Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Name	Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Birth date	1952
Nationality	American
Occupation	Anthropologist, Author
Alma mater	Barnard College; University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; University of Chicago
Notable works	The Mushroom at the End of the World

Contents

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is an American anthropologist and author known for interdisciplinary work bridging anthropology, ecology, and science studies. Her scholarship engages with and critiques scholarship associated with Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, James C. Scott, and Arjun Appadurai, while intersecting with debates in studies linked to Anthropocene, World Systems Theory, Postcolonialism, and Multispecies Studies. Tsing's writing has been influential across institutions such as Harvard University, University of California, Santa Cruz, University of Copenhagen, and cultural venues including Smithsonian Institution and Royal Geographical Society.

Early life and education

Tsing grew up in the United States and completed undergraduate studies at Barnard College before pursuing graduate training at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the University of Chicago, where she worked with scholars connected to Marshall Sahlins, Clifford Geertz, Sidney Mintz, and networks including the American Anthropological Association. Her doctoral research involved fieldwork that connected Southeast Asian ethnography to broader conversations shaped by figures like Eric Wolf and Immanuel Wallerstein. During her formative years she engaged archives and collections associated with institutions such as the British Museum and the Library of Congress while participating in research exchanges with scholars linked to Cornell University and Yale University.

Tsing held faculty positions at universities including University of California, Santa Cruz, where she helped develop programs intersecting departments associated with Anthropology (discipline), Environmental Studies (discipline), and Science and Technology Studies. She served as a visiting professor and fellow at centers including Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and collaborated with labs at Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley. Tsing's institutional affiliations extend to research partnerships with East-West Center, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and transnational networks such as the Humanities Commons and Rachel Carson Center.

Tsing's research examines human and nonhuman interactions with attention to commodities, ecosystems, and damaged landscapes, dialoguing with scholarship by Marcel Mauss, Karl Polanyi, Michel Foucault, and Donna Haraway. Her best-known monograph, The Mushroom at the End of the World, traces the global commodity chains of Tricholoma matsutake and explores precarity, salvage economies, and multispecies encounters in relation to places like Japan, China, United States, and forests studied with methods influenced by Participant observation traditions established by Bronisław Malinowski and Franz Boas. Earlier works, including Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, theorize encounters among actors such as Multinational corporations, Indigenous peoples, State actors, and nongovernmental organizations like Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund. Tsing's approach synthesizes perspectives from Cultural anthropology, Political ecology, Science and Technology Studies, and debates sparked by authors like Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Tsing's work has been recognized by prizes and fellowships from organizations including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the MacArthur Foundation-associated networks, and awards affiliated with the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Cultural Anthropology. She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute and received honors tied to institutions such as Dartmouth College and the University of Oxford through invited lectures and visiting professorships. Her books have been shortlisted and awarded prizes in circles associated with publishers like Princeton University Press and Duke University Press.

Tsing's work has influenced scholarship across fields including Environmental Humanities, Human Geography, Ethnography, and Multispecies Studies, cited alongside contributions by Anna Tsing (author not linked per guidelines), Bruno Latour, Tim Ingold, and Vandana Shiva. Reviews in venues connected to Nature (journal), Science (journal), American Anthropologist, Cultural Anthropology, and Public Culture have praised her literary style and conceptual innovations around "precarity" and "salvage accumulation," while critics associated with debates in Marxist theory, Political Economy, and Development studies have questioned the scalability of her ethnographic claims and their policy implications. Scholars at institutions such as University of Cambridge, London School of Economics, University of Toronto, and Australian National University continue to apply and critique her frameworks in work on commodity chains, biodiversity conservation, and transnational labor, generating dialogues with activists linked to Indigenous rights movements and NGOs including Friends of the Earth.

- Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton University Press) — engages actors including World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and regional governments. - The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press) — examines markets, collectors, and ecologies in places such as Hokkaido, Yunnan, and Pacific Northwest. - Editor and contributor to volumes and journals connected with Cultural Anthropology, Environmental Humanities, and edited collections with scholars from University of California Press, Duke University Press, and MIT Press. - Numerous articles in journals including American Anthropologist, Current Anthropology, and edited collections engaging debates with authors such as Harriet Bradley and Saskia Sassen.

Category:American anthropologists Category:Women anthropologists