The following four chapters aim to describe Ighil Oumsed, an ‘ordinary’ village (if any village can be ordinary) in Kabylia, where I carried out most of my fieldwork. The present chapter deals with the aspect of the village that strikes any visitor to the area before anything else might come to his or her mind: its spatial organisation. Special attention will be paid to the various ways in which this spatial organisation is perceived, used, and thereby constantly reinterpreted by villagers, and to the impact such practices have on the self-perception of the village community. Although at first sight the village presents a very clear spatial organisation, which can be related to notions of social order and to internal divisions within village society, and which tends to be cited as a proof of historical continuity, it is argued that this clarity disappears at further analysis, and gives way to flexible spatial practices that tacitly allow for and express social change.