Abstract

This thesis explores how rural communities in Kafr El Sheikh governorate, Egypt, negotiate everyday life with the contamination of Kitchener Drain, the largest agricultural drain in the central Nile Delta. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in three villages at the tail-end end of the drain, the study explores how water contamination shapes social and ecological, social life for farmers living in the catchment of the drain. The thesis situates the farmer’s present experience within the broader history of colonial and modernist national irrigation reforms and developments highlighting how systemic neglect and uneven governance reproduce conditions of vulnerability. At the same time, the thesis looks at contaminated spaces as simultaneously being zones of abandonment and zones of freedom from structure, where creative life forms can come to be. By bringing together anthropological theories of water, contamination, and value with a Deleuzian framework of events, the research demonstrates how Kitchener Drain is both a site of precarity and of persistence, where survival entails negotiating the entanglement of life and death.

School

School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Department

Sociology, Egyptology & Anthroplology Department

Degree Name

MA in Sociology-Anthropology

Graduation Date

Summer 9-7-2025

Submission Date

9-7-2025

First Advisor

Hanan Sabea

Committee Member 1

Ian Morrison

Committee Member 2

Manuel Schwab

Extent

139 p.

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Institutional Review Board (IRB) Approval

Approval has been obtained for this item

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