Anna Tsing - University of Ottawa - January 31

Critical Thinkers in Religion, Law and Social Theory
Anna Tsing: Critical Description after Progress: Recognizing Diversity in
Damaged Times
Critical Description after Progress: Recognizing Diversity in Damaged Times

January 31, 2013

University of Ottawa,
Simard 125
4:00pm - 6:30pm

Title: Critical Description after Progress: Recognizing Diversity in
Damaged Times

Abstract: As we lose expectations of progress, how shall we know the
world? This talk introduces "critical description," a genre for
reinvigorating curiosity about heterogeneity, after progress. The talk
draws from Anna Tsing's book in progress: Living in ruins. Capitalism,
blasted landscapes, and the possibilities of life on earth: a mushroom
story. Based on research tracking the global search for high-value gourmet
wild mushrooms called matsutake, the talk explores emerging lines of
cosmopolitan difference and the challenges of making lives together across
what one might call "contaminated diversity" -- that is, kinds shaped by
histories of damage and dislocation.

Bio: Anna Tsing teaches anthropology at the University of California,
Santa Cruz. She is also Niels Bohr Professor at Aarhus University,
Denmark, where she will lead a transdisciplinary research group on the
problems of living in the Anthropocene. She is the author of Friction: an
ethnography of global connection and In the realm of the diamond queen:
marginality in an out-of-the-way place, both from Princeton University
Press. She has co-edited numerous volumes, most recently, with Carol
Gluck, Words in motion: toward a global lexicon (Duke University Press).
Her current research follows the humble trail of mushrooms into the great
economic, cultural, and ecological dilemmas of our times.

University of Ottawa