#anna tsing

[garadinervi]

FUNGI: Anarchistische ontwerpers / Anarchist Designers [Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, November 21, 2025 – August 9, 2026], Interview with Anna Löwenhaupt Tsing and Feifei Zhou, video by Luc Schraauwers

[probablyasocialecologist]

In her fascinating study of the dense networks of entanglement, contradiction, and conflict in Indonesia’s forests, many of which are today being razed for palm oil plantations, anthropologist Anna Tsing encourages us to recognize that capitalism advances through the friction between its universal logic of accumulation and the particular cultures, lifeways, and structures of power in each locale. Contrary to the dreams of a “friction-free” capitalism promised by billionaire, philanthropist, and self-styled intellectual Bill Gates, capitalism is defined by conflict and tension. Gates is only the latest of a long line of capitalist thinkers to dream that the free market, if allowed to flourish without regulation, will create a smooth world where the hardworking and talented, no matter their origins or station in life, could compete to succeed, and that this competitive striving would have beneficial effects for global society at large: greater wealth and greater innovation. Even many critics of capitalism fall prey to the myth of frictionlessness in their attempts to explain the nefarious clockwork of this demonic machine that metabolizes people and the earth not only into profit, but into the energy that fuels system’s endless reproduction and expansion. Tsing’s insistence that we look to the friction encourages us to recognize that what moves this machine forward (and halts its “progress”) is the friction that stems from forms of complicity and resistance, acquiescence and refusal that define every point where the abstract system of capitalism encounters the material realities of the entangled earth and its people.

Max Haiven, Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire

[loneberry]

As biologist Scott Gilbert and his colleagues write, “Almost all development may be codevelopment. By codevelopment we refer to the ability of the cells of one species to assist the normal construction of the body of another species.” This insight changes the unit of evolution. Some biologists have begun to speak of the “hologenome theory of evolution,” referring to the complex of organisms and their symbionts as an evolutionary unit: the “holobiont.” They find, for example, that associations between particular bacteria and fruit flies influence fruit fly mating choice, thus shaping the road to the development of a new species. To add the importance of development, Gilbert and his colleagues use the term “symbiopoiesis,” the codevelopment of the holobiont. The term contrasts their findings with an earlier focus on life as internally self-organizing systems, self-formed through “autopoiesis.” “More and more,” they write, “symbiosis appears to be the ‘rule,’ not the exception…. Nature may be selecting ‘relationships’ rather than individuals or genomes.”  —Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

[anziesnewfoundtankfantasy]

[hadapatricia]

Los medios de vida precarios se manifiestan en los límites de la gobernanza capitalista. La precariedad es ese aquí y ahora donde puede que los pasados no lleven a ningún futuro.

Anna Tsing

[archaicmedusa]

so i like to read a bunch of books about a similar topic and here’s my picks that rewire your brain to better understand nature

pls send recs if you have any

[silvertriangles]

—from "Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet", Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene, by Elaine Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Nils Bubandt

[wellconstructedsentences]

Without collaborations, we all die.

The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Tsing