It was these concepts that captured the attention of the contributing editors at Cultural Anthropology who participated in this second annual Bateson Book Forum. As the jury noted in announcing Tsing’s book as the winner of the 2016 Gregory Bateson Prize, The Mushroom at the End of the World is “an open-ended polyphonic assemblage that performs in writing the very concepts it generates.” One of the most exciting aspects of Tsing’s work is how she artfully composes the narrative of the book, weaving concepts through short chapters and sections in a way that highlights how knowledge is being assembled in our contemporary world. She describes the way these forms of life create new forms of living, new entanglements, and new temporalities. She is concerned with the mythmaking and haunting that occurs in surprising ways among those engaged in forms of informal, precarious labor. In doing so, she tells stories of science and history, gifts and commodities, as well as freedoms and futures after progress. She focuses the reader’s attention on collaboration in sites on the margins of the globalized world. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s beautifully written ethnography The Mushroom at the End of the Worldevokes the forms of life that emerge in the ruins and fissures-the latent commons-of contemporary capitalism.
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