Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Educated at Yale and Stanford, she has worked across anthropology, feminist studies and environmental research, with sustained attention to Indonesia, globalization and landscapes altered by human activity.

Her books combine fieldwork, history and ecological observation. In Friction, she studies how apparently universal projects acquire force through local encounters. The Mushroom at the End of the World follows matsutake mushrooms through forests and markets, linking commercial picking, Japanese demand and disturbed woodland ecologies. Its short, shifting chapters mirror the book’s argument: survival emerges through relationships that cannot be fully planned or scaled.

Her other major works include In the Realm of the Diamond Queen and the collaborative Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. The Mushroom at the End of the World received the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s 2016 Gregory Bateson Prize. More recently, Tsing co-authored Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene, published in 2024.

Begin with The Mushroom at the End of the World. It is the clearest entry into Tsing’s method, moving from Oregon mushroom camps and global commodity chains to a larger inquiry into capitalism, precarity and life in damaged places. Readers drawn to its treatment of global connection should continue with Friction.