Anna Tsing | |
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| Born | Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing 1952 (age 71–72) |
| Partner | James C. Scott (1999–2024; his death) |
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Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (born 1952) is a Chinese-American anthropologist. [1] She is a professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of California,Santa Cruz. In 2018,she was awarded the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. [2]
Tsing received her B.A. from Yale University and completed her M.A. (1976) and PhD (1984) at Stanford University. [3]
On receiving her doctoral degree,she served as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Colorado,Boulder (1984–86) and as an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts,Amherst (1986–89). She then joined UC Santa Cruz. [3]
Tsing has published more than 40 articles in prominent journals including Cultural Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies Bulletin. She won the Harry Benda Prize for her book In the Realm of the Diamond Queen (1994). Her second book, Friction:An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005),was awarded the Senior Book Prize of the American Ethnological Society. [4]
In 2010 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship [3] for her project On the Circulation of Species:The Persistence of Diversity, an ethnography of the matsutake mushroom. [4]
In 2013,Tsing was granted the Niels Bohr Professorship at Aarhus University in Denmark for her contribution to interdisciplinary work in the humanities,natural sciences,social sciences,and the arts. She is currently developing a transdisciplinary program for exploring the Anthropocene. [5] Tsing is director of the AURA (Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene) research center. [6] [7] The project was funded by the Danish National Research Foundation for a five-year period until 2018.
Among the institutions she is affiliated with are the American Anthropological Association,the American Ethnological Society,and the Association for Asian Studies. [4]
In 1999,Tsing began a relationship with the political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott,which lasted until his death in 2024. [8]
Together with scholar Donna J. Haraway,Tsing coined Plantationocene as an alternative term to the proposed epoch Anthropocene that centers humans activities in the transformation of the planet and its negative effect on land use,ecosystems,biodiversity,and species extinction.
Tsing and Haraway point out that not all humans equally contribute to the environmental challenges facing our planet. They date the origin of the Anthropocene to the start of colonialism in the Americas in the early modern era and highlight the violent history behind it by focusing on the history of plantations. The Spanish and the Portuguese colonists started importing models of plantations to the Americas by the 1500s which they had previously developed a century earlier in the Atlantic Islands. These models of plantation were based on migratory forced labor (slavery),intensive land usage,globalized commerce,and constant racialized violence,which have all transformed the lives of humans and non-humans worldwide. Current and past plantations have been important nodes in the histories of colonialism,capitalism,and racism—histories inseparable from environmental issues that made some humans more than others vulnerable to warming temperatures,rising seawater levels,toxicants,and land disposition. [9]
Some of Tsing's notable work comprise the following books:
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Matsutake,Tricholoma matsutake,is a species of choice edible mycorrhizal mushroom that grows in Eurasia and North America. It is prized in Japanese cuisine for its distinct spicy-aromatic odor.
Philippe Bourgois is professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Social Medicine and Humanities in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was the founding chair of the Department of Anthropology,History and Social Medicine at the University of California,San Francisco (1998–2003) and was the Richard Perry University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania (2007–2016).
Lucy Suchman is Professor Emerita of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University,in the United Kingdom,also known for her work at Xerox PARC in the 1980s and 90s.
Gísli Pálsson is an Icelandic anthropologist and academic. He is a Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Iceland,formerly a professor at the University of Oslo.
Feminist anthropology is a four-field approach to anthropology that seeks to transform research findings,anthropological hiring practices,and the scholarly production of knowledge,using insights from feminist theory. Simultaneously,feminist anthropology challenges essentialist feminist theories developed in Europe and America. While feminists practiced cultural anthropology since its inception,it was not until the 1970s that feminist anthropology was formally recognized as a subdiscipline of anthropology. Since then,it has developed its own subsection of the American Anthropological Association – the Association for Feminist Anthropology –and its own publication,Feminist Anthropology. Their former journal Voices is now defunct.
Saba Mahmood (1961–2018) was professor of anthropology at the University of California,Berkeley. At Berkeley,she was also affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies,Institute for South Asia Studies,and the Program in Critical Theory. Her scholarly work straddled debates in anthropology and political theory,with a focus on Muslim majority societies of the Middle East and South Asia. Mahmood made major theoretical contributions to rethinking the relationship between ethics and politics,religion and secularism,freedom and submission,and reason and embodiment. Influenced by the work of Talal Asad,she wrote on issues of gender,religious politics,secularism,and Muslim and non-Muslim relations in the Middle East.
Tanya Marie Luhrmann is an American psychological anthropologist known for her studies of modern-day witches,charismatic Christians,and studies of how culture shapes psychotic,dissociative,and related experiences. She has also studied culture and morality,and the training of psychiatrists. She is Watkins University Professor in the Anthropology Department at Stanford University. Luhrmann was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.
João Guilherme Biehl is a Brazilian medical anthropologist known for his innovative studies of global health,poverty,and suffering. He is currently the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology,Chair of the Department of Anthropology,and Director of the Brazil LAB at Princeton University.
Tom Boellstorff is an anthropologist based at the University of California,Irvine. In his career to date,his interests have included the anthropology of sexuality,the anthropology of globalization,digital anthropology,Southeast Asian studies,the anthropology of HIV/AIDS,and linguistic anthropology.
The Meratus or Meratus Dayak is an ethnic group that inhabits the Meratus Mountains of South Kalimantan,Indonesia. The Banjar Kuala people would refer the Meratus people as Urang Baiju or Dayak Baiju,as they consider them to be the same as the Ngaju people. While the Banjar Hulu Sungai people would call the Meratus people as Urang Bukit,Dayak Bukit or Dayak Buguet.
Kristen Rogheh Ghodsee is an American ethnographer and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is primarily known for her ethnographic work on post-Communist Bulgaria as well as being a contributor to the field of postsocialist gender studies. She was critical of the role of Western feminist nongovernmental organizations doing work among East European women in the 1990s. She has also examined the shifting gender relations of Muslim minorities after Communist rule,the intersections of Islamic beliefs and practices with the ideological remains of Marxism–Leninism,communist nostalgia,the legacies of Marxist feminism,and the intellectual history of utopianism.
Cultural globalization refers to the transmission of ideas,meanings and values around the world in such a way as to extend and intensify social relations. This process is marked by the common consumption of cultures that have been diffused by the Internet,popular culture media,and international travel. This has added to processes of commodity exchange and colonization which have a longer history of carrying cultural meaning around the globe. The circulation of cultures enables individuals to partake in extended social relations that cross national and regional borders. The creation and expansion of such social relations is not merely observed on a material level. Cultural globalization involves the formation of shared norms and knowledge with which people associate their individual and collective cultural identities. It brings increasing interconnectedness among different populations and cultures. The idea of cultural globalization emerged in the late 1980s,but was diffused widely by Western academics throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. For some researchers,the idea of cultural globalization is reaction to the claims made by critics of cultural imperialism in the 1970s and 1980s.
Kathleen M. Adams is a cultural anthropologist,Professorial Research Associate at SOAS,University of London,and Professor Emerita at Loyola University Chicago. Known for her research on cultural transformations in island Southeast Asia,,she has made contributions to critical tourism studies,heritage studies,Indonesian art,and museum studies. Her award-winning books include Art as Politics:Re-crafting Identities,Tourism and Power in Tana Toraja,Indonesia and The Ethnography of Tourism:Edward Bruner and Beyond among others.
Margaret Lock is a distinguished Canadian medical anthropologist,known for her publications in connection with an anthropology of the body and embodiment,comparative epistemologies of medical knowledge and practice,and the global impact of emerging biomedical technologies.
The Mushroom at the End of the World:On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins is a 2015 book by the Chinese American anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The book describes and analyzes the globalized commodity chains of matsutake mushrooms.
Deborah Bird Rose (1946-2018) was an Australian-based ethnographer of Aboriginal peoples;plus,in her lifetime,an increasingly ecological,multi-species ethnographer and leader in multidisciplinary ethnographic research
Her research since the 1980s has focused on entwined social and ecological justice,based on long-term fieldwork with Aboriginal people in Australia. Her approach has drawn on elements of anthropology,history,philosophy,cultural studies,religious studies,and animal studies and has led to innovative understandings of ethnographic and ecological knowledge,most recently in the new area of multispecies ethnography
Veronica Strang is an author and professor of anthropology affiliated to Oxford University. Her work combines cultural anthropology with environmental studies,and focuses on the relationship between human communities and their environments. Strang's publications include the books 'The Meaning of Water';Gardening the World:agency,identity,and the ownership of water';'What Anthropologists Do','Water Nature and Culture' and most recently 'Water Beings:from nature worship to the environmental crisis',which is based on a major comparative study of water deities around the world. Further information is available on her website at:https://www.veronicastrang.com/
Anna M. Gade is a scholar of Islam,religion and ethics,Southeast Asia and environmental studies. She is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she teaches courses in Environmental Humanities,Islamic Studies,and the academic study of religion and ethics in the Religious Studies Program. Her influential book,Muslim Environmentalisms (2019),has defined Islamic environmental studies across multiple fields,including environmental humanities. Her current academic work focuses in the comparative field of environmental ethics,along with ongoing research programs on climate and sustainability issues in the Global South.
Despite many differences from my Chinese American background, Japanese Americans felt familiar to me, like family.
