Events

Organised by Yale-NUS College, and supported by NUS Libraries and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

CHAIRPERSON

Asst Prof Anthony D. Medrano, Yale-NUS College, Singapore

ABSTRACT

How might different people appreciate birds? And how do birds appreciate (or refuse the attentions of) people? In this session, Professor Anna Tsing explores what it would mean to take overlapping—but non-identical—forms of curiosity as a starting point for getting to know birds.

Traveling to the Raja Ampat islands of West Papua, Indonesia, in the company of bird experts, she watched birds and villagers and birdwatchers in their common muddling together. One of the surprises of the trip was the enthusiasm of villagers for showing international guests their local birds. Where did this enthusiasm come from, she asked, and how did it interact both with birds’ own agendas in villages and with the international political economy of birdwatching? Exploring such questions leads us into the Anthropocene’s challenges of collaboration. Prof Tsing suggests that recognising the dance of more-than-human sociality requires attention both to varied agendas people have with birds and to those birds have with people.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Anna Tsing is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) as well as one of the co-founders of UCSC’s Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions. She is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Niels Bohr Professorship for a multi-year project on the Anthropocene. Her books include In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (1994), Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005), and The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015) (all from Princeton University Press). Some of the volumes she co-edited are Nature in the Global South: Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia (Duke University Press, with Paul Greenough, 2003), Communities and Conservation: Histories and Politics of Community-Based Natural Resource Management (AltaMira, with Peter Brosius and Charles Zerner, 2005), and Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (University of Minnesota Press, with Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, 2017), and Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene (Stanford University Press, with Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman-Saxena, and Feifei Zhou, 2020).

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. Please click on the following link to register: https://yale-nus-edu-sg.zoom.us/webinar/register/2016370374296/WN_7IyAoQSPT0aldC1vTxbNxA.