Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is an American Anthropologist. She is a professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2018, she was awarded the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. She has contributed, and written several articles and books on a broad range of anthropological subjects. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2013, Tsing was bestowed the Niels Bohr Professorship at Aarhus University in Denmark for her contribution to interdisciplinary work in the fields of humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, and the arts. She is currently developing a transdisciplinary program for exploring the Anthropocene. Tsing is director of the AURA: Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene at Aarhus University. She received her B.A. from Yale University and completed her M.A. (1976) and PhD (1984) at Stanford University. She is the author of In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-way Place (1993), Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2004), a study on human dominated landscapes and environmental degradation, and The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins (2015). The latter is Tsing’s ethnographic account of the Matsutake mushroom, a rare and expensive fungi, much prized in Japan. The mushroom sprouts in landscapes that have been considerably changed by people, in symbiosis with certain species of pine trees. The book was awarded the Gregory Bateson Prize and the Victor Turner Prize.
