the author

ORCID: 0000-0002-5793-1098
Hal archives ouvertes: http://cv.archives-ouvertes.fr/Battesti
Scholar: https://scholar.google.fr/citations...

Vincent Battesti is a CNRS researcher officer, within the Musée de l’Homme in Paris at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (UMR 7206 Écoanthropologie). His main interest is in “anthropology of the nature”, especially on gardens & oases of North Africa and Middle East. His researches also focused on Cairo public spaces (especially through their sound ambiances). With a double background in ecology and social anthropology, he is working at the intersection of biology and social sciences. His foremost fieldworks were in Tunisia, Yemen, Vanuatu, Egypt, and briefly in Sudan, Algeria and Morocco. The last position in Egypt (CEDEJ, 2002-2005) was the occasion of two research projects: an urban anthropology of public spaces and parks in Cairo and a study on spaces, sociabilities in Siwa oasis.
He recently co-edited a volume on Contemporary Egypt->article579 (2011, Actes Sud publishers) and an issue of the journal Revue d’ethnoécologie on The Date Palm: Origin and Cultivation in the Middle East and in Egypt (2013/2014).

He divides his time between Paris, and his fieldworks (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc.) and for 6 years with also New York (where he was Visiting Scholar at Columbia University (Department of Anthropology) (and formerly at Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, NYU, New York University).

The man on the left of the photograph below is the sheikh of the oasis of al-Garat, near Siwa. [The former sheikh, in fact, since he passed away recently. It was sheikh Hasan, who has a remarkable hospitality.]