Capital -- whence and whither: some Pacific Rim ontologies

Wertheim Lecture 2011 by Anna Tsing

Honoring the legacy of Wertheim, this talk considers how inter-Asian developments shape global processes.  How might the basic elements of contemporary globalization depend on Asian histories? This talk addresses this question from the perspective of matsutake, aromatic wild mushrooms valued in Japan and picked in forests around the Pacific Rim. The talk introduces Japanese supply chains and the forms of globalization they sponsor, and thus the entanglement of Japanese, Southeast Asian, and U.S. wars, people, and forests in the global trade in forest products. Such historical entanglements sponsor “process ontologies” for global capitalism. 

The dynamically evolving cultural politics of Southeast Asia, at every scale from remote villages to transnational movements, has inspired Anna Tsing’s research on places and projects in the making. Her first book about Indonesia, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an out-of-the-way Place (1993), showed how “traditional” local cultures evolve in dialogue with regional, national, and global political challenges. Her next book, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2004), explored Indonesia’s environmental politics to show how place-based historical trajectories shape what comes to count as global.  Her current collaborative research traces emerging categories of global science and commerce through a focus on matsutake, aromatic wild mushrooms valued in Japan and picked by Southeast Asian refugees in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Tsing is the co-editor of several collections, the most recent of which is: Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon. Other publications include:  Shock and Awe: War on Words. (B. van Eekelen, J. González, B. Stötzer, and A. Tsing, eds). New Pacific Press, 2004, and: Nature in the Global South: Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia. (P. Greenough and A. Tsing, eds). Duke University Press, 2003.

Programme

15:00-15:30     Arrival; coffee and tea
15:30-16:00     Introduction
16.00-17.00     Wertheim lecture by Prof. dr Anna Tsing
17:00-18.00     Borrel/reception with information about AISSR, GSSS and IIAS

R.S.V.P. to: iias@fmg.uva.nl

Anna Tsing is a professor of anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a specialist in the field of feminist anthropology, Southeast Asia, ethnography, and social theory. Her work focuses on politics and culture in Indonesia, rainforest ecology, globalization and gender. Selected publications include: Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005, Shock and Awe: War on Words. (B. van Eekelen, J. González, B. Stötzer, and A. Tsing, eds). New Pacific Press, 2004, and: Nature in the Global South: Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia. (P. Greenough and A. Tsing, eds). Duke University Press, 2003.

The Wertheim Lecture is co-organized by the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), the Moving Matters programme group of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) and the Graduate School for Social Sciences (GSSS) of the University of Amsterdam.