By the book
20th century anthropological text credited with being the first in its genre.
What is Argonauts of the Western Pacific?
According one article from this quarter, they could help humanity get to Mars.
Who are anthropologists?
On this 1990s hit, you can find Mulder and Scully trying to find answers to the unexplained -- and sometimes confronting the realities of modernist conceptualizations of progress and extractive value.
What is the X-Files?
(see Season 1, Episode 20, "Darkness Falls"*)
Although often carrying a negative connotation, Tsing suggests that this is a form of encounter with generative implications.
What is contaimination?
Where astronaut Sally Ride famously went in 1983.
What is space (or low earth orbit)?
A story of science and monsters.
What is Forecasts?
Unlike Ozymandias and J. Robert Oppenheimer, they make worlds along with human beings.
Who are nonhumans organisms?
What is public anthropology?
Systems of knowledge such as science and cosmology that contextualize how we determine what we know and on what basis.
What are epistemologies?
The only continent we haven't read about this quarter.
What is Antartica?
A project on pungent organisms and the process of commodification.
What is The Mushroom at the End of the World?
This archetypal character is deliberately absent from the Forecasts narrative.
Who are villains?
Building off of their work with Matsutake Worlds, Elaine Gan and Anna Tsing co-authored an article about the use of these kinds of drawings as a way of visualizing assemblages.
What are diagrams?
(see Gan and Tsing 2018, "How Things Hold"*)
Although used colloquially to describe a state of estrangement, in a historical-materialist definition it describes the fragmentation of social relations by capitalist ones.
What is alienation?
City whose local climate policies and eco-friendly demonstration homes we explored in class.
What is Seattle?
(or Manchester)
A book about writing ethnography from the perspective of an anthropologist with an unexpected passion for Chekov
What is Alive in the Writing?
According to Elizabeth Chin, they are social citizens of a capitalist society who are oblivious to commodity, alienation, and consumption,
Who are children?
(see My Life with Things, 2016).
An approach to planning that does not rely on reaching a specified target but avoiding a possible outcome.
What is future perfect planning?
(see Knox 2020, 165).
A conceptual framework coined by Edward Said to describe how categories of "the West" are created and defined in relation to "the rest" and the implications for conceptualizing difference.
What is Orientalism?
Liminal zone where you can see biopolitics at work.
What are geo-political borders?
Discusses the use of demonstration homes to model ways of living in new technological and environmental contexts.
What is Thinking Like a Climate?
A person made real by the system of knowledge and evidence that produced them.
Who is Vera the spy?
(see My Life as a Spy*)
An experimentation in ethnographic film emphasizing experiential rather than intellectual ways of knowing.
What is Leviathan?
In their books, both Tsing and Knox discuss the formation of different kinds of these and how they might help us live in the context of climate change and ruin.
What are personhoods?
(see Knox on responsive personhood and Tsing on the co-creation of forests and people.)
Where an ethnographer might be found.
What is where the people are (or, nearly anywhere)?