The Term "Alienation" in Anna L. Tsing's work "The Mushroom at the End of the World". A new concept?

The Term Author: Omar Ibrahim
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3346264092
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 22

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Book Description
Academic Paper from the year 2020 in the subject Pedagogy - Theory of Science, Anthropology, grade: 6, University of Bern (Institut für Sozialanthropologie), language: English, abstract: The present work is of a theoretical kind and attempts to make philosophical and conceptual ideas fruitful for ethnographic research. It deals with the term "Alienation" and a new concept of it by the author herself. In her work The Mushroom at the End of the World Anna L. Tsing investigates the question of what remains after capitalism and its developments. Not very much anymore, she claims. Thus she examines the various forms of ecological and social life within capitalist ruins. The main role in her investigation is played by the Matsutake mushroom, an edible and also precious mushroom, which is some sort of an artefact fungus. This means that it grows best where humans have exerted a considerable influence on the environment. Her patchwork ethnography traces a rhizome-like interweaving of heterogeneous fields of investigation. One of the few constants in her work is the term "alienation". Tsing introduces the term with the assertion that alienation transforms people and non-human entities into movable goods. Alienation therefore also creates the capitalist ruins, leaving behind those places unsustainable from which people and other things have been moved out as goods. Alienation is in this respect a deficient relationship. It denote a disturbed world- and self relatedness. What stands out further is that the Matsutake mushrooms, for example, can assume different stages of alienation. While they are still perceived by mushroom pickers as meaningful trophies, they are alienated as market products within the international supply chains. Only again in the Japanese exchange of gifts can the Matsutake mushrooms be released from their alienated status. I have noticed that the term is theoretically not negligible in Tsing's work, but unfortunately, it remains under-determined. Much of the term remains unexplained and thus incomprehensible. Furthermore, it is immediately apparent that the term in Tsing's work is partly opposed to the classical or everyday understanding of "alienation". In the present work, I would therefore like to deal with the question of how "alienation" can be understood in Tsing's work. I will first trace the classical concepts and connect them with Tsing's ideas.

The Term "Alienation" in Anna L. Tsing's work "The Mushroom at the End of the World". A new concept?

The Term Author: Omar Ibrahim
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3346264092
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 22

Get Book Here

Book Description
Academic Paper from the year 2020 in the subject Pedagogy - Theory of Science, Anthropology, grade: 6, University of Bern (Institut für Sozialanthropologie), language: English, abstract: The present work is of a theoretical kind and attempts to make philosophical and conceptual ideas fruitful for ethnographic research. It deals with the term "Alienation" and a new concept of it by the author herself. In her work The Mushroom at the End of the World Anna L. Tsing investigates the question of what remains after capitalism and its developments. Not very much anymore, she claims. Thus she examines the various forms of ecological and social life within capitalist ruins. The main role in her investigation is played by the Matsutake mushroom, an edible and also precious mushroom, which is some sort of an artefact fungus. This means that it grows best where humans have exerted a considerable influence on the environment. Her patchwork ethnography traces a rhizome-like interweaving of heterogeneous fields of investigation. One of the few constants in her work is the term "alienation". Tsing introduces the term with the assertion that alienation transforms people and non-human entities into movable goods. Alienation therefore also creates the capitalist ruins, leaving behind those places unsustainable from which people and other things have been moved out as goods. Alienation is in this respect a deficient relationship. It denote a disturbed world- and self relatedness. What stands out further is that the Matsutake mushrooms, for example, can assume different stages of alienation. While they are still perceived by mushroom pickers as meaningful trophies, they are alienated as market products within the international supply chains. Only again in the Japanese exchange of gifts can the Matsutake mushrooms be released from their alienated status. I have noticed that the term is theoretically not negligible in Tsing's work, but unfortunately, it remains under-determined. Much of the term remains unexplained and thus incomprehensible. Furthermore, it is immediately apparent that the term in Tsing's work is partly opposed to the classical or everyday understanding of "alienation". In the present work, I would therefore like to deal with the question of how "alienation" can be understood in Tsing's work. I will first trace the classical concepts and connect them with Tsing's ideas.

The Mushroom at the End of the World

The Mushroom at the End of the World PDF Author: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691220557
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
"A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction."--Publisher's description.

The Resonance of Unseen Things

The Resonance of Unseen Things PDF Author: Susan Lepselter
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472052942
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
An interdisciplinary study of how conspiracy theories and stories persist and resonate among different Americans

Give a Man a Fish

Give a Man a Fish PDF Author: James Ferguson
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
ISBN: 9780822358954
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In Give a Man a Fish James Ferguson examines the rise of social welfare programs in southern Africa, in which states make cash payments to their low income citizens. More than thirty percent of South Africa's population receive such payments, even as pundits elsewhere proclaim the neoliberal death of the welfare state. These programs' successes at reducing poverty under conditions of mass unemployment, Ferguson argues, provide an opportunity for rethinking contemporary capitalism and for developing new forms of political mobilization. Interested in an emerging "politics of distribution," Ferguson shows how new demands for direct income payments (including so-called "basic income") require us to reexamine the relation between production and distribution, and to ask new questions about markets, livelihoods, labor, and the future of progressive politics.

Friction

Friction PDF Author: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691263523
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
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.

Matsutake Worlds

Matsutake Worlds PDF Author: Lieba Faier
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800730969
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The matsutake mushroom continues to be a highly sought delicacy, especially in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cuisine. Matsutake Worlds explores this mushroom through the lens of multi-species encounters centered around the matsutake’s notorious elusiveness. The mushroom’s success, the contributors of this volume argue, cannot be accounted for by any one cultural, social, political, or economic process. Rather, the matsutake mushroom has flourished as the result of a number of different processes and dynamics, culminating in the culinary institution we know today.

After Ethnos

After Ethnos PDF Author: Tobias Rees
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 147800228X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
For most of the twentieth century, anthropologists understood themselves as ethnographers. The art of anthropology was the fieldwork-based description of faraway others—of how social structures secretly organized the living-together of a given society, of how a people had endowed the world surrounding them with cultural meaning. While the poetics and politics of anthropology have changed dramatically over the course of a century, the basic equation of anthropology with ethnography—as well as the definition of the human as a social and cultural being—has remained so evident that the possibility of questioning it occurred to hardly anyone. In After Ethnos Tobias Rees endeavors to decouple anthropology from ethnography—and the human from society and culture—and explores the manifold possibilities of practicing a question-based rather than an answer-based anthropology that emanates from this decoupling. What emerges from Rees's provocations is a new understanding of anthropology as a philosophically and poetically inclined, fieldwork-based investigation of what it could mean to be human when the established concepts of the human on which anthropology has been built increasingly fail us.

Problems of Hope

Problems of Hope PDF Author: Patrick Bresnihan
Publisher: ARN Press
ISBN: 0957588224
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
However hopeless we often feel, we are creatures of hope. This collection of short accessible essays explores the ways in which hope is bound up with power in worlds that are composed through imagination, transformation and feeling. Hope is the most precious ingredient of power. The essays do not assume hope to be inherently good or emancipatory. Rather they reflect on how hope can both support and obstruct us in our efforts to make lives more livable, or futures more just. The essays draw on social research, philosophy, literature, music and film to show how hope might re-enchant writing and politics for a post-hopeful age. This is a book for those who want to remain hopeful but find it hard to see how. Contents Introduction: Problems of hope Cranes, Luke Carter On finding hope beyond progress, Leila Dawney Xanadu, Miles Link Hope without a future in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Patrick Bresnihan Eagles, Luke Carter Seeking, Claire Blencowe Hope in a minor key, Naomi Millner Hopefully indebted, Sam Kirwan Starlings, Luke Carter Rhythms of hope, Julian Brigstocke Networked hope, Aécio Amaral The Psychonaut’s journey: Race, closure, and hope, Tehseen Noorani Epilogue Further Reading

Subjective Lives and Economic Transformations in Mongolia

Subjective Lives and Economic Transformations in Mongolia PDF Author: Rebecca M. Empson
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787351467
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Almost 10 years ago the mineral-rich country of Mongolia experienced very rapid economic growth, fuelled by China’s need for coal and copper. New subjects, buildings, and businesses flourished, and future dreams were imagined and hoped for. This period of growth is, however, now over. Mongolia is instead facing high levels of public and private debt, conflicts over land and sovereignty, and a changed political climate that threatens its fragile democratic institutions. Subjective Lives and Economic Transformations in Mongolia details this complex story through the intimate lives of five women. Building on long-term friendships, which span over 20 years, Rebecca documents their personal journeys in an ever-shifting landscape. She reveals how these women use experiences of living a ‘life in the gap’ to survive the hard reality between desired outcomes and their actual daily lives. In doing so, she offers a completely different picture from that presented by economists and statisticians of what it is like to live in this fluctuating extractive economy.

Anthropologies of Revolution

Anthropologies of Revolution PDF Author: Igor Cherstich
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520343794
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. What can anthropological thinking contribute to the study of revolutions? The first book-length attempt to develop an anthropological approach to revolutions, Anthropologies of Revolution proposes that revolutions should be seen as concerted attempts to radically reconstitute the worlds people inhabit. Viewing revolutions as all-embracing, world-creating projects, the authors ask readers to move beyond the idea of revolutions as acts of violent political rupture, and instead view them as processes of societal transformation that penetrate deeply into the fabric of people’s lives, unfolding and refolding the coordinates of human existence.