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.

Critical Thinkers in Religion, Law and Social Theory

January 31, 2013

University of Ottawa

Anna Tsing: Critical Description after Progress: Recognizing Diversity in Damaged Times