Signs in Use

Communicating Colonial Order: The Police of German South-West-Africa (c. 1894-1915)

“…Looking at the short history of the colonial police force of GSWA (1894GSWA ( -1915, it can be concluded that its creation (as a body distinct from the army) was most of all a symbol of 'normalisation'. GSWA was, after all, intended to become a settler colony, similar to British South Africa; as a result, the growing number of settlers in the colony could not be policed by the military, given the custom in Imperial Germany to only use soldiers for police tasks during riots or other emergencies 104 . This 'normalisation' would not go as smoothly as desired however, being hampered by both organisational and financial difficulties, as well as by the unruliness of both the local African populace and the settlers themselves.…”

Social Semiotics and the Related Interpretation

“…Codes can be divided into structural code and processual code [3]. The structural code is the one by which elements make up a static system and is often referred to as the structure of the system.…”

“…It is constructed and interpreted in line with the conventions related to a genre and in a specific communicative medium. From this perspective, written texts, paintings, and folk costumes are all texts that convey intended and/or traditional information [9]. Semiotics provides us with some conceptual crowbars to construct or deconstruct the codes that work in specific texts and practices, and as long as we can find some gaps, it will give us the opportunity to make an impact.…”

Cultural Semiotics and the Related Interpretation

“…Culture is the process through which humans define and operate a limit that relates to the natural basis of our lives and our understanding of the non-human parts of the world around us. This process unfolds through interwoven sub-processes: material production, symbolic production, and institutional organization, which construct a defined, coded, traditional cultural world [1].…”