Anna Tsing

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (born 1952) is a Chinese-American anthropologist. She is a professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2018, she was awarded the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Education Tsing received her B.A. from Yale University and completed her M.A. (1976) and PhD (1984) at Stanford University.

Career On receiving her doctoral degree, she served as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder (1984–86) and as an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1986–89). She then joined UC Santa Cruz.

In 2010 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship Tsing is director of the AURA (Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene) research center. The project was funded by the Danish National Research Foundation for a five-year period until 2018.

Among the institutions she is affiliated with are the American Anthropological Association, the American Ethnological Society, and the Association for Asian Studies.

Major themes

Plantationocene Together with scholar Donna J. Haraway, Tsing coined Plantationocene as an alternative term to the proposed epoch Anthropocene that centers humans activities in the transformation of the planet and its negative effect on land use, ecosystems, biodiversity, and species extinction.

Tsing and Haraway point out that not all humans equally contribute to the environmental challenges facing our planet. They date the origin of the Anthropocene to the start of colonialism in the Americas in the early modern era and highlight the violent history behind it by focusing on the history of plantations. The Spanish and the Portuguese colonists started importing models of plantations to the Americas by the 1500s which they had previously developed a century earlier in the Atlantic Islands. These models of plantation were based on migratory forced labor (slavery), intensive land usage, globalized commerce, and constant racialized violence, which have all transformed the lives of humans and non-humans worldwide. Current and past plantations have been important nodes in the histories of colonialism, capitalism, and racism—histories inseparable from environmental issues that made some humans more than others vulnerable to warming temperatures, rising seawater levels, toxicants, and land disposition.

Notable works Some of Tsing's notable work comprise the following books:

In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-way Place (1993)

Anna Tsing's first book centers around individuals from Meratus Dayak, from South Kalimantan, Indonesia. Tsing's key informant is Uma Adang, who provides her insight into shamanism, politics and the mythology in relation to ethnic identity. The book focuses on the topic of marginality within a state and the context of community within a gendered framework.

Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2004)

Tsing's ethnography is based in the Meratus Mountains of South Kalimantan, a province in Indonesia. The term friction is described as, "the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference." Friction has become a standard text in graduate seminars in geography, sociology, critical theory, feminist studies, environmental studies, and political economy, among other areas. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015)

Tsing's ethnographic account of the matsutake mushroom gives the readers a look into this rare, prized and expensive fungus, much appreciated in Japan. The mushroom sprouts in landscapes that have been considerably changed by people, in symbiosis with certain species of pine trees. Tsing's account of the matsutake contributes to the field of anthropology in her ability to study multi-species interactions, using the non-human subject to glean more about the human world. Tsing follows its international journey in order to give the reader insight into the mushroom's complex commodity chain connecting to meditations on capitalism. The book was awarded the Gregory Bateson Prize and the Victor Turner Prize.

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (2017)