Talk:Anna Tsing

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Anna Tsing
Anna Tsing September 2017 Anna Tsing September 2017
Born	1974 (age 49–50)

• 1952 TAnna Lowenhaupt Tsing is born [1]

• 1973 Tsing undertakes a Bachelor of arts (BA) at Yale University [2]

• 1976 Tsing completes a Master of Arts (MA) at Stanford University [3]

• 1984 completes a PhD at Standford University [4]

• 1984-1986 serves as a visiting assistant Professor at the University of Colarado, Boulder [5]

• 1986-1989 Tsing serves as an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst [6]

• 1987 Tsing joins UCSC ie University of California Santa Cruz [7]

• 1994 Tsing publishes 'In the Realm of the Diamond Queen', which won the Henry J. Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies

• 1994-95 Tsing was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton [8]

• 2004-2011 Tsing conducts fieldwork during matsutake mushroom seasons in the United States, Japan, Canada, China, and Finland—as well as interviews with scientists, foresters, and matsutake traders there as well as in Denmark, Sweden, and Turkey.

• 2005 'Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection' which the American Ethnological Society honored with its Senior Book Award. Friction has become a text in graduate seminars in geography, sociology, critical theory, feminist studies, environmental studies, and political economy, among other areas [9]

• 2011 Tsing is recipient of 2011 was the recipient of the Martin M. Chemers Award for Outstanding Research in the Social Sciences Division. [10]

• 2013 directed Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA) in Denmark since 2013. [11]

• 2015 Tsing publishes The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015 [12]

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Andrew Willford on Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. 376 pages

• Tsing proposes that we understand the ostensibly universalizing thrusts of global capitalism, and apparent state collusions with it, as a set of diverging interests and perspectives, which give rise, out of their "friction," to paradoxical "global understandings," or universalisms. But in so doing, as in the logic of the Hegelian spirit, the conditions of resistance or contingency that allow for the emergence of universalisms become obscured.
• For instance, international speculators are attracted to the promises of the Borneo frontier, either for timber or gold, but their aspirations are realized only when mediated through the nationalized and local discourses of development, local autonomy, and even, ironically, conservation. These discourses and interests do not blend neatly into one another (as theorized by earlier world-systems theorists) she argues, but rather, the tensions and contradictions, or frictions themselves, generate contingent universals, as oxymoronic as that sounds, and colossal erasures, which dramatically alter the lives of the weaker segments of society
• Paraphrasing .. a universal notion or fantasy is built upon frictions generated by the processes, which effectively make the landscape an "interstitial zone" within international boundaries. The "trauma of transformation" is described and felt by both the locally indingenous peoples and by the devastated anthropologist herself, but is largely obscured or silenced by the representational power of the "fantasy" in discourses of the state, which, in turn, is semi-allied to diverse multinational interests.
• Paraphrasing: we need a phenomenological, psychological, or even a cultural elaboration of fantasy in addition to revealing the structural "friction" with its material effects in order to get a fuller understanding of the 'friction' .. to produce a required, more ethnographically intimate understanding of the 'friction' in action
• 'fantastic elements', sustain a "global conjuring", out of their contingent collaboration, more powerful parties are producing what Tsing calls the "economy of appearances,"
• "villages" became recognized, with varying success, by operating within the bureaucratic structures of the New Order. The naturalization of the notion of a "village" as the basic social unit in the New Order, though not fitting social reality, provided the framework for collaboration with outside forces and the "invention" of local culture. Tsing argues, with convincing case material, that the achievement of local rights and relative autonomy within the New Order was, at least in some instances, achieved through a translocal, inherently modified version of what they were vis-d-vis the bureaucratized centre .. universal categories are produced out of friction and a silencing of these contingencies, but also that the particular, the local, and the culturally specific are now mediated necessarily by and through its fractious and "contingent collaborations" with translocal forces. That is the tragic and yet sometimes hopeful lesson of Friction.

Resurgent life: how to flourish with what’s left Review by Matthew D. Thompson The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhapt Tsing Princeton University Press, 2015

Anthropod Episode 25. Anna Tsing on Landscapes and the Anthropocene

2017 Edge Effects Podcast: A Conversation with Anna Tsing

Assembling Anna Tsing's key concepts, contributions, and theory

1993 Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology

Ethnographic texts can draw on the sustained use of a central metaphor (for example, the trope of "marginality" in Anna Tsing's In the Realm of the Diamond Queen [1993]) .. where such a trope create a sense of connection and integration, even in those texts that are intentionally written against classical forms of holism, as is the case with Tsing's monograph.

2000 Political Ecology Across Spaces, Scales, and Social Groups

Tsing, Anna. 2000a. The Global Situation." Cultural Anthropology15, no. 3: 327-60.

Tsing, Anna 2000b. "Inside the Economy of Appearances." Public Culture12, no. 1: 115-44.

Anna Tsing (2000) argues, scale is not something °out there° to be discovered by the careful scientist. Rather, it is constantly made, negotiated, and transformed as people interact in different times and places

Anthropologists have pointed out, however, that despite the often overwhelming force of international finance institutions and capital investment schemes, predictions of global domination have not resulted in expected forms of political and economic control and culture change. Anna Tsing (2000b), for example, encourages scholars to free "critical imaginations from the specter of neoliberal conquest—singular, universal, global" and instead analyze capitalism as heterogeneous and shifting

2000 Anthropology and Nature

Anna Tsing (2000) is encouraging anthropologists to work out ways around the socio-cultural divide with nature by her notion of 'world-making'. To an extent, this can be seen as corresponding to Ingold's "embodied" (and embedded, I would add) "skills of perception and action" as I read them—with a somewhat stronger emphasis on the agency side of the process.

2002 Anthropologica

where local and global concepts such as 'tradition' are often taken for granted by anthropologists, Anna Tsiung is an exceprtion, attending to and critical of discourse that create the local - global divide

Anna Tsing unveils and critiques the guiding theoretical paradigms of global research by looking at how the discourses of "futurism" "conflations" , and "circulation" inform the work of anthropologists:

• "Futurism" involves a turning away from isolated local cultures to looking at the systemic dimensions of a global capitalism.

• "Conflations" are focused less on the systemics of global capitalism and more on the mobility of culture, that is cultural connections across wide terrain. It's fault, like that of "Futurism" is looking for a "singular anthropological globalism.
• "Circulation" has to do with the flow of knowledge, technology, people and culture and suggests the newness of the global epoch, although she rejects, as noted, the novelty of Globalization discourse. Tsing concludes (2002: 471) that the circulation metaphor often fails to examine different modes of regional to global interconnection..

Anna Tsing (2002: 4T2) believes that with globalization "scale" must become an object of analysis wherein "Understanding the institutional proliferation of particular globalization projects requires:

• a sense of particular globalization projects' cultural specificities
• a sense of particular globalization projects' travels and interactions through which these projects are reproduced and taken on in new places."

and an evaluation of scale involves two analytical principles

• one, to pay close attention to "ideologies of scale," to trace the "cultural claims about locality, regionality and globality":
• second, to 'break down the units of culture and political-economy through which we make sense of events and social processes."

"Instead of looking for world-wrapping evolutionary stages, logics and epistemes, I would begin by finding what I call "projects," that is, relatively coherent bundles of ideas and practices as realized at particular times and places."

According to Tsing (2002: 464) regaqrding local human agency and se3lf-detemination within the local-global:

"No anthropologist I know argues that the global future will be culturally homogeneous; even those anthropologists most wedded to the idea of a new global era imagine this era as characterized by local" cultural diversity. Disciplinary concern with cultural diversity overrides the rhetoric of global cultural unification pervasive elsewhere, even though, for those in its sway, globalism still rules: diversity is generally imagined as forming a reaction or a backdrop to the singular and all-powerful "global forces" that create a new world.""

Tsing argues that instead of paying specific attention to locally originating projects and local articulations of culture, many anthropologists view diversity as a reaction to global processes so disregarding local determinations in a way that takes away any substance that we would otherwise attribute to local subjects.

• Tsing avoids the trappings of global and local abstractions or reifications and challenges us ethnographically to recognize the concrete quotidian practice of situated human subjects.

2005 Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology

• To make sense, any analysis has to imagine a "world," however tenuous, in order to make connections appear. Tsing uses the term "worlding," derived from literary criticism, to refer to this kind of contextualization. Worlding is here an alternative to holism, which Tsing, following Latour, rejects because she feels it connotes units of analysis that are too rigid and internal divisions that are too definitive. Tsing defines worlding as "the always experimental, partial, and often quite wrong, attribution of worldlike characteristics to scenes of social encounter" (Chapter 4: 54). Worlding happens in the relation between people, between scientists, and in the ethnographic encounter. It can be seen as ethnography's central analytical and interpretative mechanism.

2005 Anthropology and Nature

Anna Tsing has noted two intriguing features of the enlightenment's generalizing ambition:

• First, generalization to the universal requires a large space of compatibility among disparate particular facts and observations. As long as facts are apples and oranges, one cannot generalize across them; one must first see them as 'fruit' to make general claims. Compatibility standardizes difference. It allows transcendence, the general can rise above the particular. For this, compatibility must pre-exist the particular facts being examined; and it must unify the field of inquiry. The searcher for universal truths must establish an axiom of unity—whether on spiritual, aesthetic, mathematical, logical, or moral principles. (Tsmg 2005, 89)

• The second intriguing feature, noted by Tsing, is that in the social domain of knowledge seeking and collaboration, incompatible observations can actually be turned into compatible ones on the basis of tiny convergences and an agreement upon natural objects(ibid).

2012 Anthropology and Nature

• Anna Tsing invites us into the world of mushroom sociality, insisting that humans are not the only social organisms. From this starting point we move to the satoyama forest in Japan, as a prime example of a more-than-human sociality with a long history in Japanese peasant life. Such forests are now being restored as learning pieces about the interface between human labour and natural resources, and they provide an apt site to begin exploring the human involvement in multispecies worlds. Anthropological work is a particular way of tracing the doings of others, and this requires following the practical arrangements and dynamic interactions of other species along with human fumbling. The chapter makes a strong case against the genetic understanding of sociality, and for the revitalization of critical description as an art that builds on the anthropological power of observation and dares take the more-than-human sociality seriously.

• Anna Tsing (2012) proposes to engage in what she refers to as 'nonscalability theory' in order to better understand the nature—

2015 The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in

Bruceanthro (talk) 08:16, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

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• Anna tsing tryptic featured-768x512.jpg

You can see the reason for deletion at the file description page linked above. —Community Tech bot (talk) 18:23, 7 September 2021 (UTC)

Image removed?

Tsing from 2022 video from her honorary doctorate from Aarhus University

User:Beccaynr removed this image with the comment "(rm unnecessary video screenshot image from infobox per WP:BLPIMAGE "situations where the subject did not expect to be photographed"; WP:NOTPUBLICFIGURE; and per MOS:IMAGEQUALITY/MOS:IMAGERELEVANCE)". I'd like to assume good faith but I have to say that most of that comment is ... highly questionable.

1. "unnecessary image" - it's the only image in the article; in so far as there is such a thing as a "necessary" image for this article, this is it.
2. "situations where the subject did not expect to be photographed" - it's from a video interview! She's speaking to the camera! She knows quite well she is being photographed.
3. MOS:IMAGEQUALITY? Judgment call, of course, but in my humble opinion it's a fine image, and I've uploaded a few thousand of them. Some are definitely better than others, but, again, in my opinion, this is on the "better" side.
4. MOS:IMAGERELEVANCE - she's an academic. It's from a video about her getting an honorary doctorate. It's from a school where she taught for years. It's quite relevant.

Other voices are welcome. --GRuban (talk) 23:33, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

• According to MOS:IMAGEQUALITY, "Poor-quality images—dark or blurry; showing the subject too small, hidden in clutter, or ambiguous; and so on—should not be used unless absolutely necessary," and from my view, it does not appear necessary for the lead of this BLP for someone who is WP:NOTPUBLICFIGURE to include a poor-quality screenshot from a video.

According to MOS:IMAGERELEVANCE, "Images must be significant and relevant in the topic's context, not primarily decorative. They are often an important illustrative aid to understanding. When possible, find better images" - she is not known for how she appears, and we do not need to decorate her article with a screenshot from a video to aid in the understanding of the topic of her work as an academic. If it is not possible to find an image from when she expected to be photographed, e.g. per MOS:IMAGEQUALITY "A biography should lead with a portrait photograph of the subject alone", then it seems better to have no image.

From my view, WP:BLPIMAGE policy emphasizes the MOS guidance and the care we should take when considering the quality and type of image to add to a BLP, and I think this applies to screenshots from videos, particularly for images used in infoboxes of subjects who are not public figures, which will then be at the top of search results associated with her name. Beccaynr (talk) 00:12, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

Also, in the related discussion at Talk:BLP, I wrote about these policy and MOS issues and linked to potentially relevant discussions before I removed this image [13]. I am not sure why my good faith seems to be questioned, but you are welcome to produce evidence in an appropriate forum, such as my user talk page, or strike that part of your comment. Thank you, Beccaynr (talk) 00:23, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

• Of the concerns cited, the only one that strikes me as potentially valid is the quality concern (certainly someone in front of a camera expects to be photographed; certainly a headshot of a biography’s subject is relevant unless no portrait is relevant barring people notable for their appearance.) As to quality, it’s perhaps not the most flattering expression but it would IME be a significant departure from standard practice to remove this on quality grounds—I would not be surprised if there are hundreds or even thousands of lower-quality images currently illustrating bios. I’m not sure I agree the encyclopedia would be better if we removed all of them. It’s not that I think any image is necessarily better than nothing—I have tangled with a Commons editor who regularly uploads obviously unhelpful screencaps—I just don’t necessarily think this is in that category. Left up to me I think I’d restore it. Innisfree987 (talk) 00:42, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

  My from view, appearing in a brief video to speak is qualitatively different than appearing before a camera with an expectation of being photographed, and the less-than-flattering expression captured while she was not posing for a photograph seems to emphasize this aspect of the image. And it may be helpful to have a broader BLP policy and/or MOS guideline discussion about what to do with user-generated images from video screencaps of nonpublic people who are notable enough for an article but not otherwise widely known. Beccaynr (talk) 00:57, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

  Well being captured while not posing (eg while speaking) is very common even in still photographs that illustrate WP bios, so I don’t think that tells us much. I do agree the way to go would be seeking consensus on the principle of excluding such screenshots, because right now their widespread inclusion suggests consensus is otherwise. Innisfree987 (talk) 01:25, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

  For now, we can follow WP:BRD and WP:BLPRESTORE - I raised a good faith BLP objection to the image and removed it, and GRuban opened a discussion, so we can focus on developing consensus on whether or not to include this image. Beccaynr (talk) 01:53, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

  Ok, as you like. My position is, including images like this is current site consensus (as reflected in practice), but if that broader consensus changed I’d of course be happy to follow it. Innisfree987 (talk) 05:29, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

• I too don't see any merits in Beccaynr's objections to the image. It's low resolution but low quality?! Disclosure: At the WT:BLP discussion mentioned above, I had suggested using the YouTube video to obtain a usable free image and believe that GRuban did a great job selecting an appropriate frame, cropping it and adjusting the lighting. Abecedare (talk) 00:56, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

  Yes I also think GRuban did a nice job here—I even went back and tried to get a better frame myself, and this is the best one. Well done. Innisfree987 (talk) 05:30, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

• I have replaced the image. I interpret "situations where the subject did not expect to be photographed" as situations where the subject is not making a public appearance, for example when they are sitting in a restaurant or a private garden. Wikipedia is full of images of authors taken while signing books at book launches and similar unposed public appearances, and a video interview is also a public appearance. The image is clear and not unflattering, and I see no problem with it. PamD 06:45, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

  Thank you, PamD - I personally think articles benefit from images whenever possible, and have also been thinking a fair amount about BLP policy and how it applies to nonpublic figures. The recent WT:BLP discussion got me thinking a bit more about the objective guidance available for images, and how to respond to a user-generated image that from my view, does not seem to be a flattering representation. My sense is that according to the MOS and BLP policy, we should take particular care with nonpublic figures who did not publish their own photographs, so I appreciate the discussion here about the image and the applicable guidlines and policy. Thanks again, Beccaynr (talk) 13:21, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

Thank you all! --GRuban (talk) 13:27, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

• I agree 100% with the views expressed by PamD and GRuban. It is relevant since it comes from the film about her honorary doctorate. If they are being filmed, then they fully expected to be photographed. A film is nothing but a series of pictures after all... Huggums537 (talk) 15:43, 26 June 2023 (UTC) Updated on 15:52, 26 June 2023 (UTC)