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)
We must cultivate collaborations across species.
Capitalism's ruins are fertile grounds for new stories.
Ethnography is a method of following connections.
The more-than-human world shapes our futures.
In Japan, matsutake evokes nostalgia for lost forests.
Global flows are uneven and contested.
Anthropology reveals the poetry of everyday struggles.
Resilience is not individual but collective and ecological.
We live in times of precarity, but also possibility.
Fungi networks underground mirror social connections above.
The damaged planet requires inventive ways of being.
Friction is where worlds meet and transform.
Mushrooms don't care about human borders.
Anthropology is the art of listening to the unspoken.
Capitalism commodifies nature, but nature resists.
In the forest, we find models for living together.
Ethnographic stories challenge dominant narratives.
Precarity binds us to the earth in unexpected ways.
Anthropologists thrive on ambiguity and surprise.
The world is made of patches, not wholes.
Contemporaries of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Other Anthropologys born within 50 years of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (1952).