Mauro Van Aken

Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Human Sciences, Faculty Member

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Coltivare cibo baladii in Palestina. Le politiche della natura, tra terra e aria

In the Occupied Territories, environment is not the main concern facing daily insecurity of milit... more In the Occupied Territories, environment is not the main concern facing daily insecurity of military occupation and life uncertainty in one of the most high-tech experiments of land and communities colonization and bordering, of “risk” society and fenced materiality. The common weather has been disconnected as much as water resources on the ground have been bordered. Icon of global patterns of territorial management and idolatries of land, here the aerial dimension has become a detached locus of risk (military visual control, pollution). Politics of nature stand at the heart of nationalist perspectives (politics of planting, rooting and de-rooting the self and the others, technofix utopias) with their incapacity to meet environmental changes and their challenge for a new shared patterns of knowledge and resource use: notwithstanding border development “on the ground”, Palestinian population and Israeli colons and military forces are sharing the same overheating atmosphere. The farmi...

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L'antropologia errante. Note sull'eredità etnografica di Ugo Fabietti (1950-2017)

Water politics and management: findings from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America

Radiographic lung changes after stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) vary widely between pa... more Radiographic lung changes after stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) vary widely between patients. Standardized descriptions of acute (≤6 months after treatment) and late (>6 months after treatment) benign lung changes have been proposed but the reliable application of these classification systems has not been demonstrated. Herein, we examine the interobserver reliability of classifying acute and late lung changes after SBRT. Methods and materials: A total of 280 follow-up computed tomography scans at 3, 6, and 12 months post-treatment were analyzed in 100 patients undergoing thoracic SBRT. Standardized descriptions of acute lung changes (3-and 6-month scans) include diffuse consolidation, patchy consolidation and ground glass opacity (GGO), diffuse GGO, patchy GGO, and no change. Late lung change classifications (12-month scans) include modified conventional pattern, mass-like pattern, scarlike pattern, and no change. Five physicians scored the images independently in a blinded fashion. Fleiss' kappa scores quantified the interobserver agreement. Results: The Kappa scores were 0.30 at 3 months, 0.20 at 6 months, and 0.25 at 12 months. The proportion of patients in each category at 3 and 6 months was as follows: Diffuse consolidation 11% and 21%; patchy consolidation and GGO 15% and 28%; diffuse GGO 10% and 11%; patchy GGO 15% and 15%; and no change 49% and 25%, respectively. The percentage of patients in each category at 12 months was as follows: Modified conventional 46%; mass-like 16%; scar-like 26%; and no change 12%. Uniform scoring between the observers occurred in 26, 8, and 14 cases at 3, 6, and 12 months, respectively. Conclusions: Interobserver reliability scores indicate a fair agreement to classify radiographic lung changes after SBRT. Qualitative descriptions are insufficient to categorize these findings because

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Immaginari di natura. Mangiare e coltivare cibo baladìì (locale) nei Territori Palestinesi

Food mediates intensive symbolical meanings in different cultures and environments, but in contem... more Food mediates intensive symbolical meanings in different cultures and environments, but in contemporary context food is at the centre of a process of fetishisation: is legitimate to talk about food transcending form the contexts of production, form agri/ cultures and from the dynamics of inequality that are hidden in food, starting from land and farmers. In the Palestinian context, narratives of biological food have taken place and it is generally renamed as “baladii”, local food: in aid policies, as new market product of local and transnational elite, in a coincidence of meaning with purity, authenticity or traditional. For those who cultivate their own food in small gardens close to home, baladii food states the political dimension of the local facing colonial discipline and high constraints and dependencies in the access to resources: food, as farming, makes explicit contested and interrelated imaginaries of nature and society between Israeli and Palestinians, which started with ...

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Gender and Water in the Middle East. Local and Global Realities

Gender is a relational process in which roles and interdependent ideas of masculinity and feminin... more Gender is a relational process in which roles and interdependent ideas of masculinity and femininity are reproduced or challenged: a highly relational and fluid category, and its role in water dynamics, the most “relational” of all resources, is indeed crucial, albeit generally rendered invisible. Our aim in this paper is to contextualise crucial dynamics in gender relations that flow through water, by exploring local water systems in the Middle East (Jordan and Palestine) in relation to issues of access, control, distribution and “modernisation” of water supplies. First, we examine the relationality of water and gender dynamics as they have been discussed in the anthropological literature, in terms of how aspects of the “social life” of water are intertwined with ideas and roles of femininity and of masculinity within processes of modernisation. This leads us to focus on the first of our case studies—intensive irrigated agribusiness in Jordan—as a typical example of the masculinisa...

Land grab, the values of land: new and old patterns of land appropriation

Journal des anthropologues, 2014

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The Anthropologist as Nomad. On the Ethnographic Legacy of Ugo Fabietti (1950-2017)

Nomadic Peoples, 2018

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Anthropologie et eau(x) affaires globales, eaux locales et flux de cultures

Journal des anthropologues, 2013

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Hidden Waters - The Roles of Culture in High-Tech Jordan Valley (Jordan)

The Jordan Valley (Jordan) is today a post-modern laboratory of agronomic and hydraulic technique... more The Jordan Valley (Jordan) is today a post-modern laboratory of agronomic and hydraulic techniques of arid areas where irrigation represents a conflict interface between different life-worlds. The new hydraulic technical order of the water network is characterized today by continuous disorder in a frame of increasing scarcity, ecological and economic unsustainability and competition: irrigators creatively manipulate the complex and hidden water network as a main strategy, daily reinserting water in its political and cultural dimensions. In the frame of scarcity and new “community” participation policies, what is at stake are different ideas of community between development actors and local irrigators: around water, different cultural perceptions of place, of belonging and of society encounter and struggle.

Riego y desorden "tecno-lógico". La disputa por el agua, el conocimiento y la técnica de la agroindustria en el valle del Jordán (Jordania)

El Agua En El Mundo Arabe Percepciones Globales Y Realidades Locales 2011 Isbn 978 84 615 4136 2 Pags 59 86, 2011

Il dono ambiguo: modelli d’aiuto e rifugiati palestinesi nella valle del Giordano*

Antropologia, 2005

Il dono ambiguo: modelli d'aiuto e rifugiati palestinesi nella valle del Giordano * "Il legame so... more

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Virtual Water, H2O and the De-socialisation of Water—A Brief Anthropological Journey

The Water We Eat, 2015

The concept of virtual water has been crucial in reintroducing the elements of water use and “pro... more The concept of virtual water has been crucial in reintroducing the elements of water use and “productivity” into the understanding of the economic and political aspects of contemporary processes and in making visible dynamics of water incorporated in our daily life, food and objects. In water use and meanings today another aspect remains often invisible: the cultural and social dynamics in which water is embedded and the patterns of common that cultures have developed with water, the most relational resource. The study of the relations between water and cultures highlights the relevance in understanding the complexity of commons as communal management systems of natural resources: a complex whole not to be idealised, but as historical institutions, cultural, productive and moral systems, technical and symbolic, and central to the use and, especially, the sharing of water.

Values at work: a case of labourers in agribusiness (Jordan)

Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, 2005

ABSTRACT In a context that has been reshaped in the last half a century by conflict and displacem... more ABSTRACT In a context that has been reshaped in the last half a century by conflict and displacement, the peculiar borderland that divides the Jordanian east bank from the Occupied Territories in the West bank, has been transformed due to intensive rural modernisation, a process that has generated new ideas and values of work and of working persons. Palestinian refugees have settled among Jordanian Bedouins, the Ghawarneh tribe and after the 1970s, Egyptian labourers and a smaller Pakistani community have shaped a context where terms of belonging are daily at work and overlap on the new agribusiness. The paper focuses on the different ideas and practices of work activated by local actors and their cultural understanding of the new categories of labour, cultural perceptions that are crucial part of local identity definitions and of social borders. A special focus on marginal communities helps in highlighting the hierarchy that has set up in the valley and the changing meanings of wage relations enmeshed in ethnic and class definitions.

Le travail et la question sociale au Maghreb et au Moyen-Orient

Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, 2005

Le travail et la question sociale au Maghreb et au Moyen-Orient Les années 1980 et 1990 sont, pou... more Le travail et la question sociale au Maghreb et au Moyen-Orient Les années 1980 et 1990 sont, pour bon nombre de pays du Sud, caractérisées par la généralisation des plans d'ajustement structurel, la réduction massive des dépenses publiques, les politiques de privatisation et, parallèlement, par la montée du chômage et de la pauvreté. Les pays couverts par ce dossier, du Maghreb au Moyen-Orient, avec une incursion au Pakistan, ne font pas exception à ce mouvement général. Pour la plupart d'entre eux toutefois, cette évolution s'inscrit dans une histoire marquée autant par la violence et les guerres, que par les aléas de la rente pétrolière, à l'origine de mouvements migratoires de grande envergure. Si, comme ailleurs, les populations sont sommées de s'ajuster au nouvel ordre mondial, un certain nombre de facteurs spécifiques interviennent, pour engendrer une situation de crise. La rente pétrolière a marqué les orientations du développement économique dans l'ensemble de la région (Destremau, 2000). Elle a aussi favorisé la déconnexion croissante entre les États et leurs populations, et sans doute, indirectement, alimenté la montée de l'islamisme. Les héritages de l'histoire, récente ou plus lointaine, les politiques étatiques, ou plus subtilement, les luttes sociales, les stratégies d'acteurs sociaux ou politiques, collectifs ou individuels, ont façonné des particularités nationales, que ce dossier s'efforce également de souligner.

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Development as a gift: Patterns of assistance and refugees' strategies in the Jordan Valley

The hierarchy and experience of migration: Egyptian labourers in the Jordan Valley

Politiques migratoires, filières et communautés au …, 2006

... Authors: Van Aken, MI. Title: The hierarchy and experience of migration: Egyptian labourers i... more

Facing Home. Palestinian Belonging in a valley of doubt

Palestinian Belonging in a valley of doubt. …, 2003

... Authors: Van Aken, M. Title: Facing Home. Palestinian Belonging in a valley of doubt. Keyword... more

River Basin Trajectories: Societies, Environments and Development. Edited by F. Molle and P. Wester. Wallingford, UK: CABI (2009), pp. 311, £ 85.00. ISBN 978-1-84593-538-2

Experimental Agriculture, 2010

only to food production and rural livelihoods but also to conservation. The book is therefore an ... more only to food production and rural livelihoods but also to conservation. The book is therefore an important read for conservationists who are invited to adopt a landscape matrix perspective and aim for better understanding of the socio-economic and political forces that influence land use. The paradigm proposed also challenges the industrial model of intensified agriculture that is once more being widely advocated as the best way to meet the food crisis. It is therefore also a valuable read for students and teachers of agriculture who are encouraged to show solidarity with the small farmers around the world in their struggle for food sovereignty.

Coral gardens” and their Denials. Culture, Environment and the Uncertainties of the Future

Coral gardens" and their Denials. Culture, Environment and the Uncertainties of the Future MAURO ... more Coral gardens" and their Denials. Culture, Environment and the Uncertainties of the Future MAURO VAN AKEN * O taro, tenacious as the bracken, O taro, anchored, anchored firmly, Blossom on (Malinowski, 1935a, p.281) Abstract "Coral Gardens and Their Magic" (1935) of B. Malinowski represents part of the "mythical legacy" of the foundation of cultural anthropology, it remains an unstudied book although it reveals an ancient and important denial and ambivalent tension in taking into account the relationships between cultures and environments. In these removed legacy, the dichotomy of culture/ nature are posited and will later encounter new contradictions in reading the scenarios of environmental intensive changes, which are today at the heart in conceiving futures. This urges cultural anthropology to put back culture in the environment, as it happened at its foundation. Further, anthropology needs to reintegrate futures in its ethnographic tools not as scenarios of predictions but in the way cultures perceive, imagine and incorporate the future in their practices, in relation with non-human agents and within the wider critic of the hegemonic fascination for consumption that we have taken often for granted in our models of understanding.

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Il dono ambiguo

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Mauro Van Aken

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