Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection

by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

A wheel turns because of its encounter with the surface of the road; spinning in the air it goes nowhere. Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light; one stick alone is just a stick. In both cases, it is friction that produces movement, action, effect. Challenging the widespread view that globalization invariably signifies a "clash" of cultures, anthropologist Anna Tsing here develops friction in its place as a metaphor for the diverse and conflicting social interactions that make up our contemporary world.

She focuses on one particular "zone of awkward engagement"--the rainforests of Indonesia--where in the 1980s and the 1990s capitalist interests increasingly reshaped the landscape not so much through corporate design as through awkward chains of legal and illegal entrepreneurs that wrested the land from previous claimants, creating resources for distant markets. In response, environmental movements arose to defend the rainforests and the communities of people who live in them. Not confined to a village, a province, or a nation, the social drama of the Indonesian rainforest includes local and national environmentalists, international science, North American investors, advocates for Brazilian rubber tappers, UN funding agencies, mountaineers, village elders, and urban students, among others--all combining in unpredictable, messy misunderstandings, but misunderstandings that sometimes work out.

Providing a portfolio of methods to study global interconnections, Tsing shows how curious and creative cultural differences are in the grip of worldly encounter, and how much is overlooked in contemporary theories of the global.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Ethnography, Politics, History, Environment, Sociology

321 pages, Paperback

First published November 8, 2004

About the author

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place and coeditor of Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture.

Reviews

[Naeem · Rating 3 out of 5]

Friction has a compellingly simple but important premise: universals - like capitalism, modernity, environmentalism, feminism - don't travel abstractly as mere ideologies. Rather, they travel through people, through institutions, through stories, through cultures. And along the way, the friction of travel, the friction of encounter with others, the friction of translation of universals by localities, changes those actually lived universals. It is not a new insight, but it is worth repeating since our tendency is to treat the travel of ideas, ideologies, and universals as frictionless, smooth, un-bumpy, easily transparent in translation (think Star Trek's universal translator).

Tsing's task is not merely to say this but to show it. She tells the story of how environmentalism travels in this frictional manner. The setting is Kalimantan, Indonesia in the 1990s. Tsing hangs out with the indigenous people who live the forests; she hangs out with university students from Java who belong to environmentalist clubs and travel to Kalimantan; she hangs out with government bureaucrats in Jakarata; she hangs out in workshops and conferences sponsored by international NGOs. And her patient, non-judgemental hanging out allows her to tell really well told stories. These various groups all do very different things in the name of the environment. Sometimes their different travels create frictions that are productive to some end (almost by accident), and sometimes these groups seem to live in different cosmologies where their encounters and seeming collaborations against the state, against international corporations, and against capitalism fizzle away into seeming nothingness.

At first, as with most but not all anthropologists, I thought her sense of politics would be missing. Indeed, there are at least three types of narratives here of which two can seem apolitical. First, there is a lot of theory talk. I can hang with this mostly since she is talking about what I want to hear: how to think about cultural encounter, how to think of how ideologies travel with friction, how to conceptualize a world where every locality's ideas are potentially universal and every universal notion travels through localities -- where as it travels it is transformed. But it was exactly in the theory section that my suspicions were aroused. I sensed a playfulness (something I admire) but which I feared would cause her to lose a sense fury against the injustices of universals such as capitalism.

But, I was wrong; her fury is there. The second kind of narrative she employs are short (10 pages or more) sections between the major chapters. In these the form is sometimes more direct, more experimental, more charged with anger and poetic pointedness. I really liked her in these sections.

The third form she employs is the story telling mode of really good ethnography. Here the pages fly and I was often late for my next thing because I refused to leave her stories before I was done with a chapter. Perhaps my favorite of these was the one she was the most worried about being boring for the reader. One of the chapters is almost pure description of the rain forest, its flora and fauna, and the intricate interdependency between soil, plants, animals, and humans. Her style and purpose reminded me of the hypnotic manner that K. N. Chaudhuri captured me in Asia Before Europe. There are many more stories about false claims to gold, about a environmentalist mountain climber who endorses cigarettes, about a certain story travels from Brazil (Chico Mendes), to India (Chipko), to Indonesia. These narratives are part travel tales, part investigative journalism, part rich expositions of her main concepts, and part descriptions of our astonishingly interesting world.

Together the three narratives work well and their juxtaposition solves, I think, the problems that each of these narratives would have if they were not next to each other. They would seem too theory-headed, to righteous, and too apolitical. So the form alone is interesting to contemplate.

Why only three stars then? I don't know really. Its not that I felt empty by the end of the book. Perhaps, I thought, well, hmmmm..., I wonder what I could have done with all her work instead. Its not just that I prefer the holism of, say, Eric Wolf Europe and the People Without History, since I think that the two approaches (they are both anthropologists of global connection) work really well together.

I think its that I believe that Tsing vastly overestimates how much friction de-fangs capitalism. Without a doubt I think her concerns are worth taking up. But there is a sense of hope and possibility (mind you she has earned that -- its not the mindlessness or desperation whiteness) that irks me a bit. It irks me because while she is frank and clear about the devastating effects of capitalism -- especially on rain forests -- I wish that realist sensibility would have pervaded the overall tone of the book.

In the end, her playfulness fits very well with her sense of hope and possibility. This strikes me as evasive, deflective, and unprepared for how the desperate needs of whiteness will devour her book for its own needs. If Tsing had cultivated a greater sense of tragedy, then her readers would have no way out, no exits, and therefore she would have done her best to intrude on our dream of collective denial.

In sum, a superb read that requires a second reading from me. But I suspect her politics. She seems just a bit eager to wish.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book drove me crazy while reading it...and now I can't get it out of my head. Tsing's writing style is intense and inflected with a personalized version of the Cultural Studies style, and the text packs in more characters than your typical telenovela. That said, the book fascinates. I tore my way through it, attempting to piece together her "fragments," and left with a strange feeling that - perhaps, just maybe - Tsing's ultimate arguments were deceptively simply. So simply and clear, after all of my struggles and resistance, that I'm already sorting out how to apply her in my own research; the potential is almost endless. And herein lies the strangely captivating nature of this book...

Well worth reading.

[Gijs]

interessant!

[melancholinary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This kind of work that got me thinking a lot on how ideas are transferred. Tsing argues that idea is a thing that transferred in local, global, universal with people and their friction encounter. I find her method, the fragmented and patchwork ethnographic research, really useful in contesting the assumption of global connection. This friction between universalism and globalisation is fascinating to follow, especially as Tsing offers a concept where universalism is not an idea rooted in the Western modern thought, that universalism is a bridge between similarity/dissimilarity in the diversity of cultural form. Universalism is an aspiration of capitalism, science and politics that depends on the global connection. However, with this notion of universalism can progress measured by the degree of differentiation within society, instead of the accumulation of capital and centralised science and technology? Friction is a thought-proving work.

[Margaret Halquist · Rating 5 out of 5]

Littered with complexity and contradiction. Beautifully written.

[eryn💌 · Rating 1 out of 5]

gonna start logging the readings I do for uni if I can, this will inspire me to actually read it🩷

Also did not have a fucking clue what this girl was yapping on abt for like a billion pages

[Weiling · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dripping sweat after trekking 2 miles in Kyoto’s humid July heat, I found myself standing in the air conditioned Kyoto University Bookstore in front of a copy of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015). It appeared so randomly yet so determinedly among the few English books in the small section of English language books in social sciences and Japanese philosophy. It was my third spotting of the book in an Asian bookstore in two weeks; I had seen it in Bangkok and Beijing. For the past ten years, Tsing’s mushroom has inspired many ethnographers and scholars like myself to marvel at the width and depth of research that one object can induce. That inspiration alone is a perfect example of the concept of “scale” that Tsing so eloquently articulated in Mushroom. Ten years before Mushroom’s publication, Tsing gifted the world a foundational masterpiece on scale: Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005). Thinking at the 10th and 20th anniversaries respectively of the books in 2025, I’m not surprised by their lasting relevance — their timelessness and timeliness — to whatever we are experiencing with the global and the universal at a specific locale. Now is the best time to understand friction as the fundamental experience and building block of the contingent practices of community, communication, and collaboration — as well as their failures — in and across places.

Recent nationalist attacks of globalization in the world’s political theaters, from idiosyncratic tariff wars and denial of climate change to various scales and scopes of xenophobia and immigration obstructions, seem to have divided the attitudes towards this concept along the political right and left. But rarely has any of these debates focused on what exactly is globalization, or, how, where, and through which agenda and route the world became “global.” Forgetting to ask this question, especially in the conjuncture where globalization has been taken for granted as the “good” thing for too long and anti-globalization movements fire hostility at the most vulnerable, can cost us a lot. Critics, politicians, scholars, and journalists are busy with categorizing people into binaries and mistaking, whether intentionally or not, partial explanations for whole, while everyone grieves over existing, anticipated, or imagined ruins and dystopia caused by the success or disruption of global connections, missing out on hopes and practical utopia.

There is a key oversight of dominant theories and visions of global connections: that the global is above and beyond the local, and that places achieve globalization through a top-down, the-West-to-the Rest approach. In this theoretical vision, becoming “global” is a story of backward places, peoples, and countries catching up with the developed ones, of divergent times aligning with a homogeneous time of progress, and of isolated spaces incorporated to a (paradoxically already existing) global economic and political network while maintaining their cultural specificities as a commodity of desire for nonessential, depoliticized differentiation. The foundation of Friction counters the naturalizied assignment of homogeneity to the global and essentialized specificity to the local. It confronts the illusion that the global means one universal truth arrived at when boundaries, incommensurabilities, and frictions are overcome to enable smooth transition and transportation. The imagery of the conventional and misleading understanding of global connections is easily conjured in the airport, hotel, freeway, and fast wi-fi, spaces of pure functionality that Marc Augé noted as “non-place.” But even the act of “conjuring” is not as careless and weightless as it may seem. Tsing explains why.

Indonesian forests became involved in a major scandal of gold mining in 1997 when a Canada-based company group, Bre-X, led the world to the false belief of an enormous gold deposit in East Kalimantan. Bre-X’s manipulation of the information effectively turned the remote forest into a new frontier of wealth accumulation at a time when the legends of both the gold rush and new frontier faded, and when the rising Asian economy was plunging into a massive financial abyss. But the gold spectacle/speculation/scandal that sucked in the savings of thousands’ of North American investors to a black hole was not simply one company’s doing. It resulted from the messy combination of the legacies of colonial classification and exploitation of Indonesian natural resources, the coalition of corrupt Suharto administration and greedy Japanese timber industry, the distance of the rainforest reachable and readable only to the Indigenous people who built social networks there, and the manipulatable translation and transmission of information from the depth of the woods mediated by provincial agents and businesspeople, and not the least, multinational presses’ willingness to spread the (unproved) news of the gold deposit, fearing of missing the party. Each member in this party plays their own part of conjuring, configuring a “global” and a “local” on the same slate with and against one another.

Rather than pushing us down the road of judging the right and wrong of this story, Tsing guides us to understand “conjuring” as a simultaneously playful and serious project of “scale-making.” Tsing defines scale as “the spatial dimensionality necessary for a particular kind of view, whether up close or from a distance, microscopic or planetary,” and immediately emphasizes that “scale is not just a neutral frame for viewing the world.” Rather, she adds, “scale must be brought into being: proposed, practiced, and evaded, as well as taken for granted” (p. 58). It is in these acts of proposing, practicing, evading, and taking for granted that different actors work across and define scales at the same time. Thus, it is in this plurality of incommensurable scales of experiences, scheming, and manufacturing that the global is made.

Through these interstices of scale-making projects Tsing forms the concept of friction. It is an inevitable resistance against smooth translation or transportation emerging from the incompatibility between two or more embodied experiences of production or reproduction, but is a potentially productive force to make knowledge. Put in the language of basic physical law: “A wheel turns because of its encounter with the surface of the road; spinning in the air it goes nowhere. Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light; one stick alone is just a stick” (5). By metaphorical extension, the very reason and condition with which our world becomes a “globe” is not the replacement of friction with smoothness in the transportation of people, goods, capital, resources, and ideas; quite on the contrary, the making of the “global” through both material and immaterial logistics is a process based in friction as travel happens between locations and scales. “Friction reminds us that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power” (5).

The formation of Indonesia’s forest conservation campaign that emerged in the last decade of Suharto’s New Order regime (circa 1980s-90s) was an exemplary story of friction. Between Jakarta-based policy makers, provincial advocates, scientists and engineers, Indigenous communities of the Meratus Dayaks, college-educated nature lovers from the cities, an odd alliance was formed. In the place of a top-down, unified, and planned agenda was an awkward and contingent coalescence in which neither commonground nor difference could eclipse the other. But still, in this wobbly campaign landscape, the concept of “community forest management” propelled the movement despite, and also because of, the divergent interpretations and practices of it. Village leaders acquired the rhetoric of development and conservation from the capital and provincial lawmakers while concealing the heterogeneity within the villages; college students built cosmopolitan urban persona by putting on foreign-designed hiking/camping equipment and intimating nature; activists, funded by international/Western foundations like the Ford Foundation, adopted packaged discourses of conservatism and equality to articulate Indonesian experiences and could not escape the colonial baggage of those discourses; capitalists cooked up privatization behind their support of forest conservation, co-opting the concept and role of community. Brought to life in incompatible experience, vision, and data, collaboration, Tsing reminds us, is “not consensus making but rather an opening for productive confusion” (247).

In the rich and dynamic messiness of protecting indigenous forest and community existed gaps between conservation and development, two dominant categories of knowledge production in both scholarship and policy-making. And yet, thanks to these gaps, contingent coalitions were created on thin but promising commongrounds. Tsing pays creative attention to the gaps, or “zones of ‘boredom’ and unreadability” persistently produced through the arbitrary assignment of value and interest by “powerful projects of categorization categorization, including development and conservation (as well as your scholarly reading practices, whatever they may be)” (172). Such are the cracks where light will shine in to illuminate and nurture new possibilities in times and spaces of scarcity. Here, often overlooked but actually essential was the role that small, ground-up agents and organizations played in turning the gaps that top-down, faraway observers and critics could not see or comprehend. What they did was more than transporting information back and forth between the global and local scales of working/supplying. New jobs, subjectivities, and relationships mushroom precisely in the “zones of boredom” where a plurality of divergent, incompatible, but nonetheless coexisting universals accommodate each other.

[Collin Jung · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would’ve given five stars if not for the ford foundation mention in ch 7…

[Dagezi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Serious, compelling anthropology that 1. does not assume the unassaible superiority and invincibility of the european philosophical tradition and 2. occurs in a language that is supple, human and sometimes beguiling. In Tsing's hands that old hobby horse "multi-sited ethnography" is something more than a cliche or convenient euphemism for work lacking depth. Untangling a few of the strands of the manifold web of connections in which contemporary environmental and human politics on the margins of Borneo are caught up, Tsing attempts to bring different to light the positionalities and intersections of several kinds of knowledge that are usually dealt with in separate books. The result is a sort anthropology in quadrophonic sound (hopefully without the instant obsolescene of that technology). Especially compelling for me in light of my current interests is her focus on the travel of "engaged universals". Rather simply being pleased by the ability of western philosophy to as Rabinow would have it make "friends" (or in my case, enemy) across time and space, she stresses the importance of looking at the actual movement of would-be universals as itself a proper object of ethnographic inquiry.

Revisited 4/12. Sadly, 5 years on, I have to admit that this book is to (Post-)Actor-Network Theory what Gupta and Ferguson's Culture, Power, Place is to a Doreen Masseyish strain of Critical Human Geography. The movement of universals now reads to me like an unauthorized port of the work of Latour, Law, Mol, Callon, etc. on the movement of immutable mobiles. Sigh. Down to three stars....

Revisted again 1/13 It's a total ripoff of the Pasteurization of France. Are we anthro suckers just supposed to ignore that? Is theft here some form of tribute?

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tsing is an anthropologist who uses interrelated ethnographies of 1990s Indonesia to discuss how what she calls "universals"--namely capital, knowledge, and social justice movements--are always necessarily altered when they encounter a specific site. Most interesting idea might be that "scales" that we consider to be pre-set (the community, the nation, the global) are always artificial; universals essentially force the creation of the levels on which they operate. The awkward friction of the universal hitting the ground also creates overlaps for Tsing, which for all their seeming discomfort and confusion can provide a locus for cooperation and collaboration. She gives the example of activist groups who understood concepts of "nature" and "conversation" very differently but still managed to cooperate.

Homosocial.

[Joma Geneciran · Rating 2 out of 5]

A well-regarded and highly engaged text (over 8000 citations) however, it's emphasis on the movement/agency of multiple actors as friction is essentially trying to retheorize work on contradiction (without pointing toward any of the important theorists 'hint on contradiction'.

Additionally, seemed to re-invent/theorize creative destruction and work on crisis theory within political economy without pointing/addressing toward it. The origins of the capitalist world-system in the long sixteenth century came-out-of-and-depends-upon the 'friction' or crises that is positioned as novel.

Major issue I had was how she placed "the hegemony of centralized developments" against "human rights, farmers' rights, and indigenous rights" against each other; which means any coherent anti-capitalist/anti-systemic program for delinking is against emancipation.

A frustrating text.

[Anushka · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was more of a textbook but I simply have to log it here bc I feel bad about not meeting my reading goal last year and even if this WAS non-fiction for class it was a BOOK that I FINISHED and since I was very short of my 25 books for 2022, every step to save my book goal dignity has to count : / initially I thought there was nothing innovative about the proposed concepts or research methodology in the first part of the book, but as I kept reading it really did all tie together and made me aware of some environmentalism paradoxes. I think it's really interesting if you're curious about nuances of environmentalist movements in general even though the book doesn't really go anywhere or offer any type of solution, it just explores some of the ~ friction ~ the author observes

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

A look at globalization from the local that is South Kalimantan. Overall a discussion of how globalization can be understand as a process of friction (hence the title) between local, state, intra-state, and international forces over matters such as frontier creation, ways of seeing nature, resistance, migration, culture.

Basically Tsing takes a whole boatload of stuff and admirably tries to make sense of it as it is occurring in this one area impacted by timber and mineral extraction.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actual rating: 3.5 stars

I was probably one of the only people in my class to like reading this book, then again a lot of the other students in my class have not encountered a lot of scholars who are steeped in post-modernist thinking (like I have). I liked how Tsing looked at the idea of "Friction" in the global environment, and it was an interesting read.

[Gilles Beauchamp · Rating 4 out of 5]

biologie, ethnographie et politique

Un récit passionnant d’une anthropologue engagée auprès de communautés indigènes, d’activistes, de jeunes « amoureux de la nature » qui nous fait pénétrer les forêts de Bornéo et suivre tant les transformations politiques de l’Indonésie sur plusieurs décennies que les mouvements internationaux, tant ceux des capitalistes que des environnementalistes. La culture sur brûlis et la cueillette des fruits ont permis à ces communautés d’habiter ces forêts depuis des temps immémoriaux.

[DM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Glad I finally finished this though it took me months. I think it’s really speaking to a specific moment (early 2000s “globalisation”) literature but was still compelling. I loved the sense of hope and possibility and contingency. And the ethnography of resource frontiers and environmentalism/“nature” was great. Wish I had read this when I wasn’t so tired
from the semester because it did feel quite long/a little repetitive.

[Bidita · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75ish

[Coreking · Rating 5 out of 5]

awsome

[Kate Kuisel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn’t get the hype. Concept seemed too applicable to most situations

[Ahmed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tsing is an amazing ethnographer. She tells worldly stories in all their complexities, patchiness and fragmentation.

[Isa Luiten · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unonventional anthropological monograph. Draws mostly on historical accounts consisting of documents as well as ethnogrpahic accounts. Reads fairly easy. Love her writing style!

[g · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book discloses the particularities of different collaborations that disrupt or develop processes of economic transformations that reflect on landscapes, and at the same time accentuates the role that imagination plays in re-creating the wild as fields of profiteering. it is very well written; the narrative carries the reader through complex issues without sounding too enigmatic, and employs experimental textual arrangements. the author herself does not seem to be situated in a particular locality, she enters and exits spaces and temporalities that are both invisible and tangible at the same time. the reader only catches glimpses of certain ethnographic encounters, and can never really put forth a material picture of how she traveled, where she stayed, how much time she spent in this forest, and this imaginary corresponds exactly to the global imaginary that she is writing about. finally, the title is so well-chosen, that i can't even begin to write about how significant the idea of 'friction' should be in understanding the creation of new enclosures. her use of certain words such as frontiers, conjuring/magic, spectacular accumulation, are also worthy of intimate attention. 'friction' is definitely one of the best ethnographies i have read so far.

[Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have always approached anthropology with a bit of skepticism, for a host of historical (and likely also personal) reasons, but this book really was a beautifully written, accessible introduction to another way of conceiving of both the discipline and human interactions more broadly. That said, many of Tsing's ideas are not entirely original. Her definition of friction, which she is at pains to distinguish from resistance, is close in many ways to Foucault's notion of power as an always unstable and potentially creative series of asymmtetrical force relations. Still, what makes the book worthwhile is its remarkable ability to synthesize and intervene in interdisciplinary debates; to reject tired binaries like macro/micro, universal/particular, etc.; and deftly weave in and out of cases that illustrate, in concrete terms, both the intercultural dynamics and interpretive frames that she is proposing. It's been an invaluable resource.

[Minli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was reading this book on-and-off for a few weeks now, and it's been a few weeks since. I was hoping this would be a more academic, focused book than Friedman's The World is Flat, whose focus on globalization and capitalism is breezy and authoritative. Tsing makes us question globalization's smooth rollout, that universal narrative like manifest destiny in the mid 19th century. She shows us that it's far from inevitable, and with plenty of rich description, ethnography and theoretical analysis, and writes about pockets of societies that have been affected by capitalism.

The problem with Tsing's book is that she is really, no, really really, not writing for a popular audience. This book is for academics and serious enthusiasts only. I liked it, because she was telling me mostly what I wanted to hear and reassured me it was okay to still feel hopeful.

[Terri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book. Does justice to a real account (not just a romanticized version) of the huge amounts of complexities in winning and losing battles for environmental justice...the strange bedfellows, the political opportunities (expected or unexpected), that have to be seized with perfect timing, what's at stake ecologically, culturally, and financially. Exposes some Western myths of "What is the environment," what it means to preserve it" and for whom... and establishes the "vacuous" mountainous regions of Indonesia in question as not simply a part of nature, but a social sphere.

Also interesting is her analysis of the way students, under the Suharto dictatorship, used environmentalist clubs as an "apolitical" way to challenge political and economic repression.

[Ako]

Ms. Tsing took on a heavy duty subject to tackle, however, the writing is encumbered with much too many words, as if she is paraphrasing other works. I think she can reflect much more effectively if she were a bit more direct to the point. Her reflections and explanations involved a maze-like experience. Granted it has been praised as poetic, but it can cause one to lose interest. It would be a pity, if one of those who might just really want to help her cause lose the inspiration. I placed the book down many times for many weeks. I had to take a break from deciphering her book. I don't think I have the appetite to pick it up again.

[Mely]

Reading a few chapters every few months is probably not the best way to approach politically dense ethnographic analysis. I was following the arguments for most of it, but I honestly cannot say whether or not Lowenhaupt Tsing's analysis of the philosophical interdependence of universal and local makes any sense whatsoever. I take it on faith and read on for the bits about middle-aged chemists who construct personal environmentalisms out of Islam and the global environmental movement.

[Adam Hoffritz]

A great ethnography, a must-read for people who want to understand better the global economic process (or globalization) and the affects of capitalism on ordinary people. For anthropology students the book is a treasure chest. Tzing writes about identity, globalization, nature protection, stories, investment dreams (and traces the across continents) and much more. A little bit hard to read but worth it

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best ethnographies I've ever read. Tsing, who works with indigenous people in Borneo, shows the global linkages between logging, mining, multinational corporations and virgin Borneo forest. This book has been instrumental to my development as a graduate student. I only hope I can write a quarter as well as Tsing when I have to write my dissertation!

[Rebecca]

Looking for more realistic follow ups to The World is Flat. This book looks fantastic and particularly catches my eye because Friedman is constantly celebrating this simplistic idea that globalization levels the playing field by crushing international barriers to trade and other "frictions." I like this positive spin on the idea of friction.