Dotawo/content/article/sadeq.md

---
title: "My Grandparents\' House: A Sociological Perspective"
authors: ["abdelsadeq.md"]
abstract: 
keywords: ["Nubia", "resettlement", "architecture"]
---

**Introduction**

For more than fifteen centuries, Nubians lived in the Nile Valley
between the First Cataract at Aswan in southern Egypt and the Fourth
Cataract at Dongola in Sudan. The cataract at Aswan, and the barren
deserts on either side of the valley isolated Nubians from other
neighboring groups, enabling them to retain their cohesiveness as an
ethno-linguistic group with distinguishing cultural traditions. Much of
the Nubian region consisted of rocky shoreline. The arable lands were
restricted to a narrow fringe of alluvial deposits, which was not
encouraging enough for permanent colonization by the empires of ancient
and medieval times (ancient Egyptian, Roman, Islamic, and so on).
However, Nubia was perceived as "The Corridor to Africa" by these same
empires. This permitted the partial independence of Nubia while under
the political dominance of these empires. This unique situation enabled
the Nubians to be influenced by the belief systems of neighboring
empires, which became entangled with long-standing Nubian traditions
(Smith 2020).

After the construction of Aswan dam in 1902, and its subsequent
heightenings in 1912 and 1933, Northern Nubian (*Kenuz*) villages, were
submerged under the Nile waters. This submersion forced the *Kenuz*
Nubians to rebuild their houses at higher levels each time. Also, most
of the agricultural land in *Kenuz* villages became inundated for most
of the year. Cultivation was only possible along a narrow strip of the
plain for two months during the summer. This impoverishment forced
Nubian men to migrate to Egyptian cities in search for work, while women
and children were left behind in Nubia.

Despite the heightenings of Aswan dam, the effects of the Nile flooding
were devastating along the Valley and the Delta villages causing much
loss in life and property. Therefore, the new Egyptian regime in 1954
decided to build the High Dam, a new dam in Aswan higher than the
already existing one. This meant that the entirety of Nubia was to be
submerged under the lake created behind the new dam. So, it was decided
to relocate the Nubians to the Kom Ombo area, 50 km north of Aswan City.
This resettlement plan compacted the Egyptian Nubia from thirty-nine
villages along 320 kilometers of the Nile into thirty-three villages
occupying a 60-kilometer-long crescent away from the Nile in the desert.
Several studies discussed the challenges of the Nubian resettlement
after displacement, however, these studies focused on "home-building"
issues and the wide dissatisfaction among the Nubians towards their new
houses and resettlements, but these studies say very little on
"home-making" practices and efforts undertaken by the Nubians aftermath
their displacement.

The experience of forced displacement deeply unsettles the
taken-for-granted notions of home. When the displaced person lives in a
new place, he/ she does not feel like home automatically. Home is much
more than a house or a shelter, rather it is a complex and multi-layered
concept. Some of these layers are existential; the "immersion of a self
in a locality" (Brah 1996). Home is a physical place that embodies the
state of being-at-home with its particular emotions; privacy,
familiarity, safety/comfort, control, the expression of personal
identity and the social norms and values of his community. Thus, home
does not simply exist but is made and lived. The term home-making
implies a process that turns a meaningless space into a home. Material
and social practices of home-making are undertaken to overcome the
displacement gap by reflecting one's expectations not only in his/ her
new house, but also the larger public environment in the neighborhood
and the city. Home is materially made by building structures, placing
furniture and decorating the house. Home is socially made through both
routinized and seasonal social practices including; domestic chores,
caring of the household members, relaxation, celebrating birthdays and
religious rituals, communicating with neighbors and so on.

In this research, I explore how the people of Abu Hor, a Kenuz Nubian
village, could remake their homes and homeland aftermath their
displacement in December 1964. Drawing on the scholarship on home-making
practices in diverse contexts of displacement, as well as
auto-ethnographic research based on narratives from elderly people who I
used to talk, listen, and even gossip with them to understand the
techniques they had developed to deal with the new home life in
resettlement, a life that was far from the lives they had already known,
a life which made different demands that they never had experienced
before. The research begins with an explanation of the built environment
of Old Abu Hor and the socio-cultural values that created and ordered
this environment. Then, the research focuses on the different material
and social practices that they used to create a sense of home in New Abu
Hor. Finally, the research ends with an analysis of the home-making
process based on the framework of Maurice Garcia (2019), who proposed
that the sense of home can be remade in terms of four aspects: material
place, familiar landscape, social world and emotional space. The
conclusion of the research underscores the main outcomes of the
home-making process with its challenges as well as resolutions,
continuities as well as discontinuities.

**Before displacement**

My family originated from a small Kenuz Nubian village called (Abu Hor).
The old Abu Hor was located about sixty kilometers south of the city of
Aswan, near Kalabsha village and its famous temple. The post steamboat
was the only means of transportation linking Nubian villages to Egypt,
starting from the village of Al-Shalal in Aswan to Wadi Halfa on the
Egyptian-Sudanese border, passing through all the Egyptian Nubian
villages. This steamboat used to pass by our village on Wednesdays
coming from Aswan and on Mondays returning from Halfa. It carried
passengers, goods, letters, and money orders from migrating men to their
families in the village.

Kawthar Abd El-Rasoul and Mohamed Riad visited the village in 1962 and
described it. Their description is worth quoting at length:

> "This was the first time we saw Abu Hor on a summer morning, and the
> view was beautiful, (...) , the Nile had dropped below its winter
> level by about twenty meters or a little less, and we were in Little
> Linda raising our eyes to a rock wall more than fifty meters high, and
> at the foot of the rock wall, there was a green strip no more than
> fifty meters wide, and on top of the rocks were scattered high houses,
> and due to the height, we could only see the edges of their decorated
> walls for long distances.
>
> After about half an hour, the rock wall of Abu Hor retreated in a
> large arc, and opened up into a small agricultural basin whose depth
> did not exceed one hundred and fifty meters inward. The cultivated
> areas in this small plain did not exceed several narrow strips, while
> green grass covered the remaining areas. Numbers of camels, perhaps
> more than twenty-five camels, and numbers of goats and sheep spread
> throughout the area.
>
> A little before four o\'clock we reached the hamlets of Abu Hor; The
> Nile is much narrower, the eastern plateau is high and continuous for
> kilometers, the western bank is less high and continuous and consists
> of groups of unconnected hills. (...) We rested a little on the west
> bank and saw many flying fish (2014, 68, 132)."

![Photograph of Old Abu Hor in 1962 showing camels in front of the village.](../static/images/sadeq/fig1.jpg "Photograph of Old Abu Hor in 1962. Source: Riad, M. and Abdel-Rasoul, K. (2014), A journey in the time of Nubia.")

**~~Figure 1. Photograph of Old Abu Hor in 1962. Source: Riad, M. and Abdel-Rasoul, K. (2014), A journey in the time of Nubia.~~**


Abu Hor extended for ten kilometers and included twenty-three hamlets
built on the rugged lands at the eastern and western fringes of the
valley, leaving the narrow plain for agriculture. These hamlets extended
thinly along the Nile and were separated from each other by topographic
features like *khor*[^1] and steep hills. During the summer, as the
water level of the Nile used to recede, *khor* lands became visible and
people often moved between the hamlets by donkey or on foot. In winter,
the water of the Aswan reservoir filled the valley and backed up into
the *khor*s, making hamlets sites like peninsulas, so small felucca
sailboats ferried the people across the hamlets.

Since most social relations were associated with hamlets, the village
lacked the real structure of a social unit. Even so, the village had a
role of cohesiveness. It served as an administrative unit under the
supervision of a governmental appointed mayor (Arabic: *omda*) whose
guesthouse was the place where the people of Abu Hor gathered to make
crucial decisions that concerned the entire village. The old village had
three primary schools, a telegraph office, and a health center. These
facilities were distributed among the different hamlets, and served not
only the people of Abu Hor, but also the adjacent villages.

![Map of the hamlets of Abu Hor village in 1930. Source: United Nations Archives at Geneva, Survey of Egypt, Kalabsha, 1935.](../static/images/sadeq/fig2.jpg "Map of the hamlets of Abu Hor village in 1930. Source: United Nations Archives at Geneva, Survey of Egypt, Kalabsha, 1935.")

**~~Figure 2. Map of the hamlets of Abu Hor village in 1930. Source: United Nations Archives at Geneva, Survey of Egypt, Kalabsha, 1935.~~**

The people of Abu Hor belonged to seven tribes, or maximal lineages,
which were divided among major lineages distributed over hamlets. Each
hamlet (Arabic: *nag'*) consisted of minor lineages forming a
patrilineal descent group that had lived in the hamlet for generations
and shared kinship ties. The *nag'* created a sense of belonging, as
people used to refer to themselves by their hamlet and particular
descent group, which were believed to express pride and distinctive
personalities.

The *nag'* served as the main social unit that formed the Nubian
society. It was the actual unit of community life that was organized
through propinquity and kinship bonds and carried important social
obligations; such as endogamous marriage, purchase on credit, mutual aid
in times of need, and taking care for the families of migrating men. The
*nag'* served as the appropriate domain for women to participate in
social life. While men were more concerned with village affairs and
could move freely between hamlets and villages, women were restricted to
their *nag'* where they practiced social and economic activities,
ranging from subsistence farming and raising livestock to participating
in *nag'* events such as weddings, funerals, and religious rituals.

The *nag'* offered the pattern of co-residence that maintained the
isolated and conservative life of the Nubians so as the foreigner could
be identified easily. Although there was no structural plan, the *nag'*
was a planned settlement, designed by its occupants according to their
needs and culture. The placement of the dwellings was based on family
ties and the natural environment as well. It was customary for
individuals to build their houses on any even tract of land adjacent to
their relatives in order to have help nearby in case of need. The
dwellings that made up the *nag'* followed the natural contours of the
rocky fringes of the valley. The houses that overlooked the Nile were
detached, or semi---detached, forming clustered terraces, while the
houses that extended inland were freestanding and grouped together
around an open area. Usually there were three or four houses in each of
these arrangements. In the center of the *nag'*, there was a large open
space where the mosque and few shops were located. The communal
guesthouse (Arabic: *sabeel*) which used for the *nag'* men gatherings,
entertaining and housing male guests from other hamlets or villages was
also placed in the central open space. Each *nag'* also maintained a
cemetery and a shrine for the local saint in its hinterland.

The traditional house in Old Nubia was not only a shelter, but it was
also the center of most Nubian rites. The design of the house had a
strong connection to the natural environment, especially to the
topography and the climate. It also reflected Nubian social norms and
the economic condition of the proprietor. A typical house in old Abu Hor
might be composed of a big walled courtyard with rooms built at the
northern part of the courtyard, while the main entrance and the loggia
were often located in the southern part and were open to the north in
order to allow the best possible access to north wind. Livestock
enclosures were found in the southern part of the courtyard as well, but
with a separate entrance. Guest rooms were not common in Abu Hor houses,
however, the entrance hall and the bench (Arabic: *mastaba*) built near
the entrance gate served the purpose of the guest room. The entrance
hall was a transitional zone between the semi-public, male domain
outside, and the private, female domain inside the house. The courtyard
was the vital part of the traditional Nubian house. It was not just an
empty space; rather, it was the hub for all female activity such as
baking *dooka* bread, grinding cereals, and raising livestock. The
courtyard also served as a guest area for women to meet, especially on
the occasion of weddings, funerals, and other events.

![Plan of a house in Abu Hor village in 1964. Source: Jaritz, H. (1973), Notes on Nubian Architecture.](../static/images/sadeq/fig3.jpg "Plan of a house in Abu Hor village in 1964. Source: Jaritz, H. (1973), Notes on Nubian Architecture.")

**~~Figure 3. Plan of a house in Abu Hor village in 1964. Source: Jaritz, H. (1973), Notes on Nubian Architecture.~~**

Nubian ceremonies are the most noticeable and distinct feature of the
Nubian culture. It has reflected its rich and intermingled history
through the ages. As Muslims, the Nubians celebrated the known Islamic
feasts; *Eid al-fitr* or the Small Feast and *Eīd* *al-adaha* or the
Large Feast. In these occasions, the hamlet (*nag'*) was the ritual unit
where all rites were performed. After, the Eid prayer, the men used to
make a procession to each house in their own hamlet to congratulate
their relatives for the feast. However, the Nubians had two ceremonies
that can be considered as distinctively Nubian; the wedding ceremonies,
and the local Islamic celebrations *moulid*.

Marriage rituals varied between seven and fourteen days in length; the
rituals used to start right after a new marriage was arranged and
announced, all the women and young females living in the *nag'* were
expected to assemble in the house of the bride\'s family to assist in
grinding the wheat to make *shaʼreya*[^2], while the men would visit the
groom to congratulate him.

Before marriage, the bride, dressed in her bridal gown and accompanied
by an elderly female relative, had to visit all the houses around the
*nag'* to announce the day for starting the wedding ceremonies. In turn,
the women offered gifts of *karej*[^3] or a china plate. Then the bride
would continue on to visit all the major saints\' shrines in the village
and to *Abu Asha* shrine in the adjacent village, *Murwaw*. The groom,
dressed in his bridal attire, carrying a whip, riding a camel and
accompanied by the *arras*[^4], had to visit all the guesthouses in the
village to invite the men of other hamlets to his wedding. Wedding
ceremonies were occasions for three days and nights of feasting and
dancing in both the bride\'s and the groom\'s houses. On the morning of
the wedding day (the third day of wedding ceremonies), the relatives and
friends of the groom would bring his *sandouq* *jally* and hung the
*kojara* in the bride\'s house. After the guests had eaten the *fatta*
lunch at the groom\'s house, they would form a procession with the
groom\'s family to the local shrine before going to the bride\'s house,
passing in front of the *nag'* houses while sessions of singing and
dancing were carried on accompanied by gunshots and cries of joy.

![A picture of sandouq jally.](../static/images/sadeq/fig4.jpg "A picture of sandouq jally.")

**~~Figure 4. A picture of sandouq jally.~~**

The local Saints (Arabic: *sheikh*) have an important ritual ceremony
called *moulid*, a festival day designated as the *sheikh's* birthday,
usually on the fifteenth of the Islamic month of *Shaʼbān*. The *moulid*
was both a religious and social occasion that was celebrated by men,
women and children, and reunited many of the city migrants with their
relatives in the village. The whole *nag'* used to combine their
financial resources in order to host the ceremonies, demonstrating their
generosity and prestige among other hamlets. From the early morning of
the *moulid* day, boatloads of people from neighboring villages along
with the village residents made long processions to the square of the
saint\'s shrine, where the men sang *zikr* and danced the *kaff* dance,
the women offered sacrificial goats and sheep to be slaughtered, cooked
and eaten in the communal feast afterwards, and the children enjoyed the
joyful atmosphere and bought sweets and toys from travelling vendors.

**After displacement**

On the 27^th^ of December 1963, the displacement of the people of Abu
Hor began to their village in New Nubia, where the new Abu Hor is one of
the five villages that are under the administrative local council of
Kalabsha, a main village which provides the neighboring villages with
social, educational and administrative services.

The new Abu Hor was planned according to a grid pattern; the main
streets were oriented north-south and secondary streets crossed at right
angles. In the first phase of resettlement, the houses were
significantly smaller than in Old Nubia and were arranged back-to-back
in long rows based on four prototypes of houses that ranged from one to
four bedrooms. These houses were distributed according to family size;
however, this arrangement ignored the socio-spatial structure
characteristic of the Nubian villages before displacement. Relatives and
the elderly who had lived nearby in old Nubia were allocated houses far
from each other. And women, who were confined to their hamlet, found
themselves surrounded by strange neighbors from other hamlets. For
instance, my paternal grandfather (Sayed) was assigned a
three-bedroom-house away from the house of his grandfather (Ali). Thus,
the new settings in resettlement disturbed the established social fabric
of the village.

Moreover, many families didn't even receive a house in the first phase
of resettlement, so they had to live with relatives in their new small
houses. This situation was further exacerbated after the 1967 war, when
the migrant families who were living in Suez, Ismailia, and Port Said
had to evacuate these cities and moved back to New Abu Hor to live with
their relatives. This crowdening even worsened the living conditions in
the new village.

![Layout of New Abu Hor.](../static/images/sadeq/fig6.jpg "Layout of New Abu Hor.")

**~~Figure 6. Layout of New Abu Hor.~~**


In 1970, my mother\'s family received their house (Faris' house in
Figure 6) as one of the second phase typical houses; a
thirteen-by-twenty-meter house that consisted of a courtyard, two small
bed rooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The walls were made of limestone
cut from nearby quarries, with 0.40m thickness and 3-meter height, while
the flat roof was made of reinforced concrete to allow the building of a
second storey using the bearing walls technique. However, this house
form disregarded the climatic and social considerations characteristic
of the traditional Nubian house. The kitchen was so small that there was
no space to store food and supplies. The rooms were also much smaller
than their house in Old Abu Hor, which prevented them from having enough
space for sleeping or socializing. The placement of the rooms along the
southern side of the house allowed the heat to penetrate into them, in
addition to the heat that came in from the uninsulated roof. Surrounded
by other houses on three sides, the northern winds could not reach the
house, making the living conditions intolerable during the summer
months.

They had to make alterations in the house in order to suit their way of
life. A larger kitchen was built to be spacious enough for cooking and
storing dried food and supplies, while the former kitchen had become a
bedroom, in addition to building a new room for the children and
enclosures for goats and chicken. As in Old Nubia, the façade was
whitewashed, and the low clay bench mastaba was built in front of the
house, adding more space for hospitality and neighbors\' gatherings.
Aside from cooking and cleaning the house, the daily activities after
relocation ranged between fetching water from the installed public taps
and shopping at Seyalla's weekly market. Occasionally, they spent their
afternoons on their farmland, where they planted palm trees and a
Roselle shrub.

![My grandparents\' house before and after alterations.](../static/images/sadeq/fig7.jpg "My grandparents\' house before and after alterations.")

**~~Figure 7. My grandparents\' house before and after alterations.~~**

The people of Abu-Hor tried to recreate the sense of community in their
new village through undertaking several cooperative projects. Every row
of houses cooperated in cleaning the street, plastering the facades and
planting trees. The whole village collected money to build a communal
guesthouse (*sabeel*) not only for accommodating visitors, but also as a
gathering place where men can meet in the evening, gather in ritual
feasts, and hold public meetings. The people of Abu-Hor cooperated in
celebrating religious rituals

An elderly woman, who was a custodian of a saint's shrine in the Old Abu
Hor, built a shrine in the new village. Some women, especially in the
first years after relocation, were visiting this shrine to make vows and
offer sacrificial sheep and goats as in Old Nubia. Also, the custodian
of the shrine held moulids for the saint on the fifteen of Shaaban, and
few people in the village celebrated it. But the biggest moulid after
relocation was the "Five Domes" moulid in Murwaw village, which hundreds
of Kenuz men, women, and children celebrated by singing zikr, dancing
kaff, and communal feast as in Old Nubia.

**Discussion**

The Nubian house was rooted in the natural landscape on which it was
built. It embodied the social world of Nubian society with its basic
values and hierarchies. The house was spatially organized to invert the
fundamental oppositions within Nubia: North/ South, Nile/ mountain,
public/ private, male/ female, human/ animal. Moreover, the domestic
spatial divisions enabled inhabitants to practice traditional Nubian
rituals, especially for women. In wedding ceremonies, for instance, the
women of the *nag'* gathered in the courtyard of the bride's house to
participate in a seven-day ritual period of cooking, singing, dancing
and feminine visitation. Similarly, other life-cycle rituals were
practiced by women domestically. Thus, the courtyard had to be wide
enough to accommodate the guests attending these ceremonies. The Nubian
house functioned as a generative mechanism for the Nubian culture,
underwriting habitus and reproducing its elements for the inhabitants.
As Bourdieu and Sayad stated (1964: 26) "the structure of habitat is the
symbolic projection of the most fundamental structures of a culture."

The Nubian house served as the centerpiece of all Nubian social
organization. The spatial configurations separated the house from the
patrilineal agglomeration (*nag'*) and the *nag'* from other
agglomerations. These divisions reflected the Nubian social hierarchy in
a unitary symbolic order. Thus, the traditional Nubian house and village
were the reflection of the Nubian culture, where all life functions
occur in harmony.

However, the Nubian social life with its infinite rhythm faced a sudden
and dramatic transformation after the construction of the High Dam in
1964. The resettlement policies that relocated entire Nubian people
placed them in a very different social and architectural setting;
planned villages in the desert removed from the Nile. Displacement as
experienced by Nubians driven from their homes and from their homeland,
overturned the Nubian social organization. Such transformations in
domestic space had an indelible effect on their culture.

Following displacement, as people are forced to leave their homelands, a
place where they had felt socially, culturally and emotionally embedded,
they are likely to experience a sense of loss of community, history, and
identity. Thus, emplacement is not simply re-placing people in new
place, but it is a continuous process of making one's place in the
world. Emplacement implies the social processes, relations and
encounters through which displaced people engage with the new
environment, and therefore transform the new place into a personalized
and socialized one. Emplacement emphasizes the concept of place as a
process of embeddedness and socio-affective attachment, and also
emphasizes the role of displaced people in place-making processes.

The loss of a home due to displacement is such a socially disorienting,
disempowering and disruptive process that remaking one involves a
lengthy effort with no obvious start or end point. The process of
remaking a home entails more than building a physical place of shelter
and finding a source of livelihood. It requires inhabitants to establish
a feeling of being "'at home" (Hage's, 1997: 102). This process of
feeling at home involves four dimensions; a material place, a familiar
landscape, a social world, and an emotional and existential place.

The home is not only a place where individuals can satisfy their basic
needs and protect themselves from harm threatening otherness (weather
conditions, animals, people). It is also a place where dwellers can take
control of their own boundaries and express their personal and social
identities within the home. Living in a place in which individuals have
no control or ability to express themselves and cannot change the
furnishings or the decorations can be deeply frustrating. It compromises
their ability to feel at home. Houses are seldom built by their
inhabitants. Thus, it is the ornamentation, maintenance, housework,
identification, and personalization processes that people enact to
transform a house into a home. According to Bourdieu, domestic space is
appropriated by the resident according to a system of customs that are
generated by past residential experience which he called \"habitus\".
Thus, the acts of appropriation and identification from past experience
not only connect individuals spatially with the places in which they
dwell, but also connect them with the past and the future.

Regaining the sense of being at home was also achieved through
familiarization with the new milieu, including its geographical and
social features. This is a process whereby strange places and people
become familiar. This process involved different scales of place, from
the specific home to the whole village. The meaningless house is
transformed into a home through daily practices and repetitive behavior
in everyday life events. The actions create familiarity and therefore a
sense of home.

> Becoming at home is linked to the "refrain," a form of expression with
> a different meaning every time it is repeated, as a song ventures
> forward with each verse before returning to the refrain (Dovey, 2010,
> 18).

Familiarity is also created when people possess a maximal spatial
knowledge of the new village and its features become familiar through
daily movement along the same paths, which Michel de Certeau called "The
opacity of the body."

> In movement, gesticulating, walking, taking its pleasure, is what
> indefinitely organizes a here in relation to an abroad, a
> \"familiarity\" in relation to a \"foreignness\" (Leach, 2016, 299).

As Korac (2009: 42) stresses, "emplacement does not take place in a
social vacuum; rather it occurs within the context of intra- and
inter-group relations." Creating a sense of home in New Abu-Hor required
reconstructing a social world in the new village based on shared
traditions and values after centuries of belonging to *nag'* kin groups.
Reconstructing the social world aimed to regaining a sense of belonging
to a community, where "one recognizes people as 'one's own' and where
one feels recognized by them as such."

Through everyday social practices, visiting and chatting with neighbors
in *mastaba*, the people of Abu-Hor could create new social attachments
within the place of resettlement, thus creating a sense of home.
Building the village guesthouse (*Sabeel*) was another way the people of
Abu-Hor could reconstruct their social world, by creating "new material
forms which symbolize a former community" (Schultze,2020, 291). The
guesthouse could be conceived as a "memorialized locale" (Lofland, 1998,
65) which symbolizes the lifestyle of the past culture.

Displacement involved separating from a place that Nubians described as
"homely," a place where they had felt emotionally embedded. Displacement
was an experience full of emotional distress; whether grief for the
place left behind, the struggle of living in the present or worrying for
the future. This emotional distress of being displaced remained until
people were able to remake emotional attachments in the new village.
However, the reconstruction of the emotional feeling of being at home
did not happen automatically; for a long time, people continued to
reflect on differences between the old Abu-Hor and the new village.

The people of Abu-Hor could reconstruct the emotional feeling of being
at home by replicating their social and cultural traditions of Old Nubia
in the new village; such as life-cycle rituals and celebrating religious
ceremonies. Although the new setting lacked the geographical features in
which these traditions were practiced -- the Nile, mountains, old
shrines, and so on -- creativity and imagination helped them to
reproduce cultural traditions by evoking the landscape that they were
forced to abandon. As Obeid writes (2013: 374), "what seems like a
yearning for the past can contribute very much to the creation of the
present and the future."

**Conclusion**

For more than fifteen centuries, Egyptian Nubians had lived in isolated
villages on the banks of the Nile, surviving the harsh environment and
the competing empires, and had slowly developed a distinctive culture
that successfully responded to numerous crises. However, the building of
the High Dam and the subsequent resettlement of Nubians in a desert
habitat has been the greatest shock to their culture that has been
characterized by continuity and change. Yet Nubian culture did not
collapse by the backwaters of the High Dam, the vitality and flexibility
of the Nubians helped them to adjust to the different natural and social
milieu while retaining a strong sense of their historical and cultural
identity.

The idea that Nubia no longer exists made the (re)production of homeland
as a mythical place necessary for maintaining their identity. This
research illustrated the varied strategies undertaken by Nubians to
reconstruct homeland in new settlements. These strategies included
houses alterations, symbolic recreation of places depicting the places
in Old Nubia such as the shrine and the community guesthouse, practicing
Nubian rituals and celebrating religious and social ceremonies. All
these strategies were significant in transforming the unfamiliar
resettlement place into a home.

Former narratives of Nubians displacement were often colored by rosy
view of Old Nubia, which became a mythical place to which Nubians still
long to return. Such narratives emanates from the static and fixed
Heideggerian ontology of being-in-the-world, which conceive of home and
homeland as a place of rootedness. However, the Nubian displacement, and
other experiences of displacement worldwide, challenge this discourse.
Even after displacement disrupted people's social worlds-- the
individuals' sense of being at home and their social relations -- the
displaced are often able to recreate home, or what Naila Habib (1996)
calls "the evolving meaning of home" as "a dynamic and constantly
changing process." This dynamic notion of home denotes that belonging to
a place can be understood as fluid territorialisation -- in the
Deleuzian sense -- through giving meaning to the place by individual and
collective behavior, which reminds us of Appadurai\'s (1995) thesis on
the production of locality. According to this thesis, a locality is not
a given, but it is created by social practices, ritual activities, and
the collective effort of the community in order to socialize the space
and localize the people. In the case of Abu Hor, villagers turned to
traditional practices in addition to building of a shrine and a
community guesthouse in the new village, which illustrates this process
of (re)construction not only of Abu Hor but also of the bond between the
people and their new locality.

Indeed, this research does not aim to romanticize nor to underestimate
the precarious circumstances of Nubian displacement. Instead, the
intention of this research is to acknowledge the significance of
Nubians' contributions to produce alternative meanings within the
modularization of their new top - built environment. Rather than
associating the Nubian displacement merely with loss and passivity, this
research discussed the resiliency and the spatial practices through
which Nubians could contribute to processes of homemaking and
(re)territorialisation on different spatial scales.

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[^1]: []{dir="rtl"}Khor: an Arabic word stands for a natural swale
    cutting through the desert plateau at right angles to the Nile.

[^2]: Shaʼreya: a vermicelli-like food with milk and sugar which was
    served as breakfast to the guests and to the bride and groom after
    the wedding.

[^3]: []{dir="rtl"}Karej: Nubian traditional plates weaved of brightly
    colored palm fiber strips.

[^4]: Arras: a young boy relative of the groom who accompanied him
    everywhere for the whole week prior to the wedding. His role was to
    serve the groom and "guard" him from his friends\' pranks.