What We Are Reading Today: Friction by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing challenges the widespread view that globalization invariably signifies a clash of cultures, developing friction as a metaphor for the diverse and conflicting social interactions that make up our contemporary world.  Tsing focuses on the rainforests of Indonesia, where in the 1980s and 1990s capitalist interests increasingly reshaped the landscape not so much through corporate design as through awkward chains of legal and illegal entrepreneurs that wrested the land from previous claimants, creating resources for distant markets.