesiastic state” that Landau has delineated. The material claiming by Khama of European forms of dwelling affirmed the continuing relevance of the motse and its wards and houses as a sensuous model of social relations.

With the move to Serowe, however, Khama seems to have changed his semeiotic strategy toward the European mission. At this point the mission buildings were spatially marginalized and located well away from the chief’s ward. Even the “native” church was set apart from the town at a distance of some kilometers (Reid et al. Reference Reid, Lane, Segobye, Borjeson, Mathibidi and Sekgarametso1997, 383). By this date, circumstances had changed and the political autonomy of the Ngwato was under attack; the habitual interpretants that were emerging from both mission and colonial interventions could no longer be managed and appropriated so easily by Khama. The attempt to displace the signs of mission outside the town was in itself a sign of his weakened semeiotic control of the encounter and his effort to reclaim the central and sacred ground of the motse for himself and his people.Footnote ¹²

The actions of Khama III and his people at Phalatswe can be contrasted with the ways in which European building techniques were drawn upon at the Kwena towns of Kolobeng and Ntsweng, in present-day Botswana. In 1847, apparently encouraged by David Livingstone, kgosi Sechele I decided to move his capital from Chonwane to Kolobeng (occupied from 1847 to 1852). The mission station moved at the same time. Despite this, it was not incorporated into the new motse. Instead, the mission buildings were kept separate and distinct, with church, mission house, and graveyard located outside the Kwena settlement (Reference Lane and InsollLane 1999, 156). This maintained the spatial and moral order of the motse, while allowing Livingstone to lay out his station according to spatial principles that he recognized as appropriate and morally correct. Yet, while maintaining the spatial separation between town and mission at Kolobeng, Sechele I also drew on the use of space promoted by the missionaries in building a rectangular house for himself. At a later capital, Ntsweng (occupied from 1865 to 1937), the mission station was sited even further away, about two miles outside the settlement, while Sechele’s new house retained the new rectangular building form and was furnished with expensive European goods “dominated by a large crystal chandelier” (Reference VolzVolz 2001, 20). This strategy allowed the kgosi more room to seize the semeiotic terms on which European features were incorporated into the motse. An example is provided by the construction on Sechele’s initiative of a chapel close to his compound when he moved his capital to Ntsweng, even before a missionary had been installed at the town (Reference Lane and InsollLane 1999, 158).

Sechele incorporated Christian belief and practices selectively and strategically, integrating Christianity with Tswana practices (Reference GulbrandsenGulbrandsen 1993; Reference VolzVolz 2001). Indeed, Sechele’s idiosyncratic version of Christianity led to his later alienation from the LMS. Despite this, Stephen Volz (Reference Volz2001, 2–3) argues cogently that Sechele’s conversion was genuine and heartfelt, “motivated by spiritual and moral concerns.” Volz suggests that to place too much emphasis on Sechele’s political motivations is to miss other, perhaps less utilitarian, possibilities and to elide the ways in which Christianity may have worked against his interests as ruler. Certainly, to consider Sechele’s politics narrowly as a means to the end of sustaining rule seems an impoverished way to think about what took place. However, insofar as politics could not be divorced from a broader field of cultural practice, then it perhaps serves as an opening to understand some of what went on. We can see how Sechele worked to control the terms on which European semiotic forms and processes were incorporated into Tswana ways of dwelling. Like Khama, his incorporation of European architectural forms in the heart of the capital acted as a sign of his ability to take advantage of the semeiotic shocks that had been delivered by the missionaries and others. In this way the challenges posed to local habitus were themselves seized and reworked to reconstruct and affirm his political and spiritual influence.

John and Jean Comaroff argue that Tswana forms of personhood at the time of the colonial encounter can be understood in terms of an ongoing process of becoming. Personhood was made and known through relationships and through practical activities in which the work of building and making was valorized (John Comaroff and Jean Reference Comaroff and ComaroffComaroff 2001, 268–73). Tswana understood the self to be “ranged over sociophysical space-time occupied by the sum total of its relations, presences, enterprises—anything that acted on its traces might affect it for good or ill” (275). This can be considered in relation to changes in domestic space. Archaeological research at Ntsweng has shown that despite changes in the residences of the elite, the majority of the population maintained an attachment to the circular-plan houses and compounds that were the basic building block of Tswana villages (Reid et al. Reference Reid, Lane, Segobye, Borjeson, Mathibidi and Sekgarametso1997, 376–79). As at Phalatswe, the organization of the town affirmed the relationships between people and remade them daily. However, in contrast to Phalatswe, the archaeological evidence shows that some modifications were made to the usual house form at Ntsweng, with the incorporation of linear elements into the walls of yards outside houses and the inclusion of some straight-wall construction in house walls themselves, producing semicircular rather than circular houses. Just as the sensuous model of the town worked as an interpretant of chiefly authority, so the houses themselves may be understood as interpretants (and hence signs). Paul Kockelman’s work on semiotic agency (Reference Kockelman2007) suggests a consideration of how in building a house people interpreted a whole set of relationships—whether between the mud and the particular purchase and function that it offered or of particular gender relations and relations of hierarchy and subjugation. To change and experiment with house form was to push and test the relationships within which people were situated and to create new material interpretants of these changing relations.

The alterations made to the design of the house indicate an incorporation of rectilinear space into local architecture that appears to have taken place very much on local terms, rather than the transformation of the space of the house along European lines that missionaries hoped for (cf. Reference HallHall 1997). The introduction of straightened walls in Kwena houses and yards at Ntsweng suggests an experimental and reflexive demeanor among those who were building. The changes in house construction indicate that some people (perhaps particularly women) were actively exploring the potential that rectilinear space offered and, in doing so, imagining different possibilities for the future. Local people may have been trying on new habits promoted by missionaries, but only insofar as they worked within a broader field of recognition growing from preexisting practices. As Landau has observed, the innovations introduced by missionaries and others had to resonate for them to be picked up and reproduced locally (Reference Landau1995, xxv). It is clear that, with these changes to domestic space, the embodied sense of how to move within and around the house and compound was maintained, and the shock of the new was incorporated into existing habitus.

Peirce argued that thought (and hence belief) takes place in and through signs, and these signs are inescapably embedded in the world of experience: thought is not a purely internal mental process (e.g., Reference PeircePeirce 1868b). From this perspective, the self (to use a term admittedly freighted with individualist and rationalist associations) may be viewed as a shared and ongoing semeiotic process that emerges as a set of habitual relationships with the experienced world (Reference PeircePeirce 1868c). As Milton Singer explained, for Peirce the self is distributed, social, and public, its locus “found in the sign processes themselves” (Reference Singer1984, 56–57) rather than in any purely mental construct. These ongoing sign relationships shared in, confirmed, and reinscribed practical habits through which people ordered and made sense of the world. In this view, the house is as much a part of the self as any other more usually recognized bodily extensions such as clothing or jewelry (cf. Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton Reference Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton1981, 15–16). In building their houses in wards that remade and pointed to the center, people affirmed the position of the kgosi, both in the work of building and in the homesteads they created. The appearance of linear elements within the walls of houses and yards suggests a form of recognition of Sechele’s innovations as meaningful for people locally. This is interesting in that it contrasts with the apparent failure of Christianity to spread among his people. Stephen Volz notes that, in ten years’ work among the Tswana, Sechele was the only convert made by David Livingstone (Reference VolzVolz 2001, 1) and that many of Sechele’s headmen were made uncomfortable by his European-style house and furnishings (40). Yet some elements seem to have been picked up by the broader population.

At Mabotse, in the former Transvaal, South Africa, Simon Hall has examined similar changes during 1872–80 (Reference Hall1997). He argues that the incorporation of linear elements into the space of the village drew just as much on preexisting local valuations of these elements as it did on European introductions (214). Hall suggests that these changes be understood in terms of the increasing appropriation and control of women’s labor by Tswana men. He observes that the incorporation of straight-line walls tended to be used in the creation of rectangular or subrectangular semipublic enclosures used by men. Houses, in contrast, constructed by and associated with women, remained circular, although, as at Ntsweng, the walls around house yards at Mabotse became more angular. Hall argues that these shifts seem to have followed a trend toward increasing gender hierarchy and the circumscription of choices and possibilities for women within Tswana communities. This can be seen particularly in shifts in agricultural practice during the same period. Margaret Kinsman emphasizes the “web of mutual dependence” that was woven “between husband and wife” (Reference Kinsman1983, 42) through their respective roles in food production and distribution. A woman gained access to the agricultural land that she tended through her father or husband, and although she could be given cattle upon marriage, the animals were subject to control by her husband (42–43). The introduction of the plow by Methodist missionaries to the Southern Tswana had dramatic effects on women’s control over their productive activities. Jean and John Comaroff observe that contact with the highly valued cattle that were used with the plow was restricted for women and that, as a result, their role in planting and distributing grain was diminished (1986, 13). Instead women were left to care for and harvest the crops—work that was arduous but of lesser cultural value. Whereas previously, using hoes to till the fields on the edges of the settlement, women had a good deal of control over their labor and the food they produced, men moved into the sphere of plow cultivation and took more control of the distribution of crops (Reference OkihiroOkihiro 2000, 91–98). The same transition from hoe to plow agriculture took place at Shoshong between the 1850s and the 1880s (Reference FosbrookeFosbrooke 1971, 182–84) and in Khama’s kingdom. Paul Landau notes that around Phalatswe women’s work was increased at harvest time as the result of the plow because larger areas could be brought into production (Reference Landau1995, 74, 104).

These renegotiations in the relations of production are consistent with Hall’s argument that at Mabotse the kgosi and the male elite were working to maintain gender distinctions, while consolidating and extending their authority and power. Such changes were made on terms that were recognizable and meaningful to locals, but innovations brought by missionaries were also assessed for their effect on local practice. In the context of the longer-term shifts in male power outlined by Hall, these changes in agriculture may be seen not simply as the unexpected consequences of the encounter. Rather, they suggest ways in which gender relations were being reworked, while appearing to maintain habits of practice and association in the face of new farming techniques. Along these lines, Paul Lane suggests that there is a visible shift of emphasis in architectural organization at many sites in the region from the eighteenth century, with an intensified concern with boundedness and control of access to settlement and houses (Reference Lane and KentLane 1998, 194). He argues that the historic period sees an increased differentiation of domestic space, transforming the house and its yards into “a contested domain in which men and women negotiated for position” (200). The construction of angular yards outside houses at Mabotse seems to be part of these longer-term negotiations taking place over space and over the different domains of men and women.

The reordering of the domestic space of women at Ntsweng took place at the same time that the matrilocal arrangement of grain storage was under threat. However, in contrast to Hall’s interpretation of changes to the yards of houses at Mabotse, which he suggests is a reworking of women’s space under pressure from male relatives, I read the traces at Ntsweng a little differently. Here not only the semipublic and negotiated space of the yard but also the houses themselves were subject to changes. If a woman’s sense of self and of her relationships with her extended family was embedded and remade through the space of the house and the associated yard, then the appearance of linear elements can also be understood as an effort by women to make sense of the semeiotic shocks that were assaulting them from all sides. This was an affective and energetic trying on of new architectural elements but within the familiar space of the house, a search to establish recognizable and sustainable habits of practice in the context of dramatic changes to women’s social and productive roles. In this context, the experimentation with linear elements within the walls of yards and houses at Ntsweng seems to assert an iconic linkage between homesteads and the central position of the chief. Looking at the archaeological remains today, they evoke a feeling of connection and integration within the town, which one can infer was also felt by those building and decorating the walls of the house and yard. The reconfiguring of space suggests one way in which women worked creatively to assert control over their sphere of influence and to maintain their sense of self within rapidly changing conditions and massive disruptions to their traditional activities and status.