Friction

An Ethnography of Global Connection

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780691120652, 9780691120645
• eBook ISBN: 9781400830596
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

What the struggle over the Indonesian rainforests can teach us about the social frictions that shape the world around us

Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light while one stick alone is just a stick. It is the friction that produces movement, action, and effect. Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing challenges the widespread view that globalization invariably signifies a clash of cultures, developing friction as a metaphor for the diverse and conflicting social interactions that make up our contemporary world.

Tsing focuses on the rainforests of Indonesia, where in the 1980s and 1990s capitalist interests increasingly reshaped the landscape not so much through corporate design as through awkward chains of legal and illegal entrepreneurs that wrested the land from previous claimants, creating resources for distant markets. In response, environmental movements arose to defend the rainforests and the communities of people who live in them. Not confined to a village, province, or nation, the social drama of the Indonesian rainforests includes local and national environmentalists, international science, North American investors, advocates for Brazilian rubber tappers, United Nations funding agencies, mountaineers, village elders, and urban students—all drawn into unpredictable, messy misunderstandings, but misunderstandings that sometimes work out.

Providing an invaluable portfolio of methods for the study of global interconnections, Friction shows how cultural differences are in the grip of worldly encounter and reveals how much is overlooked in contemporary theories of the global.

Index

..........

accumulation: capitalist, 244

flexible, 75

spectacular, 72–73, 75–77

activism: environmental, see environmentalism; generations of, 22

grassroots, 233

Islamic, 237

mining, 140

in New Order, 227

social, 272

adat, 225–26, 291n.27

Aditjondro, George, 223, 291n.23

agency, 6, 214–15, 227, 230, 238, 252

of destruction, 26

global, 270

Meratus model of, 261

agriculture, 165

capitalist, 177

plantation, 167

Aliansi Advocasi Meratus, 209–10, 212

Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN), 226, 293n.4

Al Qaeda, 11, 215

Americans: indigenous, 6, 91, 100, 283n.10

middle-class white, 142

“Native,” 160

privileged, 240

stereotypes of “Native,” 151

Anderson, Benedict, 128

APHIDS, 76

Aristotle, 91

armed forces. See military articulation, 77

Asia-Africa Conference, 81–87

Asia-Pacific Peoples Environmental Network, 222

Asian Development Bank, 222

Asian tigers, 36

Asosiasi Panel Kayu Indonesia (APKINDO). See Indonesian Wood Panel Association (APKINDO)

axiom of unity, 89–90, 96, 106, 111

Barrick Gold, 61, 71–73, 281n.26

Bauhin, Gaspard, 92

biodiversity, 155–58, 182–83, 190, 209–10

conservation of 157–60

cultivated, 165

discourse of, 95

of fruit, 178

local knowledge of, 182, 186, 189

in mixed forest landscape, 174, 177–78

of rattans, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• I Prosperity
• II Knowledge
• III Freedom
• Coda
• Notes
• References
• Index