Anna Tsing

To attend to the possibilities of life in ruins is to acknowledge that the Anthropocene is not a singular, unified event but a series of unevenly distributed and experienced transformations.

Capitalism is not a monolithic force; it is a landscape of diverse projects, some of which are quite small and local.

Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others, and it is a condition that is increasingly shared across species.

The matsutake mushroom offers a way to think about how life goes on in the ruins of capitalism.

Salvage accumulation is the process by which value is extracted from things that are considered waste or marginal.

To be attentive to the multispecies world is to recognize that humans are not the only actors in history.

Friction is the awkward, unequal, and creative collision of difference.

Global connections are not smooth and seamless; they are full of bumps, rubs, and resistances.

The global is not a given; it is made through specific encounters and negotiations.

To understand global processes, we need to pay attention to the local specificities that shape them.

The concept of 'friction' helps us to see how power operates in global encounters.

The forest is not just a resource; it is a complex web of relationships.

Collaboration across species is essential for imagining and building alternative futures.

The Anthropocene demands new forms of storytelling that can account for the entanglement of human and nonhuman lives.

To live on a damaged planet is to learn to live with ghosts, with absences, and with the traces of what has been lost.

The future is not predetermined; it is made through ongoing practices of world-making.

Hope is not a passive expectation but an active engagement with the possibilities of transformation.

The task of anthropology in the Anthropocene is to document the diverse ways that life persists and flourishes amidst ecological destruction.

We need to cultivate an ethics of attentiveness to the nonhuman world.

The concept of 'disturbance' can be a generative force, opening up new possibilities for life.