Katz Colloquium: Anna Tsing, "What is History? Or, the Life and Times of Water Hyacinth"

Debates about the meaning and role of “history” in anthropology have characterized the discipline since its inception.  This lecture revisits some of these debates to consider how anthropologists might better incorporate the contingent and transformative abilities of other species into our stories of what happened.  Can “history” make room for multiple ontologies?  To show how articulations across varied human and non-human agendas forge unexpected paths, the talk considers how the infamous weed plant water hyacinth has tracked and haunted colonial and neocolonial water engineering across the world.

Anna Tsing is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  She is also Niels Bohr Professor at Aarhaus University in Denmark, where she codirects Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA). Tsing is well-known for her far-reaching and interdisciplinary work in the environmental humanities and ethnography, exploring not only how the Anthropocene extinguishes life, but also how to gives way to new modes of living. She is author of The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015) and co-editor of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017). Together with Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman-Saxena, and Feifei Zhou, she is co-editing Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene, forthcoming in 2020.