Families held property in many places and across different ways of living, binding traders, farmers, scholars and herders in mutual obligations. Because income came from sources spread across different terrains and economies, unusual windfalls could be shared out and crises absorbed. Risk was managed through a web of debts and duties rather than by any single owner.
Power and belonging are traced through chains of named ancestors, not through fixed places or groups. Group boundaries are never given but are negotiated and must be actively drawn. So influence comes from how far one's ties extend, not from controlling a patch of ground.
Smuggling everyday goods stays open to anyone with a vehicle, a little capital and relatives along the route, and it is seen as morally acceptable. Organised criminal networks and the state are both feared for the same reason: they recruit individuals and enrich them alone. Locals say this 'turns people away from their families' and breaks the ties that keep trade morally accountable.
Desert oases were specialised single-crop places that needed heavy investment, imported labour and food from neighbouring regions, so none could survive alone. A place's very existence, and its identity, depends on its connections to elsewhere. That also makes it fragile and open to outside interference.
Settling a place is told as a moral and religious achievement, not merely a physical one. Successful trading families model their own histories on the story of a founding saint, which justifies both how they got rich and their present rank. A boomtown with no such moral grounding is seen as wilderness, however much it looks like a town, and its people loudly claim traditional virtue to make up for it.