Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
American anthropologist who examined friction, matsutake mushrooms, and multispecies worlds in globalization.
Most quoted
"To be a good ethnographer is to be a good listener, to be open to surprise, and to be willing to be changed by what you hear."
— from Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, 2005
"To live well in the ruins means to cultivate curiosity, humility, and a willingness to learn from others, human and nonhuman."
— from The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, 2015
"The challenge is not to escape precarity, but to learn to live with it, and even to find forms of flourishing within it."
— from The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, 2015
All quotes by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (101)
Scales matter; what seems local is always entangled with the global.
Matsutake forests are collaborations between humans, trees, and fungi.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of life.
Difference is the engine of history.
In picking mushrooms, we learn to notice the precarity of life.
Anthropologists must engage with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.
Globalization is a story of encounters, not inevitability.
The damaged planet calls for arts of living together.
Fungi remind us that decay is productive.
Power works through the frictions of everyday life.
To study anthropology is to trace the assemblages of life.
Hope lies in the cracks of ruin.
Humans are not the center; we are part of multispecies worlds.
Indonesian rainforests teach us about contested natures.
Mushroom picking is a way of knowing the world intimately.
Theory emerges from the ground up, from lived experiences.
The supply chain of matsutake reveals hidden labors.
Anthropology demands humility in the face of complexity.
Life persists through disturbance and adaptation.
Friction generates both conflict and creativity.
Contemporaries of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Other Anthropologys born within 50 years of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (1952).