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...
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 ...
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...
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.
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.
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.
Politiques migratoires, filières et communautés au …, 2006
... Authors: Van Aken, MI. Title: The hierarchy and experience of migration: Egyptian labourers i... more ... Authors: Van Aken, MI. Title: The hierarchy and experience of migration: Egyptian labourers in the Jordan Valley. Keywords: migration Egypt, Jordan, mobility. ... Citation: Van Aken, MI (2006). The hierarchy and experience of migration: Egyptian labourers in the Jordan Valley. ...
Palestinian Belonging in a valley of doubt. …, 2003
... Authors: Van Aken, M. Title: Facing Home. Palestinian Belonging in a valley of doubt. Keyword... more ... Authors: Van Aken, M. Title: Facing Home. Palestinian Belonging in a valley of doubt. Keywords: Belonging, refugees, development, aid, Jordan. MIUR Subject : Settore M-DEA/01 - Discipline Demoetnoantropologiche (1681). ISO Language : eng. Issue Date: 2003. ...
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.
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...
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 ...
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...
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.
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.
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.
Politiques migratoires, filières et communautés au …, 2006
... Authors: Van Aken, MI. Title: The hierarchy and experience of migration: Egyptian labourers i... more ... Authors: Van Aken, MI. Title: The hierarchy and experience of migration: Egyptian labourers in the Jordan Valley. Keywords: migration Egypt, Jordan, mobility. ... Citation: Van Aken, MI (2006). The hierarchy and experience of migration: Egyptian labourers in the Jordan Valley. ...
Palestinian Belonging in a valley of doubt. …, 2003
... Authors: Van Aken, M. Title: Facing Home. Palestinian Belonging in a valley of doubt. Keyword... more ... Authors: Van Aken, M. Title: Facing Home. Palestinian Belonging in a valley of doubt. Keywords: Belonging, refugees, development, aid, Jordan. MIUR Subject : Settore M-DEA/01 - Discipline Demoetnoantropologiche (1681). ISO Language : eng. Issue Date: 2003. ...
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.
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Papers by Mauro Van Aken