--- title: What did Anna Tsing mean by modular simplification and feral proliferation? description: The anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, with Andrew Mathews and Nils Bubandt, named two forms that shape the landscapes of the Anthropocene. A modular simplification, such as a plantation, feedlot or fish hatchery, strips a place down to one kind of… url: "https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/wiki/what-did-anna-tsing-mean-by-modular-simplification-and-feral-proliferation/" updated: "2026-11-10" category: People tags: - Andrew Mathews - Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing - Anna Tsing - Anthropocene extinction - collaborative survival - feral proliferation - matsutake - modular simplification - monoculture - Nils Bubandt - patchy Anthropocene - plantations - precarity - scalability - Taker culture - The Mushroom at the End of the World - totalitarian agriculture --- # What did Anna Tsing mean by modular simplification and feral proliferation? The anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, with Andrew Mathews and Nils Bubandt, named two forms that shape the landscapes of the Anthropocene. A modular simplification, such as a plantation, feedlot or fish hatchery, strips a place down to one kind of living thing so that it can be copied anywhere; a feral proliferation is what that simplification lets loose beyond its own fences, such as crop diseases, new viruses and toxins. The idea parallels what Therapeutic Shamanism calls totalitarian agriculture, though the two tell the story with different starting points. ## Who is Anna Tsing? An anthropologist, born in 1952, who teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2013 she was given a Niels Bohr Professorship at Aarhus University in Denmark, where she directed a research centre on the Anthropocene.^[1](#note-1) Her books include *In the Realm of the Diamond Queen* (1993), an ethnography from Indonesian Borneo; *Friction* (2005), on global connection; and *The Mushroom at the End of the World* (2015), which follows the matsutake mushroom through forests damaged by logging and fire. She co-edited *Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet* (2017), and in 2018 received the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.^[1](#note-1) 1. "Anna Tsing", *Wikipedia* (read 9 November 2026). ## What is a modular simplification? A landscape reduced to a standard unit that can be repeated across the world. The plantation is the model. Plantations grow a single crop so that workers who are coerced or alienated, and now machines, can tend it "without the care that farming otherwise requires", and they still carry histories of slavery and of indigenous communities driven from their land. In Tsing, Mathews and Bubandt's words, "Plantations attempt to reduce the number of living things in an area to just one kind"; everything not needed to produce the product is removed. The same form applies to animals, and feedlots are animal plantations.^[2](#note-2) The word 'modular' comes from the anthropologist Hannah Appel's work on the social discipline of oil-company enclaves in Equatorial Guinea.^[2](#note-2) A related idea in her work is scalability: projects that expand and copy a model that seems to have worked, with the sugarcane plantation as an icon of it. As her 2012 essay on the subject is usually summarised, she holds that scalability is not an ordinary feature of nature and takes a lot of work to make.^[3](#note-3) 1. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Andrew S. Mathews and Nils Bubandt, "Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology", *Current Anthropology* 60, Supplement 20 (2019), pp. S186-S197 (S189). 2. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, "On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales", *Common Knowledge* 18(3), 2012 (as summarised by the P2P Foundation wiki, "On Nonscalability", read 9 November 2026). ## What is a feral proliferation? What escapes. A modular simplification never fully walls itself off, and the conditions it creates breed effects that spread far beyond it. The coffee rust fungus spread from industrial coffee plantations. Chickens crowded in enormous uniform lots in Hong Kong and southern China form, in effect, a natural laboratory for new bird viruses that can infect humans around the world. Toxins spread from the radioactive landscapes of Ukraine and Belarus, and from the pesticides of the banana plantations of Martinique, into water, soil and living bodies. Hatchery salmon in the American north-west outcompete wild salmon, and the cattle brought to Latin America with colonial conquest sometimes ran wild beyond any planner's control.^[4](#note-4) "The modular and the feral are messily entangled", and the Anthropocene, on this account, is not one uniform age but a patchwork of places shaped by the two together.^[4](#note-4) 1. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Andrew S. Mathews and Nils Bubandt, "Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology", *Current Anthropology* 60, Supplement 20 (2019), pp. S186-S197 (S189). ## What does a mushroom have to do with it? It shows life going on in the ruins. The matsutake grows with pines, which with their fungal partners flourish in landscapes burned by humans, and when Japan began importing it at high prices it drew foragers into the cutover forests of the American Pacific North-west.^[5](#note-5) Tsing contrasts the plantation's single crop with shifting cultivation in Borneo, where sugarcane grew among rice, bananas and other crops on their own schedules.^[5](#note-5) Her word for life in such places is collaborative survival, and her starting point is that "Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others."^[5](#note-5) The hope that comes from such places, the 2019 essay says, "is not scalable"; it is found in particular patches, not in a model for the whole world.^[6](#note-6) 1. Princeton University Press, "A look inside *The Mushroom at the End of the World*" (read 9 November 2026), from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, *The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins* (Princeton University Press, 2015). 2. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Andrew S. Mathews and Nils Bubandt, "Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology", *Current Anthropology* 60, Supplement 20 (2019), pp. S186-S197 (S189). ## Has her approach been criticised? Yes. Reviewing *The Mushroom at the End of the World*, Clotilde Riotor and Cyprien Tasset found its outlook "relatively pessimistic", concerned "not so much about radical change or resisting capitalism" as with surviving at its edges, and noted that its central idea of precarity is given shifting meanings.^[7](#note-7) Against that reading stands the book's own starting point, written before the review, that "Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival", and the 2019 essay's view that hope has to be looked for patch by patch and not in one large scheme.^[8](#note-8)^[9](#note-9) 1. Clotilde Riotor and Cyprien Tasset, "As Fragile as a Matsutake", *Books & Ideas* (La Vie des Idées), 2 July 2018. 2. Princeton University Press, "A look inside *The Mushroom at the End of the World*" (read 9 November 2026), from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, *The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins* (Princeton University Press, 2015). 3. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Andrew S. Mathews and Nils Bubandt, "Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology", *Current Anthropology* 60, Supplement 20 (2019), pp. S186-S197 (S189). ## How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? Closely, in the picture of the plantation. What Therapeutic Shamanism calls totalitarian agriculture, a term taken from the novelist Daniel Quinn, rests on the belief that humans are supreme and own the land; it changes the land wholesale, clearing forest for fields, and drastically reduces biodiversity as complex ecosystems are replaced by monocultures.^[10](#note-10) Its message to the land is that the owners now decide what lives on it and what dies. The goats and the wheat may stay, and every species that competes with them is killed.^[11](#note-11) Tsing's modular simplification is a close parallel, though hers is a landscape form and totalitarian agriculture is first of all a way of thinking. The feral side is different. Tsing's feral proliferations are escapes, such as diseases, toxins and runaway animals, not extinction as such. What the books describe as following from totalitarian agriculture is larger still: the surplus food of totalitarian agriculture, and the rise in human numbers it allows, has brought on the sixth mass extinction, the first caused by a living species, with wild vertebrates now under two per cent of the vertebrate weight on Earth, and insect populations collapsing.^[12](#note-12) A culture killing species at around a thousand times the normal rate, and destroying the environment its own life depends on, is in that sense a death cult.^[13](#note-13) See [What are Taker and Leaver cultures?](/wiki/what-are-taker-and-leaver-cultures/) 1. Paul Francis, [*Rewilding Yourself*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/rewilding-yourself/), "A Guide to Frequently-Used Shamanic (And Other) Terms", "Totalitarian agriculture". 2. Paul Francis, [*Rewilding Yourself*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/rewilding-yourself/), Chapter One, "Abandoning Hunter-Gathering". 3. Paul Francis, [*Rewilding Yourself*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/rewilding-yourself/), Chapter One, "The Anthropocene Extinction". 4. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter Three, "The Taker Society Is a Cult". ## Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? In where the story starts. Tsing, Mathews and Bubandt trace modular simplification through colonial conquest, slavery and capitalism. Therapeutic Shamanism traces the same impulse back to the beginning of totalitarian agriculture in the Neolithic, around 11,000 BC, and to a change in consciousness. Hunter-gatherers lived as one species in a community of species, honoured the land as the body of Mother Earth**Mother Earth.** The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: "The Earth is indeed our Mother." [More about this](/wiki/who-is-mother-earth/), and never set out to wipe out a competing species, whilst the farmers who followed began to see themselves as owners of the land and above all other species.^[14](#note-14) The plantation is then a late and extreme form of something much older, and the recovery it calls for is not only a different economy but beginning to listen again to the wise beings around us, the other Peoples, and to bring their healing back.^[15](#note-15) See [Was farming a mistake?](/wiki/was-farming-a-mistake/) and [What did James C. Scott show about early states and grain?](/wiki/what-did-james-c-scott-show-about-early-states-and-grain/) 1. Paul Francis, [*Rewilding Yourself*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/rewilding-yourself/), Chapter One, "Abandoning Hunter-Gathering". 2. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter Three, "1. The Long, Slow Fall". - [What are Taker and Leaver cultures?](/wiki/what-are-taker-and-leaver-cultures/) - [Was farming a mistake?](/wiki/was-farming-a-mistake/) - [What did James C. Scott show about early states and grain?](/wiki/what-did-james-c-scott-show-about-early-states-and-grain/) - [What is the myth of human supremacy?](/wiki/what-is-the-myth-of-human-supremacy/) - [What did Deborah Bird Rose mean by double death and shimmer?](/wiki/what-did-deborah-bird-rose-mean-by-double-death-and-shimmer/) - [Who was Daniel Quinn, and what did Ishmael teach?](/wiki/who-was-daniel-quinn-and-what-did-ishmael-teach/) - [*Rewilding Yourself*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/rewilding-yourself/) (Chapter One, totalitarian agriculture and the Anthropocene extinction) - [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/) (Chapter Three, the Taker society) - [all courses](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/shamanic-courses/)