I appreciated the way that Tsing’s incorporated reflections on methodological approach and collaboration within her discussions of entanglements. From the second page of text, anthropology and capital-R Research is explicitly defined by their rootedness in the very same entanglements: “Below the forest floor, fungal bodies extend themselves in nets and skeins, binding roots and mineral soils, long before producing mushrooms. All books emerge from similarly hidden collaborations” (viii). Working from this perspective, Tsing moves on to state her intention of “explor[ing] a new anthropology of always-in-process collaboration” (ix) to frame the design of this project as a whole. A final direct quotation I will pull from this section is in regards to knowledge generation: “[at UC Santa Cruz] I glimpsed how scholarship could cross between natural science and cultural studies not just through critique but also through world-building knowledge” (x).
Although Enabling Entanglements serves as an acknowledgement section of the overall text, I was particularly drawn to the immediacy of the connection between the entanglements of mushrooms, our globalized world, and scholarship itself. Too often the processes of research are made exempt from the forces that shape our objects of research; by taking an analytical lens, we are free to see our work as outside of whatever we may be interrogating. However, Tsing situates her research as embedded in the very same webs that she writes about and embraces it, discussing how later volumes build upon the work that she presents in The Mushroom at the End of the World.
One additional quote that I think would be worthwhile to talk through in class is present at the end of Chapter 1: “The modern human conceit won’t let a description be anything more than a decorative footnote” (19-20). I think this point is central to thinking about the role of ethnography within contemporary research, and I am eager to hear how we each come to challenge or embrace this notion of thick description.