BATTESTI Vincent

• In 2018 began a research project (with) in Corsica on the Orezza Valley in Castagniccia​.
  It consists of several phases. The first one in progress is this one:

 Historical demography and land strategies in the Orezza Valley in Castagniccia, Corsica
Our research on the evolution of the population and the use of its territory through the land issues of Castagniccia (late 18th century to today) combines an approach of historical demography and a history of land in Castagniccia. The study concerns the small Castagniccia, i. e. the heart of this region, the Orezza valley and, for the most systematic surveys, the municipality of Nocario. The data are a combination of oral and archival sources.
co-PI: Vincent Battesti & François Ireton (CNRS)

• In 2019, a double project began in Saudi Arabia in the oasis of al-'Ulā.

The oasis of al-'Ulā, capital of the governorate of the same name, is part of the province of Madīna, located in northwest Saudi Arabia. Al-'Ulā, the ancient city of Dādān in the wadi al-Qura, was the capital of the Lihyan empire on the incense road. It is located about twenty kilometers from Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ which hosts the Nabataean site al-Ḥijr classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Al-'Ulā, which is now a modern urban area of about 40,000 inhabitants in a narrow valley, carved out of the sandstone (and basalt) of the plateau, still has its former fortified urban centre (al-Dīra) with hundreds of mud brick and stone houses in an upper part of the valley to protect itself from flooding.

Two projects :

 Anthropological survey of al-‘Ulā community and its oasis system
PI: Vincent Battesti (CNRS)

 Ethnographic, genetic, and morphometric analyses of the date palm agrobiodiversity in al-‘Ulā oasis
co-PI: Vincent Battesti (CNRS) & Muriel Gros-Balthazard (IRD & NYU-AD, New York University in Abu Dhabi).

• In 2019, I became a researcher in residence "in zero gravity" at the CNES (Centre national d'études spatiales) Space Observatory.

 Pour une anthropologie extraterrestre : sensorialités et cosmos
(Extraterrestrial anthropology: sensorialities and cosmos)
The ambition here is to propose an "extraterrestrial anthropology", or rather, an anthropology of human beings outside their terrestrial context. I propose a first angle and a methodology: a work on the sensorialities and the relationship to the cosmos.
If the question of space is well delineated in anthropology, because it has only focused on the ordinary experience of human beings until now, it has always been a two-dimensional space, with feet on the ground. Now that Man is emancipating himself from this natural of gravity, it is perhaps time to found a new anthropology of space.
The methodological angle is both original and self-contained: the sensory. Our sensory equipment is the only way to acquire information about our environment and to interact with it. I will mobilize two aspects of my previous research, on the one hand my experience of ecologically constrained environments for humankind such as deserts, and on the other hand my experience of an anthropology of sensory perceptions.