The friction of thinking globally and acting locally

This week I have been accompanied by a book by Anna Tsing called Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connections (2005). Here Tsing unravels a net of relations, including rhetoric, allegories, knowledge, actors and as the title states – their global connections. In chapter 6 she describes how environmental movements attempt to mobilize the general public for a cause and the devices they use in their work. It is the occupation of friction, or “the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” that influences these encounters that her analysis focuses on (2005:4). Friction is needed to create something new, and she derives the concept from an illustration of a wheel which simply just would not cause any motion without the encounter with a surface. Friction can offer creative possibilities for social mobilization, but this requires attention to the “awkwardness of translation” (2005:211).

Translation is a central concept through her analysis. Another characteristic approach is that she performs a symmetrical analysis and focus on heterogeneous perspectives of environmental care and use, and the “remaking [of] ideas, practices, and local, regional, and global histories. Only in this analytically symmetrical treatment can the difference between landscape destruction and the struggle for life shine through.” (2005:212). Just like Tsing, I believe that it is important to attempt to take the field further and not just add another story of disastrous projects of transnational corporations and corrupt politicians. It becomes important to focus on competing environmental perspectives, and to learn about how knowledge moves.

An interesting example which she gives is the description of the “success” of Chico Mendes, the Brazilian rubber tapper union leader. She recounts how an Indonesian activist tells a story to some local villagers that starts out with Mendes and continues with the Chipko movement. “A distinctive feature of the travels of the Chico Mendes story was its travel through the north. It is the story northern environmentalists made of Mendes that became significant elsewhere” (2005:234). With the Chipko movement Tsing illustrates how a social movement can undergo multiple cultural translations (2005:235). These international stories become “social interventions”, as she calls them, which can be compared with “critical interruptions” as Pezzullo (2001) proposes.

Through her field work, Tsing spent a lot of time with different activists. She notices how activists spend much time travelling and in workshops trading stories of success and failure. Activists further borrow allegories, which Tsing calls “charismatic packages” (2005:227). These can be made up of images, songs, morals, organizational plans or stories, and they all speak to the possibilities to making a cause heard. “Traveling packages are translated to become interventions in new scenes where they gather local meanings and find their place as distinctive political interventions.” (2005: 238) Thereby the possibilities to make a cause heard, is dependent on the political and cultural context, or location. The concept translation both speaks to the transformation of a charismatic package to a new context, as well as to the literal interpretation from Indonesian to English for example. By domesticating the foreign a form of translation takes place. Another strategy is to portray environmental damage as being both local and global in order to enrol more actors (2005:217). Her book has a lot to offer to my study since she focuses on travelling forms of activism and knowledge. Nowhere has the use of advances in scientific knowledge as a force for global progress been more evident than in the field of environmental conservation (Tsing 2005:12).

Her analysis has much to offer studies of environmental movements, and especially for those who want to understand what means and methods that are used, and the intersections between the global and the local. She has an intersectionist perspective, and states that “Social justice goals must be negotiated not only across class, race, gender, nationality, culture, and religion, but also between the global south and the global north” (Tsing 2005:13) In Indonesia a public reading of a poem by Taufiq Ismail in 1971 is said to have inaugurated the national environmental movement (Tsing 2005:28). The poem raised the issue of Japanese traders who plundered the wood of the forest. For a time, environmentalism was the only pluralist social justice movement in Indonesia. It became a context to imagine what was politically possible (2005:231). “For most of the this time, the movement imagined itself as coordinating already existing but scattered and disorganized rural complaints. Activists’ jobs, as they imagined it, involved translating subaltern demands into the languages of the powerful, including English.” (Tsing 2005: 17-18)

Tsing deals a lot with universalism in her book, and she claims that these universals manage to mobilize people. “The knowledge that makes a difference in changing the world is knowledge that travels and mobilizes, shifting and creating new forces and agents of history in its path.” (Tsing 2005:8) But it is also important to notice that universals are constantly reformulated through dialogue. “To turn to universals is to identify knowledge that moves – mobile and mobilizing – across localities and cultures” (Tsing 2005:7). Here I cannot help but thinking about the slogan at the Earth Day last year – “Pensando globalmente – actuando localmente”.