ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some cases, each illustrating a different aspect of the cultural relationship between the state and the civil society. The Tunisian government devised a plan to improve existing water points and create new ones. The goal was to create enough water points so that no one would be more than 4 km from the nearest one, and the situation has been much improved. Musha is a large village in the part of Upper Egypt that experienced the annual flood until the completion of the Aswan High Dam in 1963. Social relations in Musha are essentially dyadic in the sense that there are few occasions on which large groups of people meet. Testour is a relatively prosperous agricultural town which now mainly supplies fruits and vegetables to Tunis wholesale market. Testour was founded by Muslims expelled from Spain in 1609. These were the Moriscos or Andalusians whose descendents now form only a small minority of the town's population.
