In 2010 she received aGuggenheim Fellowship[3] for her projectOn the Circulation of Species: The Persistence of Diversity, an ethnography of thematsutake mushroom.[4]
In 2013, Tsing was granted theNiels Bohr Professorship atAarhus University in Denmark for her contributions to interdisciplinary work in the humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, and the arts. She is currently developing a transdisciplinary program for exploring theAnthropocene.[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.
Together with scholarDonna J. Haraway, Tsing coined Plantationocene as an alternative term to the proposed epochAnthropocene that centers humans activities in the transformation of the planet and its negative effect on land use,ecosystems,biodiversity, andspecies 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 ofcolonialism in theAmericas in the early modern era and highlight the violent history behind it by focusing on the history ofplantations. TheSpanish and thePortuguesecolonists started importing models of plantations to the Americas by the 1500s which they had previously developed a century earlier in theAtlantic Islands. These models of plantation were based onmigratoryforced labor (slavery), intensiveland usage,globalized commerce, and constantracialized 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 fromenvironmental issues that made some humans more than others vulnerable to warming temperatures,rising seawater levels, toxicants, and land disposition.[9]
Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2004)
Tsing'sethnography is based in theMeratus Mountains of South Kalimantan, a province in Indonesia.[13] The term friction is described as, "the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference."[13] This ethnography was based on short-term, consecutive instances of field work; the methods are based on "ethnographic fragments".[13] The book is a study on human dominated landscapes, running themes include corporate exploitation, globalization, environmental activism, andenvironmental degradation.[14]Friction has become a standard text in graduate seminars in geography, sociology, critical theory, feminist studies, environmental studies, and political economy, among other areas.[3]
From her research, Tsing is able to conceptualize friction as an alternative theory to the simple “development of a globalized society”. Tsing critiques this paradigm as it stems from an imperialist point of view, where development is framed as becoming more similar to powerful nations and is linked to morality. The idea of the “globe” is something difficult to measure and study and creates a dichotomy between societies considered part of the global community. Tsing begins by explaining how illogical trends in Indonesian land management seem despite the fact that the population and demands for infrastructure do not seem to be increasing on a local level. The issue of this deforestation led to increased solidarity and conversation between urban and rural communities in Indonesia. Tsing points out that part of the reason for the unity of different Indonesian communities over this issue was that none of these communities were benefiting from the destruction of these forests as they were to create goods for foreign powers. As protesters argue, this environmental destruction does not align with the positive imagination of the global movement. Instead, Tsing writes, it reveals how power and inequality are reflected in destruction of natural resources and the activism in response to those actions. Tsing argues that the current paradigm of globalization theory is that all global interactions are done in the goal of creating a global era. By instead describing global and cultural interactions across difference as “friction”, Tsing acknowledges the effects that these interactions have on the trajectory of societies without attaching morality or monolithic view points to them. Tsing also suggests that using the concept of friction to understand the impacts of interaction rids the perception that the power of globalization is a uniform and inevitable process. It takes away some of the power in the way we speak about globalization by acknowledging that the concept is “messy” and does not always create changes in the same way. Tsing’s conceptualization of friction as a description for interaction on the global scale offers a new way to understand how diverse the effects of these interactions can be on different worlds.[15]
Tsing's ethnographic account of thematsutake mushroom gives the readers a look into this rare, prized and expensive fungus, much appreciated in Japan.[16] The mushroom sprouts in landscapes that have been considerably changed by people, in symbiosis with certain species ofpine trees.[17] Tsing's account of the matsutake contributes to the field of anthropology in her ability to study multi-species interactions, using the non-human subject to glean more about the human world.[18]
Tsing follows its international journey in order to give the reader insight into the mushroom's complexcommodity chain connecting to meditations oncapitalism.[16] She uses it to shed light on broader themes about how ecology is shaped by human interference,[16] and to discuss the meaning of being human in relation with other species.[19] The book was awarded the Gregory Bateson Prize[20] and the Victor Turner Prize.[21]
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (2017)
^McKenzie, Don (2006-05-02). "Connectivity and scale in cultural landscapes: A.L. Tsing, Friction: an Ethnography of Global Connection".Landscape Ecology.22 (1):157–158.doi:10.1007/s10980-006-9000-7.ISSN0921-2973.S2CID8616786.
