T1 – Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, An Ethnography of Global

PAROLA D AUTORE | T1 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing Friction. An Ethnography of Global Connections, Princeton University Press, 2005, pp. 2-6 An Ethnography of Global Connections Nel brano seguente, l antropologa statunitense Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing mostra come ogni luogo del pianeta sia plasmato dall attrito o frizione (friction) tra diverse forze globali. In particolare, l autrice racconta la devastazione delle foreste pluviali del Borneo a partire da un intricata trama di relazioni e incontri inaspettati tra multinazionali del legname, governi corrotti, giovani ambientalisti e attivisti locali. Something shocking began to happen in Indonesia s rainforests during the last decades of the twentieth century. Species diversities that had taken millions of years to assemble were cleared, burned, and sacrificed to erosion. The speed of landscape transformation took observers by surprise. No gradual expansion of human populations, needs, or markets could possibly explain it [ ]. Corporate growth seemed [ ] chaotic, inefficient and violent in destroying its own resources. Stranger yet, it seemed that ordinary people even those dependent on the forest for their livelihood were joining distant corporations in creating uninhabitable landscapes. Within Indonesia, this ugly situation came to stand for the dangers of imperialism and the misdeeds of a corrupt regime. Opposition to state and corporate destruction of forest-people s livelihoods became a key plank of the emergent democratic movement of the 1980s and 1990s. An innovative politics developed linking city and countryside, bringing activists, students, and villagers into conversation across differences in perspective and experience. [ ] None of these questions can be addressed without an appreciation of global connections. Indonesian forests were not destroyed for lo- cal needs; their products were taken for the world. Environmental activism flourished only through the instigation and support of a global movement. [ ] A villager shows a North American miner some gold; a Japanese model of trade is adopted for plywood; students banned from politics take up hiking; a minister is inspired by a United Nations conference on the environment: these narrowly conceived situations lay down tracks for future global developments. [ ] This book shows how emergent cultural forms including forest destruction and environmental advocacy are persistent but unpredictable effects of global encounters across difference. This proposition extends my earlier research, in which I explored how even seemingly isolated cultures, such as rainforest dwellers in Indonesia, are shaped in national and transnational dialogues [ ]. Scholars once treated such cultures as exemplars of the self-generating nature of culture itself. However, 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. [ ] To address these challenges, this book develops [ ] methods to study the productive | Pensare la contemporaneità | 133