This page was created by Collin Hardwick.
Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection
Discipline/Field: Anthropology, History, Environmental Studies
Year: 2005
Main Arguments & Concepts
Friction is an ethnography based off of Tsing’s work in the Meratus Mountains in Indonesia. A central claim to Friction is that “the dichotomy between the global blob and the local detail isn’t helping us” (58). Basically, this means that looking at things as happening on a global or local scale is an oversimplification that masks the ways that individuals and communities interact with each other and with ‘global’ forces. In reality, both have the ability to engage with one another. Without looking for the “friction” of these interactions, we are left a binary where the “global is homogeneous precisely because we oppose it to the heterogeneity we identify as locality” (58).Univerals
Tsing points out the potential for universals, which she acknowledges are, still, in part formed from local knowledges and histories, but also provide opportunity for cross-cultural connection: “To turn to universals is to identify knowledge that moves -- mobile and mobilizing -- across localities and cultures” (7). She criticizes the focus on hyper-local knowledges, arguing that “The knowledge that makes a difference in changing the world is the knowledge that travels and mobilizes, shifting and creating new forces and agents of history in its path” (8). Still, she acknowledges that universals can be exclusionary, and lack self-criticism. The goal, then, is to work with “engaged universals.”
Tsign particularly focuses on universals in terms of the environmental and ecological initiatives: “ we know and use nature through engaged univerals. The ‘environment’ spreads around the world through the friction of engagement, both for commercial users, who tap into its divergences for capitalist commodity chains, and for advocates, who find in these same divergences the means to study, enjoy, or preserve it” (270).
Translation
Tsing writes “The spread of liberalism depends on translation. The terms through which liberalism is to be enacted must be made accessible in new locales...Translation carries cultural genealogies from an original language even as it takes on new genealogies of thought and action from the new language” (224). Her concept of translation presents interesting example of how the local and global interact. As ‘global’ concepts are negotiated in a place, there is sort of co-creation of new concept. The ‘global’ concept will not be the same after its translated.
Quotes
“It has become increasingly clear that all human cultures are shaped and transformed in long histories of regional-to-global networks of power, trade, and meaning. With new evidence of these histories entering the academy from every direction, it has become possible for scholars to accept the idea that powerless minorities have accommodated themselves to global forces. But to turn that statement around to argue that global forces are themselves congeries of local/global interaction has been rather more challenging” (3).Notes
There are some interesting stylistic features of this book, like the flora/fauna list that Tsing adds to the margins of Chapter Four. She offers two reasons for including it: 1) “Cultural theorists need to know that the variety of nature is an important rural concern, not just an imposition of metropolitan scientists” (169-170), and 2) “It is self-consciously culturally particular and cross-culturally generative: it speaks of the possibility of multiple kinds of translation” (170).Related
Basso, Wisdom Sits in PlacesStewart, A Space on the Side of the Road
