Landscape Ecol (2007) 22:157–158
DOI 10.1007/s10980-006-9000-7
BOOK REVIEW
Connectivity and scale in cultural landscapes: A.L. Tsing,
Friction: an Ethnography of Global Connection
Princeton University Press, Princeton, MA, USA. 2005, 321 pp., illus.; 24 cm,
Cloth, ISBN 0-691-12-64, Paper, ISBN 0-691-12065X.
Don McKenzie
Received: 22 February 2006 / Accepted: 27 March 2006 / Published online: 2 May 2006
Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006
The ubiquity of humans as landscape elements is
becoming an increasingly central theme in land-
scape ecology. To understand the complex role of
humans in any landscape, whether semi-natural,
urban, or somewhere in between, we clearly need
to go beyond humans as agents in individual-
based models, components of biomass, or
modules in ecosystem flow diagrams. The social
sciences present alternate paradigms of the hu-
man-landscape connection, broadening and
enriching classic concepts such as connectivity,
scale, and hierarchy. Anna Tsing’s book brings
the traditions and practice of anthropology to the
study of human-dominated landscapes, reworking
those classic concepts (albeit without once men-
tioning landscape ecology) in a study of recent
social, political, cultural, and ecological events in
South Kalimantan, Indonesia.
Friction refers to the imperfect connectivity
between people from different cultures and
socioeconomic strata and between events at glo-
bal vs. local scales. Tsing believes that this friction
is creative—it provides a glue that gives meaning
to economic and cultural interactions. For exam-
ple, in a campaign to save their land base in the
Meratus Mountains of South Kalimantan from
D. McKenzie (&)
Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Lab, USDA Forest
Service, Seattle, Washington 98103, USA
e-mail: donaldmckenzie@fs.fed.us
corporate exploitation, village elders and national
environmental activists were able to work syner-
gistically precisely because of the initial misun-
derstandings arising from their different world
views. Moving this metaphor of friction across
scales (from local to global) and through a hier-
archy of political control in the face of ‘‘global-
ization’’, Tsing aims at a deep explanation of the
rise and fall of economic prosperity in Kaliman-
tan (and Indonesia as a whole) through rapid
exploitation of its natural resource base under the
auspices of globalization and development. Her
method is a redefined ‘‘ethnography’’: instead of
referring to in-depth enumeration of cultural
practices at a specific locale, it now refers to an
accounting of the global array of connections that
yield a specific land-use decision and its conse-
quences.
Each of these connections occurs with a char-
acteristic amount of ‘‘friction’’, in her words
‘‘refusing the lie that global power operates as a
well oiled machine’’. For example, top-down de-
crees in the 1970s awarding timber contracts to
Japanese corporations did not effortlessly trans-
form rainforest biomass into profits. It was only
through the friction generated by the conflicting
agendas of national, regional, and local exploiters
that the trees fell and the wood found its way to
the market. Similarly, mitigation of unsustainable
timber extraction only succeeded through the oft-
conflicting efforts of villagers, regional ‘‘nature
123
158
lovers’’, and national environmental groups. At a
longer temporal scale (decades), these frictions
produced the rise and fall of national prosperity.
In her statement of the purpose of the book,
Tsing writes ‘‘Friction gives purchase to univer-
sals, allowing them to spread as frameworks for
the practice of power... This book tells the story of
how some universals work out in particular times
and places, through the practice of friction.’’ She
devotes each of the three main sections of
the book to a ‘‘universal’’ (ideal?): ‘‘prosperity’’,
‘‘knowledge’’, and ‘‘freedom’’, in succession.
Each is placed in the context of the history of
Kalimantan, and each has a unique realization, in
her view, through the friction among the diverse
elements of Kalimantan society and between it
and the island’s finite resource base. For example,
the ideal, or goal, of prosperity motivates gov-
ernment regulators with their ties to special
interests, the special interests themselves, down to
locals seeking to take advantage of temporary
employment for cash.
Tsing’s prose moves abruptly and often be-
tween the delightfully concrete and the madden-
ingly abstract. As such it can be a difficult read.
She is most lucid when recounting (old-style)
ethnographic detail, as in her descriptions of the
123
Landscape Ecol (2007) 22:157–158
horticultural practices of the Dayak people in
villages of the Meratus Mountains. Other pas-
sages can be opaque, even with multiple readings.
The latter reflect a long-standing tension within
the field of anthropology between those who focus
on epistemology and those who focus on ethnog-
raphy, similar to that between theorists and field-
based ecologists. Tsing seems to ask us to apply
creative friction to reconcile the concrete with the
abstract as the only means to understand the
complex historical phenomena under discussion
in her book. This task is not for the casual reader,
but in my opinion the persistent reader will find
the book very worthwhile. Read the introduction
carefully, and return to it for a refresher after
reading each of the three sections, as if it were the
refrain of a song or poem. The book is not badly
written or disorganized, but the exposition comes
in waves on two different levels. For landscape
ecologists, our notion of a landscape will be
greatly enriched by the author’s conception of a
‘‘forest as a terrain of personal biography and
community history’’, our classic concepts of scale
and hierarchy will be subliminally stretched, and
our capacity for abstraction without equations or
flowcharts will be challenged.