Biography
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is an American anthropologist and Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research explores the relationships between culture, economy, ecology and politics, with particular attention to globalisation and the interdependencies between human beings and other species. Her ethnographic work has helped broaden approaches to studying landscapes transformed by human activities.
In In the Realm of the Diamond Queen (1993), she investigated the relationships between marginality, identity and power in Indonesia. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005) examined how global processes take concrete shape through local encounters and unequal relationships. In The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), she followed the ecological and commercial networks of the matsutake mushroom to question the possibilities of life in environments affected by capitalist destruction.
Her work is characterised by attention to collaboration between species, precarity and forms of coexistence that exceed dominant models of economic progress. Tsing has made a decisive contribution to multispecies anthropology and the environmental humanities by showing that social history cannot be understood without the organisms and environments with which it is intertwined. Her research connects the critique of capitalism with new questions about survival and ecological responsibility.
Published books