Vincent Battesti

Vincent Battesti (b. 1970) was born in Le Havre, France. He has been conducting research and fieldwork in North Africa and the Middle East for over thirty years. He is a social anthropologist at the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique). He is based at the Musée de l’Homme, Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, in Paris (Éco-anthropologie laboratory, UMR 7206), where he co-leads the Ethnoecology research team.

From 2015 to 2016, he was a visiting scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University (New York), and from 2012 to 2015, a visiting scholar at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University.

His research focuses on ethnoecology and ecological anthropology. He specializes in oasis agroecosystems, particularly in the oases of Siwa (Egypt) and al-ʿUlā (Saudi Arabia). He has also conducted research on the agroecosystems of Castagniccia (Corsica, France), as well as on urban anthropology—especially public spaces in Cairo—and on the anthropology of sensory perceptions, with a particular interest in sonic environments.