Anna Tsing

Anna Tsing
Aarhus Universitet · CC BY 3.0 · source
Name	Anna Tsing
Birth date	1952
Birth place	California, United States
Occupation	Anthropologist, author, professor
Notable works	The Mushroom at the End of the World; Friction; In the Realm of the Diamond Queen

Anna Tsing is an American anthropologist and author known for ethnographic work on globalization, environmental change, and multispecies worlds. She has produced influential monographs and edited volumes that bridge anthropology, science studies, and environmental humanities, and has held academic posts across leading institutions. Her research often centers on Southeast Asia and the Pacific, engaging with field sites in Indonesia, Japan, and Malaysia.

Early life and education

Tsing was born in California and raised in the United States. She completed undergraduate studies at Princeton University and pursued graduate training at Cornell University, earning a Ph.D. in anthropology. Influences during her education included scholars associated with UCLA, Harvard University, and the intellectual milieus of Berkeley, where debates about political ecology and postcolonial studies intersected. Her early scholarly formation connected her to networks involving figures from The New School, MIT, and the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Academic career and positions

Tsing has held faculty and visiting positions at institutions such as University of California, Santa Cruz, Duke University, University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University. She served as a professor in departments spanning Anthropology and interdisciplinary programs connected to Environmental Studies at UCSC. She has been a visiting scholar at Princeton University, a research fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and engaged with centers including Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Santa Fe Institute, and Getty Research Institute. Her career includes participation in collaborative projects with universities like Yale University, Columbia University, University of Chicago, and Oxford University.

Major works and themes

Tsing's book The Mushroom at the End of the World examines commodity chains, salvage accumulation, and multispecies entanglements through the lens of matsutake mushroom foraging, engaging debates tied to globalization, capitalism, and biodiversity. Friction analyzes the dynamics of power, encounter, and deterritorialization, drawing on case studies from Indonesia, Siberia, and Southeast Asia. In the Realm of the Diamond Queen explores ritual and governance in East Kalimantan and connects to literatures on postcolonialism, indigenous movements, and resource extraction. She has edited volumes and articles contributing to discussions in journals linked to American Anthropologist, Cultural Anthropology, Social Text, Public Culture, and Environmental History. Core themes include assemblage thinking, multispecies ethnography, precarious life in extractive economies, and the politics of knowledge production, intersecting with work by scholars at Duke University, MIT Press, Cambridge University Press, and University of California Press.

Fieldwork and methodology

Tsing's fieldwork has focused on sites in Indonesia (notably East Kalimantan), industries related to mushroom markets in Japan and China, and collaborations with researchers in Malaysia and Thailand. Her methodological approach blends participant observation, ethnobotany, and archival research, dialoguing with methodologies from science and technology studies, human geography, and ecology. She employs multispecies ethnography that engages with organisms (fungi), traders, loggers, and migrant laborers, intersecting with research agendas at Smithsonian Institution, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and field networks linked to Copenhagen and Tokyo research centers. Her work dialogues with methodological innovations promoted by scholars at University of Cambridge, Australian National University, McGill University, and National University of Singapore.

Honors and awards

Tsing's scholarship has received recognition including prizes associated with publishers and scholarly societies; her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from institutions like National Science Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation-linked programs. She has been awarded fellowships at Wenner-Gren Foundation, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and research residencies at Getty Research Institute and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Her books have been shortlisted or honored in competitions associated with American Anthropological Association, Association for Asian Studies, and awards coordinated by Society for Cultural Anthropology.

Influence and reception

Tsing's work has been widely cited across disciplines, influencing scholars in anthropology, geography, environmental humanities, and science and technology studies. Her concept of salvage accumulation and emphasis on multispecies assemblages have shaped research agendas at departments such as UC Berkeley, UCLA, New York University, Goldsmiths, University of London, and University of Toronto. Reviews and critiques have appeared in venues connected to The New Yorker, The New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, and scholarly journals like American Ethnologist, Ethnography, and Development and Change. Debates about her approaches engage thinkers associated with Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Timothy Morton, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and intellectual currents from postcolonial studies, actor–network theory, and political ecology, prompting curricular adoption at programs across Europe and Asia.

Category:Living people Category:American anthropologists Category:Environmental humanities