Anna Tsing. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connections. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Extract

In Friction, Anna Tsing uses logging practices and timber consumption, environmental activisms and ideas about nature, local loss of livelihood and local despair over the loss of forest-as-life (as opposed to forest-as-resources), and Indonesian nation-making through business practices and international investment as her entry points for a richly argued and ethnographically nuanced analysis of the social processes by which the spatial, discursive, and metaphoric sites that have come to be known as the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ are made by each other. Her ethnographic contribution is her ability to demonstrate multiple experiences of events—from Meratus Dayak elders to Indonesian environmentalists, from Indonesian businessmen to consumers in an IKEA, from the Korean Development Company to Freeport McMoRan—which each person and institution understands and narrates differently. Indeed, Tsing shows that these people and institutions understand events and misunderstand each other in profound ways, but that the misunderstandings are productive, creating the social fact that is the Indonesian forest.