Anna Tsing facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Anna Tsing
Born	Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing 1952 (age 72–73)
Alma mater	Yale University Stanford University
Partner(s)	James C. Scott (1999–2024; his death)
Awards	Huxley Memorial Medal Guggenheim Fellowship Gregory Bateson Prize Victor Turner Prize

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (born in 1952) is a Chinese-American anthropologist. An anthropologist studies human societies and cultures. She is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2018, she received the Huxley Memorial Medal. This is a special award from the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Learning and Teaching

Anna Tsing studied at Yale University for her first degree. She then earned her Master's (1976) and PhD (1984) degrees from Stanford University.

After finishing her studies, she taught at other universities. She worked at the University of Colorado, Boulder from 1984 to 1986. Then she taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst from 1986 to 1989. Later, she joined UC Santa Cruz.

Tsing has written many articles for important journals. 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), also won a major award.

In 2010, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. This award helped her study the matsutake mushroom. She explored how this mushroom connects to different cultures and environments.

In 2013, Tsing became a Niels Bohr Professor in Denmark. This was for her work that combines different fields of study. She brings together ideas from humanities, science, and art. She also directs a research center called AURA. This center explores the Anthropocene, which is about how humans impact the planet.

Big Ideas

What is the Plantationocene?

Anna Tsing, along with another scholar named Donna J. Haraway, came up with the term Plantationocene. This word is an alternative to Anthropocene. The Anthropocene describes our current time as one where humans have greatly changed the Earth.

Tsing and Haraway suggest that not all humans have caused these environmental changes equally. They point to the start of colonialism in the Americas around the 1500s. This was when European colonists began setting up large farms called plantations.

These plantations used slavery and forced labor. They also used land very intensely and traded goods globally. This system caused huge changes for people and nature around the world. Plantations have been key parts of colonialism, capitalism, and racism. These histories are linked to today's environmental problems. They show how some people became more vulnerable to climate change and pollution.

Important Books

Here are some of Anna Tsing's well-known books:

• In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-way Place (1993)

This book is about the Meratus Dayak people in South Kalimantan, Indonesia. Tsing learned about their shamanism, politics, and stories. She explored how they keep their ethnic identity. The book also looks at how communities deal with being on the edges of a state. It also considers how gender plays a role in their lives.

• Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2004)

In this book, Tsing studies the Meratus Mountains in Indonesia. She uses the idea of "friction" to describe how different parts of the world connect. She says these connections are often "awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative."

Tsing argues that globalization isn't always a smooth process. It's often messy and doesn't affect everyone the same way. She shows how people in Indonesia protested against deforestation. This destruction was happening to create goods for foreign countries. Tsing's idea of friction helps us understand how power and inequality shape global interactions. It shows that globalization is not a simple, uniform process.

• The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015)

This book is about the matsutake mushroom. This rare and expensive mushroom is popular in Japan. It grows in places that humans have changed, often with certain pine trees. Tsing follows the mushroom's journey around the world. She uses it to explore how nature and human actions are connected.

The book also looks at how capitalism affects our environment. It helps us think about what it means to be human alongside other living things. This book won the Gregory Bateson Prize and the Victor Turner Prize.

• Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (2017)

Images for kids

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  Anna Tsing at Aarhus University in 2022.