My Grandparents' House: A Sociological Perspective

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.¹

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”.² 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:³

“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

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 khor⁴ 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 khors, 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.

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.

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 shaʼreya⁵, 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 karej⁶ 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 arras⁷, 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.

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.

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.

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, “the structure of habitat is the symbolic projection of the most fundamental structures of a culture.”⁸

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 places, 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.”⁹ 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.¹⁰

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."¹¹

As Korac stresses, “emplacement does not take place in a social vacuum; rather it occurs within the context of intra- and inter-group relations.”¹² 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.”¹³ The guesthouse could be conceived as a “memorialized locale,”¹⁴ 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, “what seems like a yearning for the past can contribute very much to the creation of the present and the future.”¹⁵

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 emanate 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 calls “the evolving meaning of home” as “a dynamic and constantly changing process.”¹⁶ 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 thesis on the production of locality.¹⁷ 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.

Bibliography

Appadurai, Arjun. “The Production of Locality.” In Counterwork: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge, edited by Richard Fardon, pp. 107-16. London: Routledge, 1995.

Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge, 1996.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Sayad, Abdelmalek. Le déracinement. La Crise de l’agriculture traditionelle en Algérie. Paris: Minuit, 1964.

Dovey, Kim. Becoming Places. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2010.

Habib, Naila. “The Search for Home.” Journal of Refugee Studies 9 (1996): pp. 96–102.

Hassan, Abu-bakr Mahjoub and Hassan, Mohamed Mahjoub. Abu- Hor Our Homeland. Khartoum: The Nubian Studies and Documentation Center, 2000.

Jaritz, Horst. “Notes on Nubian Architecture.” In Nubians in Egypt: Peaceful People, edited by Robert A. Fernea. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1973: pp.XX

Korac, Maja. Remaking Home: Reconstructing Life, Place and Identity in Rome and Amsterdam. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009.

Leach, Neil. “Belonging: Towards a Theory of Identification with Space.” In Habitus: A Sense of Place, edited by Jean Hillier and Emma Rooksby, pp. 297-313. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2016.

Lofland, Lyn H. The Public Realm: Exploring the City’s Quintessential Social Territory. Communication and Social Order. Hawthorne and New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1998.

Obeid, Michelle. “Home-Making in the Diaspora Bringing Palestine to London.” In Diaspora and Transnational Studies Companion, edited by Ato Quayson, and Girish Daswani, pp. 366-80. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2013.

Perez Murcia, Luis Eduardo. “Remaking a Place Called Home Following Displacement.” In The Routledge Handbook of Place, edited by Tim Edensor, Ares Kalandides, and Uma Kothari. Abingdon, pp. 468-76. Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020.

Riad, Mohamed and Abd el-Rasoul, Kawthar. A Journey in the Time of Nubia. Windsor: Hindawi Foundation, 2014.

Schultze, Henrik. “The Symbolic Construction of Community Through Place.” In The Routledge Handbook of Place, edited by Tim Edensor, Ares Kalandides, and Uma Kothari, pp. 285-93. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020.

Smith, Stuart T. “Colonial Entanglements: Imperial Dictates and Intercultural Interaction in Nubia.” In Archaeologies of Empire: Local Participants and Imperial Trajectories, edited by Anna L. Boozer, B.S. Düring, and B.J. Parker, pp. 21-56. Santa Fe, NM: SAR & UNM Press, 2020.

United Nations Archives at Geneva, Survey of Egypt, Kalabsha, 1935. www⁄https://archives.ungeneva.org/kalabsha-4

Hassan Fathy, www⁄https://www.archnet.org/sites/14965