Tsing - Friction: an ethnography of global connection

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Copyright 2005 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press,
41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
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All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt.

Friction : an ethnography of global connection /

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-12064-1 (alk. paper)

ISBN 0-691-12065-X (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Intercultural communication. 2. International economic relations. 3. International relations. 4. Ethnology. 5. Globalization. I. Title.

GN345.6.T75 2005

303.482dc22 2004043422

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Janson and Frutiger

Printed on acid-free paper.

pup.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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From the perspective of many foreigners, Indonesia in the last thirty years of the twentieth century was a bustling yet quiet place, known for its beaches and its business opportunities. Thensuddenlyaround the turn of the century, the country appeared to fall apart. Stories of financial crisis, political scandal, ethnic and religious conflict, and resource struggle filled the news. Even a slightly closer look, however, reveals that these outbreaks of unrest and disaster built directly on the policies and practices of the preceding thirty years of imagined peace and progress. Consider the terrain of Indonesias famous rainforests and indigenous cultures. The New Order regime of General Suharto (19661998) made business a predator, born from the mix of nepotism, international finance, and military muscle, and feeding on cheap resources ripped illegally from rural communities. No wonder that after Suhartos resignation in 1998, villagers grew bold enough to assert their local rights. And, given the violence that had accompanied corporate expropriations, no wonder too that local complaints of all sorts entered a dangerous melee. Community groups fought and merged with illegal loggers, corporate security guards, gangsters, advocacy groups, religious factions, district officials, police, and army men.

This book describes the cultural processes in which certain kinds of predatory business practices, on the one hand, and local empowerment struggles, on the other, came to characterize the rainforests of Indonesia. Large pieces of my story draw on fieldwork in the mountains of South Kalimantan, but this is not a story that can be confined in a village, a province, or a nation. It is a story of North American investment practices and the stock market, Brazilian rubber tappers forest advocacy and United Nations environmental funding, international mountaineering and adventure sports, and democratic politics and the overthrow of the Suharto regime, among other things. In reaching across these terrains, I offer an ethnography of global connection. The term global here is not a claim to explain everything in the world at once. Instead, it introduces a way of thinking about the history of social projects, including business and local empowerment. First, such projects grow from spatially far-flung collaborations and interconnections. Second, cultural diversity is not banished from these interconnections; it is what makes themand all their particularitiespossible. Cultural diversity brings a creative friction to global connections. The topic of my book is this friction.

I first became excited by the possibilities of studying environmental connections across difference when I stumbled upon a curious misunderstanding during 1994 fieldwork in Indonesia. Although it was good to see old friends and adopted family, it was a disturbing time to be in the Meratus Mountains of South Kalimantan, the site of my on-going research. Timber companies had made new inroads into the Meratus landscape. Many of my Meratus Dayak friends were depressed by the destruction of the forests that had formed the basis for their livelihoods as shifting cultivators and forest foragers. As I traveled around the countryside listening to Meratus views of the logging crisis, a number of people reminded me of a moment of hope: a successful campaign to remove a logging company from one Meratus village in 1986. I decided to find out about this campaign, which was organized by village elders working together with a nature lovers group in the provincial capital as well as national environmentalists from Jakarta. By chance, I knew, or knew of, many of the key players, and I was able to interview the leading participants. Of course, I wasnt there for the original campaign. But this only heightened my appreciation of the storytelling about it. For something very odd emerged in the stories: They all seemed to describe different events. When presented with other participants stories, each respondent found the others fantastic, unreal. I couldnt help but notice the systematic misunderstandings that separated village elders, provincial nature lovers, and national environmental activists. And yet these misunderstandingsfar from producing conflicthad allowed them to work together!

These incommensurable interviews clarified for me a central feature of all social mobilizing: It is based on negotiating more or less recognized differences in the goals, objects, and strategies of the cause. The point of understanding this is not to homogenize perspectives but rather to appreciate how we can use diversity as well as possible. (I discuss the story of this Meratus anti-logging campaign and its analytic significance in more detail in chapter 7.) The interviews also confirmed the practical usefulness of the kind of patchwork ethnographic fieldwork I had been doing on these issues. On the one hand, I was unwilling to give up the ethnographic method, with its focus on the ethnographers surprises rather than on a pre-formulated research plan. On the other hand, it is impossible to gain a full ethnographic appreciation of every social group that forms a connection in a global chain. My experiment was to work my way back and forth between the Meratus Mountainswhere I had a long-term ethnographic backgroundand the places implicated in the chains I traced.search for odd connections rather than seamless generalizations, inclusive tables, or comparative grids.

How does one do an ethnography of global connections? Because ethnography was originally designed for small communities, this question has puzzled social scientists for some time. My answer has been to focus on zones of awkward engagement, where words mean something different across a divide even as people agree to speak. These zones of cultural friction are transient; they arise out of encounters and interactions. They reappear in new places with changing events. The only ways I can think of to study them are patchwork and haphazard. The result of such research may not be a classical ethnography, but it can be deeply ethnographic in the sense of drawing from the learning experiences of the ethnographer.

Many ethnographic learning experiences shaped this book. One of the most important came early in my research in the Meratus Mountains: The forest landscape is social. I originally entered the Meratus forests with the eyes of a naturalist. I marveled at the diversity of species, and I admired the forest views from many a mountain ridge. It was only by walking and working with Meratus Dayaks that I learned to see the forest differently. The forest they showed me was a terrain of personal biography and community history. Individuals and households tracked their histories in the forest: House posts resprouted into trees. Forest trees grew back from old swiddens. Fruits and rattans were planted in the growing forest. Forest giants were cleaned and claimed for their potential for attracting honeybees. People read the landscape for its social as well as its natural stories. Communities were constituted in these overlapping histories, as well as in shifting communal places, the old ones marked with enriched islands of trees. (This landscape is described in chapter 5.) Yet almost all scholarship and policy continues to portray forests as wild, natural spaces outside society. If Meratus forests were recognized as social, the predominant forms of both resource exploitation and conservation that have been imposed on the area would seem very odd indeed.