The UW Libraries offers many Research Guides to help you to get started with research. These research guides will include library resources relevant to research related to Anna Tsing's lecture. You are encouraged to contact the librarians for these subjects for help with your research.
In this lecture, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing will explore how digital visualization and storytelling might create a new community of resisters in this more-than-human Anthropocene. The lecture, to be held on Tuesday, February 25, 2020 at 7:00 pm in Kane Hall 210, is free and open to all. Read a brief description of the Lecture.
This research guide includes resources published by Anna Tsing and related research. All resources are available through the UW Libraries. Everyone is welcome to visit a UW Library in person to access these resources. UW students, faculty, and staff may access online resources from off campus using their UW Net ID.
The following readings have been recommended by Anna Tsing for those who would like to learn more about the subject of her lecture.
The Mushroom at the End of the World by
Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world--and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made? 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. By investigating one of the world's most sought-after fungi, The Mushroom at the End of the World presents an original examination into the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth.
Our History Is the Future by
How two centuries of Indigenous resistance created the movement proclaiming "Water is life" In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century. Water Protectors knew this battle for native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even after the encampment was gone, their anticolonial struggle would continue. In Our History Is the Future, Nick Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance that led to the #NoDAPL movement. Our History Is the Future is at once a work of history, a manifesto, and an intergenerational story of resistance.
Anna Tsing, 2018. “The New Wild,” The Clearing (December 2018)
Available online
Phone & Spear : a yuta anthropology by The UW Libraries has many books related to Anna Tsing's lecture. A few are listed below. To find more, use the UW Libraries Search database. Ask Us! if you need help with your research.
As Long As Grass Grows by
Through the unique lens of "Indigenized environmental justice," Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites, while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle. As Long As Grass Grows gives readers an accessible history of Indigenous resistance to government and corporate incursions on their lands and offers new approaches to environmental justice activism and policy. Throughout 2016, the Standing Rock protest put a national spotlight on Indigenous activists, but it also underscored how little Americans know about the longtime historical tensions between Native peoples and the mainstream environmental movement. Ultimately, she argues, modern environmentalists must look to the history of Indigenous resistance for wisdom and inspiration in our common fight for a just and sustainable future.
This Indian Country by
Frederick E. Hoxie, one of our most prominent and celebrated academic historians of Native American history, has for years asked his undergraduate students at the beginning of each semester to write down the names of three American Indians. Almost without exception, year after year, the names are Geronimo, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The general conclusion is inescapable: Most Americans instinctively view Indians as people of the past who occupy a position outside the central narrative of American history. These three individuals were warriors, men who fought violently against American expansion, lost, and died. It's taken as given that Native history has no particular relationship to what is conventionally presented as the story of America. Indians had a history too; but theirs was short and sad, and it ended a long time ago. In This Indian Country, Hoxie has created a bold and sweeping counter-narrative to our conventional understanding. Native American history, he argues, is also a story of political activism, its victories hard-won in courts and campaigns rather than on the battlefield. For more than two hundred years, Indian activists--some famous, many unknown beyond their own communities--have sought to bridge the distance between indigenous cultures and the republican democracy of the United States through legal and political debate. Over time their struggle defined a new language of "Indian rights" and created a vision of American Indian identity. In the process, they entered a dialogue with other activist movements, from African American civil rights to women's rights and other progressive organizations. Hoxie weaves a powerful narrative that connects the individual to the tribe, the tribe to the nation, and the nation to broader historical processes. He asks readers to think deeply about how a country based on the values of liberty and equality managed to adapt to the complex cultural and political demands of people who refused to be overrun or ignored. As we grapple with contemporary challenges to national institutions, from inside and outside our borders, and as we reflect on the array of shifting national and cultural identities across the globe, This Indian Country provides a context and a language for understanding our present dilemmas.
Life of the Indigenous Mind by
2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title In Life of the Indigenous Mind David Martínez examines the early activism, life, and writings of Vine Deloria Jr. (1933-2005), the most influential indigenous activist and writer of the twentieth century and one of the intellectual architects of the Red Power movement. An experienced activist, administrator, and political analyst, Deloria was motivated to activism and writing by his work as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, and he came to view discourse on tribal self-determination as the most important objective for making a viable future for tribes. In this work of both intellectual and activist history, Martínez assesses the early life and legacy of Deloria's "Red Power Tetralogy," his most powerful and polemical works: Custer Died for Your Sins (1969), We Talk, You Listen (1970), God Is Red (1973), and Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties (1974). Deloria's gift for combining sharp political analysis with a cutting sense of humor rattled his adversaries as much as it delighted his growing readership. Life of the Indigenous Mind reveals how Deloria's writings addressed Indians and non-Indians alike. It was in the spirit of protest that Deloria famously and infamously confronted the tenets of Christianity, the policies of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the theories of anthropology. The concept of tribal self-determination that he initiated both overturned the presumptions of the dominant society, including various "Indian experts," and asserted that tribes were entitled to the rights of independent sovereign nations in their relationship with the United States, be it legally, politically, culturally, historically, or religiously.
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Human Rights and the Environment by
Much has been written, discussed, advocated and litigated about human rights and the environment over the last two decades. With 45 structured entries from a global collection of expert scholars, this volume of the Elgar Encyclopedia of Environmental Law provides an authoritative source of reference and features new commentary on the role of the rule of law in responding to the variegated impacts of environmental challenges on the human condition.This comprehensive volume offers fresh perspectives to the conversation by focusing especially on four subjects that shed new light on the subject of environmental human rights: the challenges of identifying the fundamental legal sources for the protection of human rights and the environment, the recognition of the indivisibility of human rights and environmental law, the centrality of the right to human dignity as the lodestar of human rights law, and the uniqueness of geographic particularities. Fundamentally, the entries demonstrate that there is much to do, learn and share on this vital topic.Offering thoughtful critical perspectives on a timely subject, this volume will be an essential resource for academics and students, as well as policymakers and practitioners.
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The Environment in the Age of the Internet by
How do we talk about the environment? Does this communication reveal and construct meaning? Is the environment expressed and foregrounded in the new landscape of digital media? The Environment in the Age of the Internet is an interdisciplinary collection that draws together research and answers from media and communication studies, social sciences, modern history, and folklore studies. Edited by Heike Graf, its focus is on the communicative approaches taken by different groups to ecological issues, shedding light on how these groups tell their distinctive stories of "the environment." This book draws on case studies from around the world and focuses on activists of radically different kinds: protestors against pulp mills in South America, resistance to mining in the Sami region of Sweden, the struggles of indigenous peoples from the Arctic to the Amazon, gardening bloggers in northern Europe, and neo-Nazi environmentalists in Germany. Each case is examined in relation to its multifaceted media coverage, mainstream and digital, professional and amateur. Stories are told within a context; examining the "what" and "how" of these environmental stories demonstrates how contexts determine communication, and how communication raises and shapes awareness. These issues have never been more urgent, this work never more timely. The Environment in the Age of the Internet is essential reading for everyone interested in how humans relate to their environment in the digital age.
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