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 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
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 The word ‘modular’ comes from the anthropologist Hannah Appel’s work on the social discipline of oil-company enclaves in Equatorial Guinea.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
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 “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
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 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 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 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
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 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.89
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 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 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 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 See What are Taker and Leaver cultures?
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 EarthMother 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, 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 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 See Was farming a mistake? and What did James C. Scott show about early states and grain?
