The Farthest Place: Social Boundaries in an Egyptian Desert Community

This ethnographic account of a conglomerate of Egyptian villages in the Western Desert, envisaged as a government project to resettle populations from the Nile Valley and Delta, looks at how Abu Minqar's existence is contingent upon social and spatial networks that reach beyond the boundaries of the physical community. Through marriage, spatial distribution, and agricultural practices, social spaces become apparent and illustrate the unbounded nature of Abu Minqar and the role of various networks in constituting its everyday experiences of pasts, presents, and futures.