10.

When the ­Things We Study Respond to Each Other

Tools for Unpacking “ the Material ”

Anna Tsing

This volume sets out a challenge: to explore ­those overlapping meanings of

“material” that confound distinctions between analy­sis and the world. Ma-
terials are scholarly collections (the material for an analy­sis) and the ­things
around us, ­whether in a scholarly collection or not. This is an intriguing
overlap to explore, particularly as the stakes, of late, have changed. Whereas
analysts once agonized over the question, “Are our collections adequate to
know the world?,” we now ask, “Are they lively enough to participate in the
world?” The provocative issue before was repre­sen­ta­tion; now it is anima-
tion. Materials as data join materials as ­things in this provocation.1
Yet we are haunted, too, by our pre­de­ces­sors’ thoughts on repre­sen­ta­tion.
They worried increasingly not just about ­whether they had appropriate
data but also about what they knew from it. The big contributions of the
last thirty years have been more concerned about the apparatuses of repre­
sen­ta­tion than the representativeness of data. Our ability to ask new ques-
tions ­today depends on the brilliant schemes this period pioneered for us for
understanding how the apparatus of data collection becomes knowledge. We
learned about colonial discourse and Foucauldian epistemes; we benefited
from burgeoning new fields, from feminist science studies to decolonial
theory. As inheritors of ­these schemes, our work on animation foregrounds
the apparatus of data collection. Objects, we recognize, emerge through our
apparatuses. Thus, we recognize the liveliness of the material through the
liveliness of our knowledge apparatuses for engaging with it.
Picking up the challenge of animation, however, poses new dilemmas.
Might our attention to the knowledge apparatuses of h ­ uman analysts some-
times overwhelm our ability to notice the liveliness of the material? Taking
animation seriously means allowing material to react to other material, with
­these materials’ own skein of apparatuses, as well as to t­ hose apparatuses
we throw up as analysts. Yet foregrounding only our own apparatus some-
times blocks attention to that par­tic­u­lar form of liveliness. In trying to avoid
frameworks in which true t­ hings are merely “discovered,” we allow ourselves
to identify liveliness only in relation to ­those pro­cesses we initiate. If mate-
rial emerges from our apparatus, the two would be closely paired in one-­
to-­one relations: our apparatus, our material. We leave aside the material
reacting across its varied components; we leave aside nonhuman relational
apparatuses. Some of this prob­lem is addressed in the scholarly turn to mul-
tiplicity, which shows us multiple knowledge apparatuses acting si­mul­ta­
neously. Yet as long as ­human knowledge apparatuses continue to make up
the frame through which we know multiplicity, nonhuman makings never
enter. Identifying h ­ uman apparatuses as technologies and practices of being,
rather than knowledge, might help, but as long as multiple ontologies are
­human multiplicities of enactment, nonhumans remain passive. Might non-
humans also enact multiplicity?2
In this chapter, I worry through this prob­lem by introducing a notion of
“assemblage” that has helped me follow the liveliness of the material, in its
double sense as data and as world. I use this tool in The Mushroom at the End
of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Cap­i­tal­ist Ruins (Tsing 2015), where
I use the assemblage to illuminate both landscape and po­liti­cal economy. In
contrast to purely structural models of capitalism, which tend to be static,
assemblage allows attention to history, conjuncture, and what I have called
“friction,” that is, the unexpected structural effects of historical encounters
(Tsing 2005). In this chapter, I extend the landscape discussion to work on
assemblage at the border between anthropology and science studies. This
allows me to pick one exemplification of the prob­lem of lively material
through a focus on multispecies relations. How, I ask, might we learn to
notice lively encounters among nonhuman beings—­rather than just human-­
nonhuman relations? I mention the political-­economy application to make
it clear that multispecies relations are not the only topic that m ­ atters in ad-
dressing animation; the prob­lem of not letting attention to analysts’ knowl-
edge practices overcongeal the material is equally impor­tant when studying

222 Anna Tsing

human-­centered topics. However, picking a focus helps make the theoretical
issues clear. Since the knowledge apparatus is part of the analyst’s humanity,
can he or she ever move beyond the primary dyad human-­to-­nonhuman?
When in our work are nonhumans allowed to respond to each other, and
not just to h­ uman analysts? My questions are relational: I do not imagine
that material gains vitality all by itself (Bennett 2010). But must all relations,
I ask, begin and end with ­humans?

Anthropos and the Material

The prob­lem of blocking the liveliness of the material is mixed up with the
new anthropos proposed by critics of h ­ uman exceptionalism. Bruno Latour
(2017) nicely articulates this revision: rather than being a master of nature,
the anthropos Latour proposes ­will be ­those “earthbound” creatures that ac-
cept the limitations of a multispecies earth. Yet consider the implications of
an anthropos-­material relationship composed of human-­nonhuman entan-
glements. Although one might argue that this ­frees ­humans from their bur-
den of mastery, it transfers the burden to the nonhumans, who, forever ­after,
come to life only in the embrace of the h­ uman. But why would not the nonhu-
mans be perfectly lively without us? I know the quick answer: at the border
between science and technology studies (sts) and anthropology, theorists
have worked hard to construct alternatives to ­those ­simple ­positivisms in
which ­things speak for themselves, calling out truths that transcend the re-
search apparatus. I agree with this program. But perhaps it is not enough to
posit material that can only respond to a ­human call. Material responds to
other material too. Of course, we know such responses through h ­ uman en-
tanglements; yet to posit that we alone create responsiveness is not enough.
Response is not just a function of ­human dreams and plans.
Consider the major approaches through which theorists have enlivened
other beings. Latour is a cofounder of the actor-­network theory school, which
earned its chops working through prob­lems of the relationship between
­humans and technology.3 Technology is a special kind of material: material
created to respond to ­humans and to form prostheses to satisfy our needs
and desires. While it is perfectly pos­si­ble for social theorists to explore the
histories of copper ores or electromagnetic fields before and outside their
relation to engineers and end users, most theorists of technology are not
particularly interested in such histories. They care about what emerges from
the relationship between ­human intentions and the nonhumans that come
to serve their purposes. I think this is a fine way to approach technology—­

Tools for Unpacking “the Material” 223

but it is not enough to know “the material” more generally. Certainly, when
we get to living beings, other-­than-­human relationships ­matter.
The most prominent approach to bringing living beings into the redefini-
tion of the h ­ uman comes from animal studies, where ethical questions have
helped to reframe the relation between ­humans and nonhumans. If we learn
to imagine animals not as a class of deferent or pesky ­others, but rather as
individuals with whom we can develop a relation of mutual response, we
might open our social lives beyond the h ­ uman as we knew it. Deborah Bird
Rose (2013), Donna Haraway (2007), Thom van Dooren (2014), and Jacques
Derrida (2008) push us in this direction. Through a refocusing of the h ­ uman
self to include animals, we join a multispecies earth. This is helpful, smart,
and radical. But it also captures “the material,” h ­ ere the animal, in the em-
brace of its h ­ uman companions. We know the animal through its dyadic
relations of response with the anthropos, however expanded. Yet one plus
one is not enough, even as it is clear that many ­others make each “one.” ­There
is no tool ­here to follow the responses of the many, each to each other, rather
than just to response-­seeking ­humans.
Let me mention one more approach that has achieved prominence in
anthropology: the new animism. Theorists such as Eduardo Viveiros de
Castro (2015) and Rane Willerslev (2007) have argued for a reopening of the
anthropos through attention to non-­Western and nonmodern ways of know-
ing, inhabiting, and making worlds. In the worlds they describe, other beings
are animate persons, as lively and as social as ­humans. This approach is an
exciting leap out of customary scholarly categories. Yet the necessities of
showing how this leap is done have slanted the analy­sis ­toward cosmological
abstractions as opposed to practical descriptions of animist beings. Rather
than watching the beings interact with each other, most accounts show us
how they inform lines of thought that expand ­human conceptions of our-
selves.4 Analysts’ interest remains with cosmologically intentional ­humans;
other beings are extensions of our hopes and dreams. It is difficult to watch
all ­those promisingly animate beings interact with each other.
Each of t­ hese approaches is inspiring and necessary for addressing my prob­
lem. Taken together, however, they suggest that an irrationally magnified fear
of positivism has taken root at the sts-­anthropology border, blocking atten-
tion to questions concerning the interactions of nonhumans with other non-
humans. Reminding ourselves not to forget the apparatus, we have allowed
its singular logic to take up so much space in the analy­sis that we forget that
other dynamics might also be impor­tant. Perhaps, too, we have picked mod-
els that allow us to obscure this prob­lem. Technology and animals, ­whether

224 Anna Tsing

Western or indigenous, have something in common: they urge us to look
close to our self-­making dreams. Animals are like us, persons indeed, and it
is easy to imagine both intimacy and cosmology through them. Perhaps it is
time to stray into what Michael Marder (2013) calls “plant-­thinking” to draw
us into multispecies relations in which consciousness and intention may not
be the place to start. ­Here, more than two can participate in making worlds,
and none need be ­human.
The challenge is to appreciate the dynamism of the other-­than-­human
world without imagining facts that speak for themselves. Necessarily, the an-
alytic apparatus still ­matters. But rather than limiting oneself to the apparatus
of scientists and social analysts, might we also check out the apparatuses of
nonhuman ­others? To explain this point it is useful to adopt the vocabu-
lary of Karen Barad (2007), who writes of the “agential cuts” that shape the
world—­including what this volume is calling “the material.” Since materials
emerge from world-­making pro­cesses, it makes no sense to Barad to see
them as results of interactions between already-­constituted ­things. Instead,
she argues that materials emerge in “intra-­actions,” actions internal to the
material-­making pro­cess. Through intra-­actions, agential cuts make forms
of materiality pos­si­ble. Her most impor­tant example is physicist Niels Bohr’s
demonstration that light is both a stream of particles and a wave, depend-
ing on the apparatus used to study the light, and thus the agential cut. My
argument ­here is that neither apparatuses nor agential cuts need be ­human.
Might not other beings also make agential cuts, in the sense of introducing
apparatuses that shape the emergence of ­matter and the material?
Let me offer a figure. Proteins take on a formal configuration, a “fold,” in
relation to their intra-­actions; when ribosomal protein and rna bind pro-
teins as functional partners during the formation of the protein building-­
blocks of cells, they introduce an apparatus that enables par­tic­u­lar fold
configurations. Other folds are pos­si­ble, but the agential cut of the rna shapes
the potential for further relational action. The fold is formed in intra-­action.
The material that emerges from the ribosomal activity is in some cases also
­shaped by intra-­actions involving other proteins, “chaperones” of protein
folding, with their agential cuts.5 Of course, we only know this through ad-
ditional apparatuses involving laboratory science, but that hardly erases the
intra-­actions of rna, ribosomes, and proteins. Imagine the choreography of
protein synthesis and you’ll see: agential cuts are more than ­human.
How might an anthropologist go about noticing interactions and intra-­
actions among varied nonhumans—­without falling back into the assump-
tion that truth congeals naturally around t­ hings?6 Ontological approaches to

Tools for Unpacking “the Material” 225

animacy can help us h ­ ere. Enactments of being need not distinguish h­ umans
and nonhumans. We just need to get used to the fact that nonhumans, like
­humans, frame ways of being through their practices. We might call each of
­these frames an apparatus. They interact in what Viveiros de Castro (2004)
calls “equivocations,” that is, moments in which incommensurable frames
occupy the same event; equivocations happen all the time, among nonhu-
mans with each other as well in human-­nonhuman interactions.
To develop this argument in the next sections, I suggest several courses.
First, I address a common objection. Second, I offer practical materials, that
is, the material as it might emerge in anthropological and sts practices.
Third, I show how ­these engage each other in a revitalized concept of the
assemblage. Assemblages are a means to notice constitutive intra-­actions
within the material. Fi­nally, I offer a few examples from recent collaborative
fieldwork in central Jutland.

H
­ umans Are ­Human?
Before ­going further, let me address the most common riposte I hear to
suggestions that social analysts might study relational dynamics among
nonhumans. “How would we even know about such interactions,” my in-
terlocutors ask, “except through our ­human ways of knowing?” The thought
­here is correct. As I am a h ­ uman, every­thing I do and imagine must be
­human—­including my grasp of interspecies interactions. But consider the
narrowing of the scope of analy­sis ­here: every­thing ­humans know and do
is ­human. This tautology is hardly sufficient for understanding anything.
It defines “­human” as a limit, not an open-­ended quest; it denies the trans-
formative power of training, intimacy, experience, or prosthetics. It makes
learning a joke, since we have established our encapsulation before asking
a question.
Consider the ordinary procedures of humanist anthropology. When I did
ethnographic research in the Meratus Mountains of Kalimantan, Indonesia,
I worked hard to develop a working knowledge of Meratus Dayak language,
history, and culture (see Tsing 1995). This did not transform me into a Mera-
tus person, but it did allow me to attune myself to what was ­going on enough
to get some significant glimpses of local dynamics. The same procedure is
pos­si­ble with nonhumans. I train myself; I hang out with my subjects; I do
not refuse the help of prosthetics such as microscopes. My goal is to learn
practices of attunement through which I can sense local dynamics. As in

226 Anna Tsing

ethnographic research, I expect to be wrong a lot of the time, especially at
first; I start again and practice u ­ ntil I sense that my hesitant attunements are
working.
This is a practice of honing agilities. Haraway’s (2007) discussion of agility
training with her dog, Cayenne, is just right for thinking through this prob­
lem. “Agility” is a game in which the w ­ oman guides the dog through obsta-
cles. Haraway is in training in this pro­cess as well as Cayenne. Only when the
­woman learns to attune herself to the dog can she offer signals Cayenne can
understand. ­Here I extend the term “agility” to refer to historically shifting
talents, across species. In this sense, e­ very living being has agilities, ­whether
­human or not, and we all are engaged in practices of interspecies attunements,
although not necessarily with ­humans. As we train, we transform, becoming
something not outside our species, but still more than a static species enclo-
sure. We attune to new relations and apparatuses with which we had not been
familiar before; we continue to impose our own, but we aim to keep them
open enough to work well with t­ hose of ­others. So, yes, h­ uman is ­human, and,
no, this does not mean we must simply gaze at our navels.
Sometimes, in seeking t­ hose fragile attunements, it is impor­tant to con-
trast ­human ways of being with ­others. Many lichens grow slowly and age
not at all; I age quickly in comparison (Pringle 2017). Such contrasts can be
helpful. But to use contrasts as an excuse for not getting to know the other
seems to me as bad as excluding immigrants ­because they ­haven’t yet trained
themselves in your country’s lifeways.
Just which kinds of training are most relevant to appreciating interspe-
cies dynamics? Leaving this question open is impor­tant to me. One might
want to develop vernacular agilities of many kinds—­from indigenous cos-
mology to criminal arts—as well as fluency in vari­ous elite discourses and
official sciences. It is in layering ­these forms of training that social analysts
might ask about interspecies dynamics without taking for granted scien-
tific authority. Furthermore, t­ here is something about the challenge of our
time—­the pos­si­ble destruction of planetary livability—­that might require
uncomfortable juxtapositions of ghosts and geology, science and science
fiction, the mundane and the monstrous. Varied genre experiments seem
in order (see Tsing et al. 2017 for more on this). This chapter’s step-­by-­
step exposition—­somewhere between a handyperson’s guide and a travel
memoir—is just one of varied semivernacular modes of telling more-­than-­
human sociality.

Tools for Unpacking “the Material” 227

 Material Practices
Three interventions, all arrived at collaboratively, have guided my thinking
about how to get into the material without so shadowing it with my own
body that its internal dynamics dis­appear. The first is direct observation.
Anthropologists and sts scholars are not afraid of direct observation of
­human beings. When we learn from participant observation, we do not ac-
cuse ourselves of positivism. We imagine that we can make the fieldwork
situation part of our analy­sis.
The same should be true for direct observation of nonhumans. It is fasci-
nating to me that so many sts scholars refuse to learn anything themselves
about the research objects of the scientists they study. They talk to the sci-
entists, and they follow their knowledge work—­but they erect a wall against
the nonhuman objects of the study, except as the scientists relate them. The
same is true in one wing of the anthropology of the environment: anthropol-
ogists report what other ­people (e.g., residents, conservationists) say about
the environment, but they refuse to get to know anything about the natu­ral
world themselves. It’s as if touching a nonhuman so contaminates the ana-
lyst with positivist truth claims that it has become taboo to even look. This
is silly.
It takes ­great machines and laboratories to attend to some parts of the
nonhuman world, but t­here are plenty of other t­hings that can be studied
using methods that are not so dif­fer­ent from what anthropologists use in
fieldwork. The work of field biology, for example, is quite similar to ethnog-
raphy: it involves watching and describing the social relations the analyst
finds. In my study of matsutake mushrooms, I tracked commercial and eco-
logical relations through related techniques (Tsing 2015). I talked to ­people;
I looked at forests and camps and supply lines; I put together histories from
their ­human and nonhuman traces. Elsewhere, I have described some of the
ways of looking at the landscape that, it seems to me, contribute to a more-­
than-­human anthropology (Tsing 2012). None of the methods I describe for
nonhumans (e.g., looking at form, watching social gatherings) deviate radi-
cally from ­those well known to ethnographers. And while they expand the
discussions we might have about knowledge practices, they do not force my
hand in the direction of positivism.
I had help learning to imagine direct observation as a tool for noticing
multispecies dynamics, and my debts to Andrew Mathews (e.g., 2017) and
Zachary Caple (e.g., 2017) are particularly strong. Mathews showed me how
to read the social history of forests through form. Caple has pioneered ways
to combine natu­ral history and ethnographic technique, making such a

228 Anna Tsing

combination seem pos­si­ble. My collaboration with ­these scholars gives me
the confidence to break the taboo: we can appreciate the liveliness of the
material in part by getting to know it better through fieldwork.
My second methodological intervention also derives from collabora-
tion, in this case with Elaine Gan. It is to attune oneself to time as a way of
identifying both ­human and nonhuman responsiveness. Gan and I have
developed a concept of “coordination” to watch the intra-­actions of the
material (Gan and Tsing n.d.). “Coordinations,” as we use the term, are non-
centralized temporal responses across difference. They allow us to watch
action and emergence without requiring intentional communication or mu-
tual legibility among participants. World making can proceed with or with-
out planning, and privileging intentionality as the basis of responsiveness
too often brings us back to ­human lifeworlds. Coordination, in contrast,
allows us to acknowledge the incommensurable ontics of vari­ous beings at
the same time as we watch the becomings they sponsor in their encounters.
As Gan explains elsewhere:

Temporality [is] a series of coordinations across incommensurabili-

ties or qualitatively dif­fer­ent ontologies. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s
concept of a manifold or an assemblage of rhizomatic becomings . . . ​,
coordinations arise out of multiple trajectories that may be considered
as sequences and thresholds for intimacy and immensity, continuity
and change. Coordinations are not coincidental occurrences, or t­ hings
that just happen to occur si­mul­ta­neously. Coordinations emerge from
sequences that sediment, recur, endure, echo, extinguish, and lie dor-
mant. From ­these variations, and intersections between variations, a
specific attunement unfolds and recurs. M ­ atter and milieux become
and remember through a manifold of temporalities, or a coordination
across historically constituted differences that conjugate and concrete.
(N.d., 2–3)

Our case takes us to Japa­nese peasant forests, where h

­ umans, pines, oaks,
and matsutake mushrooms coordinate in making a space that is livable for
all of t­hese. Farmers cut oaks for firewood and charcoal; oaks sprout from
their stumps, becoming stable features of the architecture of the forest. The
open forest of coppiced oaks makes way for pine, which without h ­ uman dis-
turbance would not enter t­ hese forests. Pine, in turn, grows with matsutake
mushrooms, which feed from the roots while supplementing the trees with
nutrients. ­Humans appreciate the fungal reproductive bodies as a gourmet
food. ­These coordinations make a forest. Furthermore, we show how they

Tools for Unpacking “the Material” 229

are part of contingent histories, both h ­ uman and not ­human. ­These coordi-
nations are ­shaped by industrialization, war, and urbanization, on the one
hand, and introduced species, climate change, and disease, on the other.
­Humans are part of the story, but h ­ umans do not make the story. To work
with coordinations as a guide allows multiple protagonists to emerge in the
heart of the material.
My third methodological intervention, already suggested in the
matsutake-­forest case, is to ground research and analy­sis in a landscape.7
A landscape is the sediment of h ­ uman and nonhuman activities, biotic and
abiotic, both meaningful and constructed without intent. Landscapes are
active lifeworlds, held by material traces and legacies, yet open to emerging
forms and possibilities. I follow ecologists in making difference a key prop-
erty of my “landscapes”: a landscape can be at any scale, but it always involves
a diversity of patches. A patchwork of farms and forests is a landscape, but so
too is a leaf on which insects and fungi have created micro­ecologies. Think-
ing with landscapes opens analy­sis to a constrained multiplicity. The mate-
rial expands to include the relationships that make places and niches. But it
need not open so far as to require every­thing to enter the analy­sis. This is
key to the challenge of rethinking the material for nonhuman-­to-­nonhuman
analy­sis.
Consider again why the material so often seems just one ­thing in its rela-
tion to the anthropos. An abstract relation involves two: ­here, the analyst
and the material. The dyadic distinction between anthropos and material is
confirmed merely by abstraction. In contrast, if we reintroduce the landscape
of the material, every­thing changes. A relation grounded on a landscape is
suddenly crowded by other relations, which demand to be told. The material
becomes multiple, and its components are engaged in their own constitutive
interrelations. The converse is equally impor­tant. It is difficult to abstract all
the relationships that form a landscape. More and more crowd in, and the
mathe­matics of responsiveness becomes increasingly arcane. A landscape is
easier to h­ andle in its concreteness—­not as a set of dyads in a vacuum but
within the geographic and historical contours that give it a par­tic­u­lar com-
position and character. This is its strength as an analytic tool.
My alertness to landscape owes much to conversations with Heather
Swanson, who showed me that ­water as well as land grounds the analy­sis of
more-­than-­human sociality (e.g., Swanson 2014). Swanson’s study of salmon
required attention to two radically dif­fer­ent waterscapes: the river in which
salmon are born and to which they return to spawn, and the open sea where
they spend most of their adult lives. By taking each of ­these waterscapes

230 Anna Tsing

s­ eriously—as well as the land around the ­water—­she shows multiple inter-
locutors for salmon, including both h
­ umans and nonhumans of varied sorts.
Rather than abstracting human-­salmon relations, she grounds them in the
worlds salmon make. The material emerges from t­hese land-­and water-
scapes rather than performing atop them.

Assemblages: Unpacking the Material

­These three methods come together in enabling a concept of the assem-
blage. The assemblage is a tool for exploring the constitutive dynamics of
landscapes. My assemblages are coordinations across varied ways of being—­
human and not h ­ uman, living and not living, and in and outside of En-
lightenment practices. Through investigating landscape-­based gatherings
of coordinations, fieldwork might loosen the falsely ­imagined unity of the
material in its relation to the apparatus of analytic investigation.
My use of the term “assemblage” draws from both ecol­ogy and social
theory. Ecologists speak of “species assemblages,” characteristic gatherings
of species. The term moves beyond the fixed and bounded connotations of
ecological “community.” “Assemblage” keeps open questions of how the
varied species in a species assemblage influence each other. Some species
are predators or prey; ­others compete with each other; still ­others help each
other out in mutualistic relations. Furthermore, species come and go. As-
semblages are open-­ended gatherings. They allow us to ask about commu-
nal effects without assuming them. They show us potential histories in the
making.
Neither species nor organisms, however, are the best units for the as-
semblages I propose. Even where living beings are key ele­ments of the as-
semblage, I want to see identities coalesce in the assemblage, and so I cannot
write their contours into preexisting units. Instead, I watch gatherings of
“ways of being.” Species identification can be a good clue to the ways of
being of living t­ hings, but it is only one clue. We know this well for h
­ umans.
Farmers and scientists “do” landscapes differently, despite belonging to a
single species, ­because of their ways of being, which are ­shaped by hab-
its and legacies we gloss as “culture” and “history.” Habits and legacies are
equally relevant to the lives of other species. An organism in one environ-
ment may be a peaceable companion to its neighbors; out of that setting, it
may become a virulent destroyer. Species identifications are not enough to
know such ways of being, which draw me into environmental histories and
micro­ecologies.

Tools for Unpacking “the Material” 231

 The concept of ways of being also brings me into social theory. I’m inter-
ested in assemblages as sets of coordinations across difference, that is, across
situations in which one partner in a coordination may operate quite differ-
ently than another, and without mutual legibility. Following Helen Verran,
it may be useful to call such strategies of existence “ontics.” Verran contrasts
everyday ways of being, ontics, with philosophies of being, “ontologies.”8
Ontics ­under the abstracting gaze of reflection become ontology; ontologi-
cally in­ter­est­ing practices in life, in contrast, are ontics. For Verran, both
terms refer to h ­ uman apparatuses. Th ­ ere is no reason I can think of, how-
ever, not to extend ontics to nonhumans. (Ontology may be more difficult:
do nonhumans have their own philosophies?) Assemblages, then, group dis-
crepant ontics, ­human and not ­human. They allow us to ask about response
and interaction without ontological unity. And thus, too, they sponsor in-
quiries into forms of ontological multiplicity in which ­humans are not the
only ones with apparatuses of agential cuts.
Other social theorists use the term “assemblage” differently. The two most
common usages of which I am aware are to mean discursive formations
(Ong and Collier 2005) or to mean actor-­networks (Latour 2007). Each of
­these uses has quite dif­fer­ent goals and promises than the one I promote
­here. And while I suppose it is an act of g­ reat hubris to try to get a word to
mean what you as opposed to ­others want, the term is not so set in stone yet
that it seems to me unmovable, nor is it a keystone in e­ ither of the frame-
works I just mentioned. Furthermore, the fact that “assemblage” is used as
the En­glish translation of phi­los­o­pher Gilles Deleuze’s agencement (Phillips
2006) only helps me—by providing a wide field of interpretation in which
the main constraint is allegiance to undoing constraint.
One way of specifying my variant is to add the qualifier “polyphonic.”
­Here’s how I explained that qualifier in my recent book:

Polyphony is ­music in which autonomous melodies intertwine. In

Western ­music, the madrigal and the fugue are examples of poly­
phony. ­These forms seem archaic and strange to many modern listen-
ers ­because they ­were superseded by ­music in which a unified rhythm
and melody holds the composition together. In the classical ­music that
displaced baroque, unity was the goal; this was “pro­gress” in just the
meaning I have been discussing: a unified coordination of time. In
twentieth-­century rock-­and-­roll, this unity takes the form of a strong
beat, suggestive of the listener’s heart; we are used to hearing ­music
with a single perspective. When I first learned polyphony, it was a rev-

232 Anna Tsing

 elation in listening; I was forced to pick out separate, simultaneous
melodies and to listen for the moments of harmony and dissonance
they created together. This kind of noticing is just what is needed
to appreciate the multiple temporal rhythms and trajectories of the
assemblage.
For ­those not musically inclined, it may be useful to imagine the
polyphonic assemblage in relation to agriculture. Since the time of
the plantation, commercial agriculture has aimed to segregate a single
crop and work t­oward its simultaneous ripening for a coordinated
harvest. But other kinds of farming have multiple rhythms. In the
shifting cultivation I studied in Indonesian Borneo, many crops grew
together in the same field, and they had quite dif­fer­ent schedules. Rice,
bananas, taro, sweet potatoes, sugarcane, palms, and fruit trees min-
gled; farmers needed to attend to the varied schedules of maturation
of each of t­hese crops. ­These rhythms ­were their relation to h ­ uman
harvests; if we add other relations, for example, to pollinators or other
plants, rhythms multiply. The polyphonic assemblage is the gathering
of ­these rhythms, as they result from world-­making proj­ects, ­human
and not ­human. (Tsing 2015, 23–24)

To work with assemblages, then, requires habits of noticing. Th

­ ese are key
to a richer engagement with the material in which materials interact with
each other as well as with us. The best way to show you what I mean is to
move into some small examples.

Multispecies Assemblages in the Ruins of Industrial Mining

In my current work with the Aarhus University Research on the Anthro-
pocene (aura) working group, we have convened a team of researchers to
take a look at landscapes both ­shaped by and exceeding the design of ­human
activities. Our current site is an abandoned mining area in central Jutland,
Denmark (Tsing and Bubandt 2018; Tsing 2017). During and ­after World
War II, brown coal was dug from beneath the ground and sold for industrial
energy. Mining ceased in the 1970s, leaving the area full of lakes—­that is,
holes where brown coal was removed—­and sand dunes, the piled overbur-
den. The area was difficult for living ­things ­because mining had unearthed
layers of pyrite-­rich clay, which oxidized to sulfuric acid. Furthermore, the
sand piles ­were unstable, and underground slides made it too dangerous for
­human development. Trees w ­ ere planted in some places; however, compared

Tools for Unpacking “the Material” 233

to most of Denmark, a low bar for landscape management was envisaged. In
this promisingly “wild” terrain, members of our research group have asked
about how materials interact with each other.
For my own part in the research, I have made fungi a guide to assem-
blages emerging from the acid sands. This has been made pos­si­ble by the
generous assistance of mycologists Henning Knudsen and Mikako Sasa,
who have guided me. I have worked with a small team including Elaine Gan,
Thiago Cardoso, Pierre du Plessis, and Nathalia Brichet. We are a fragment
of a larger group of researchers who often circulate across proj­ects.9 This
wealth of researchers, with our varied disciplinary skills and commitments,
does not make ­things easy. This is not normal science. We work around and
against each other. Are sporadic and anecdotal observations significant? To
what extent should our apparatus of research and analy­sis be essential to our
deliberations? Our research is a negotiation of such questions, and thus of
our relation with the material.
Two research prob­lems have emerged for me. First, what grows up in
­these ruins? Almost every­thing alive and bigger than a microbe was wiped
out; plants and animals had to start all over. Second, I am interested in
the constant (if irregular) more-­than-­human disturbance that shapes the
place. Our site is a place to study “bare-­ground ecohistories,” that is, histo-
ries in which ­humans and nonhumans have each worked to remake a radi-
cally altered landscape anew.10 Both ­humans and nonhumans are historical
actors; neither succeed as intentional designers, planning neatly managed
landscapes. ­Human disturbances include the unintended results of ac-
tivities (e.g., mining) in which landscape consequences are given hardly
a thought. In this, h ­ umans are rather similar to other aggressive species
on the landscape. On the postmining Brown Coal Beds, weedy lodgepole
pines and overcrowded red deer have each had major landscape effects. Each
of ­these—­humans, lodgepoles, and red deer—­might be said to be churning
the landscape, rather than limiting their disturbances to just one instance.
The assemblages I trace are the result of this multispecies churning, with its
multiple agential cuts.
Let me take you to a few small examples of the coordinations through
which assemblages form in this place. First, bare-­ground ecohistories: trees
are able to establish themselves on the overburden sand dunes ­because of
the help of ectomycorrhizal fungi, that is, fungi that gather nutrients hidden
within the comparatively barren sand and make them accessible to the roots
of trees (Gan and Tsing 2018). This is particularly noteworthy for exotic spe-
cies, such as lodgepole pine, brought to Denmark without their favorite fun-

234 Anna Tsing

 Paxillus mushrooms in the sand piles. Photo­graph by
FIGURE 10.1.  ​
Elaine Gan, used by permission.

gal companions. Lodgepole is a North American species, but it grows fast

and furiously in the Brown Coal Beds. This is ­because it has been successful
in working with open-­minded local fungi, that is, ones that are not too picky
about their tree hosts. In figure 10.1 we see lodgepole (in the background),
whose roots encroach on bare sand through the help of Paxillus involutus,
perhaps the most ubiquitous ectomycorrhizal fungus in Denmark.
What kind of anthropology is this to notice pines and fungi, working to-
gether? In the terms I have set out h ­ ere, mycorrhizas form an apparatus for
coordination. Pines and fungi have quite dif­fer­ent ways of being; that they
form joint structures is an instance of the productiveness of the assemblage.
­There is certainly communication between root and fungus, but not mutual
intelligibility. The analy­sis ­here might take up the prob­lem of divergent on-
tics joined in the coordinations of the assemblage. Of course, my noticing is
not irrelevant to the analy­sis. But its goal is to articulate with the apparatuses
within the material, rather than to assume that only the interface between
my apparatus and the material, ­imagined as a homogeneous ­thing, m ­ atters.
Apparatus is a practice-­based concept; it does not depend on cognitive in-
tention. Mycorrhiza is an apparatus in the same way that fieldwork is. Both
m­ atter.
Assemblages modify landscapes, in part through their interaction with
other assemblages. In figure 10.2 the foregrounded mushrooms are coconut-­
scented Lactarius, a fungus that grows mainly with the roots of birch. If you

Tools for Unpacking “the Material” 235

 Lactarius growing with birch ­under a lodgepole canopy.
FIGURE 10.2.  ​
Photo­graph by Anna Tsing.

follow the photo­graph back, t­oward the center you can see the light blush
of leaves of the ­little birch tree to whose roots the mushrooms are attached.
The exciting ­thing about finding this arrangement, for me, involved the
fact that this small birch tree was growing in the m ­ iddle of a well-­developed
lodgepole pine forest—­a place that is far too shady for the happy establish-

236 Anna Tsing

ment of birch. But with the help of the fungus, the birch is hanging on. The
birch survives ­because of the fungus; the assemblage is the starting unit for
collaborative survival—­and thus world making. The landscape is an as-
semblage of assemblages—­here lodgepoles and birches, each with nurturing
fungi, each working to establish ways of being through available coordina-
tions. Through such apparatuses, materials respond to materials, and worlds
are made.
Each set of organisms adds its own agilities—­its apparatuses for world
making. Each works with and against the ­others. ­Human tree planters
brought the first lodgepoles, which took off beyond their wildest dreams.
The new forests sprang up just as another ecological history was unfolding
in Jutland: the return of the red deer. Red deer occupied Jutland ­after the
last retreat of the glaciers, but they w ­ ere increasingly reduced by hunting
and landscape change; some three hundred years ago, free-­roaming red deer
­were killed off to protect farms. In the last twenty-­five years, as farms have
been abandoned, red deer have wandered back. The Søby Brown Coal Beds
have been a refuge for them ­because ­human presence is limited by the insta-
bility of the sand. Furthermore, as soon as they made their presence known,
hunters began buying up the land and encouraging reproduction by pro-
viding extra food. Red deer populations exploded. ­Every eve­ning, the deer
come out to eat grass or farmers’ crops. During the day, the deer are crowded
in the comparatively nontasty forests. As one hunter explained, the deer bite
the trees’ bark not ­because they like it but ­because “they are bored.”
Deer-­damaged trees die, sometimes allowing other species to succeed
them. Fungi take part. Damaged trees are quickly infected by parasitic and
decomposing fungi, which are often responsible for the final blow. H ­ ere
too is coordination and landscape making, although in unpredictable fits
and starts. Assemblages emerge from all the practice-­based apparatuses of
coordination on the scene: red deer boredom, tree vulnerability, fungal appe-
tites, and the availability of successor trees waiting in the undergrowth. Fig-
ure 10.3 shows a deer-­damaged willow (see the bite mark at the lower end).
It is infected with Crepidotus (the hanging white caps), which consumes the
dead and ­dying wood.
This scene of multispecies coordinations was not designed by the deer,
nor does it add up to a self-­regulating ecological system. It is part of the eco-
logical history of this place, with its crowded deer populations. It is a distur-
bance caused by deer churning. In the same way, h ­ umans have not designed
this landscape, but ­human churning—­including feeding the deer, which
gives rise to crowding—is key. Churning, ­whether of ­humans, deer, or trees,

Tools for Unpacking “the Material” 237

 Crepidotus growing on deer bites on willow. Photo­graph
FIGURE 10.3.  ​
by Elaine Gan, used by permission.

makes landscapes historical rather than static. And the way to appreciate
this history is through noticing the apparatuses of the nonhumans as well as
the ­humans. Our apparatuses succeed to the extent they expand to coordi-
nate with ­those of ­others.
Material responds to material, not just to us.

238 Anna Tsing

 Making the Most of Awkward Relations
Cultural anthropologists who never read scientific journals may make the
­mistake of seeing the preceding section as a form of natu­ral science. In
fact, however, the natu­ral history description I just gave is not intelligible
as scholarship in the natu­ral sciences, just as it equally falls outside of most
definitions of the humanities. Yet ­there is something to be said for occupy-
ing the productive seams between varied intellectual trajectories. By “seam,”
I am thinking of the vis­i­ble line in a stream where two or more currents of
­water hit each other without fully merging. This is a place where fish make
use of quiet pockets formed within the turbulence to lie in wait for the foods
drawn by each current. Seams of this sort do not cordon off fixed fields;
they open possibilities for what Marilyn Strathern calls “awkward relations”
(1987) and “partial connections” (1991). H ­ ere it is pos­si­ble to both hold apart
conventions and, si­mul­ta­neously, imagine what might happen if they mixed
and melded.
The seam I try to work in the previous section is that between obser-
vation and history. Observation is a perfectly respectable concept in the
natu­ral sciences, but to make it part of scholarship, it ordinarily must be
pulled into some kind of systems thinking in which ahistorical natu­ral laws
can be seen in action. As one ecologist explained to me, she loves fieldwork
for its natu­ral history observations, but when it comes time to publish an
article, she must turn to “theory,” which, for her, refers to systems model-
ing in which observations can be removed from their moments of contin-
gent connection to speak to general, mechanical princi­ples that sustain the
world. While in the nineteenth ­century natu­ral history in itself seemed a
contribution to science, by the early twentieth ­century biologists had found
a way to remove history from their analyses, thus establishing laws. History
is a chain of unrepeatable events and connections; by removing history, the
life scientists i­magined they might find something more solid and stable.
Meanwhile, the humanities have become the home for the unrepeatable,
the qualitative, and the anecdotal—­that is, the historical. Yet by focusing on
­those abilities i­ magined as separating h
­ umans from other living beings, such
as language, cognition, and reflection, the humanities have had less interest
in observation, especially when it comes to nonhumans. It is this divergence
that creates a productive seam across history and observation.
Anthropological fieldwork has been one site for negotiating this seam,
at least when it comes to observing ­human practices. During fieldwork,
anthropologists are alert for what p ­ eople do as well as what they say. Even
before the recent anthropological interest in nonhumans, the discipline

Tools for Unpacking “the Material” 239

encouraged attention to practices and the differences they make in shaping
socie­ties over time. This chapter has suggested that we extend this courtesy
to nonhumans. By following nonhuman practices and agilities, we might
extend our already developed questions of how practice-­based apparatuses
of knowledge and being make a difference. ­Toward that goal, this chapter
has focused on methods. By careful attention to landscapes as sites of co-
ordinations, it becomes pos­si­ble to construct a new kind of ecological his-
tory in which nonhumans as well as ­humans build worlds. One key to this
is to see that nonhumans, like ­humans, create worlds through apparatuses,
including t­ hose historically changing talents I call “agilities.” In learning to
appreciate more-­than-­human agilities, with their potential for intra-­active
agential cuts, we have a chance to see what happens when the t­hings we
study respond to each other.
The result, I am arguing, may not be an easy revision of disciplinary
practice but rather a negotiation of awkward relations. Still, it is h ­ ere that
we learn to occupy the “slow science” of reflection and reworking that
Isabelle Stengers has taught us to appreciate: “to accept what is messy not
as a defect but as what we have to learn to live and think in and with”
(2018, 120).

Notes
1. I am grateful to Knut Nustad for soliciting this chapter, and to the participants
of the Engaging the Material workshop for their comments. Animation provocation:
In addition to the more-­than-­human scholarship discussed ­here, I am thinking of
Ingoldian phenomenology, “new materialism,” the ontological turn, and vari­ous other
attempts to bring ­things to the center of social inquiry. (See, for example, Ingold 2013;
Bennett 2010; Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2006.)
2. For multiple ontologies, see Mol 2002; Lien 2015. Sebastion Abrahamsson, Filipo
Bertoni, and Annemarie Mol’s (2015) consideration of relational materialism is helpful
for the issues I explore ­here; my addition is to include relations that are not initiated
by ­humans.
3. Latour (2007) offers a methodological introduction.
4. I find exceptions to this generalization in the writings of Richard Nelson (1983)
and Eduardo Kohn (2013), who offer closely observed histories of the animate beings
of indigenous worlds.
5. This discussion of protein synthesis derives from personal conversations with
biologist Bente Vestergaard, who also generously made suggestions about this
paragraph.
6. In this chapter, I move in and out of Baradian intra-­action—­depending on the
historical action I highlight. I need interaction (which begins with congealed products
of intra-­action) as well as intra-­action to show materials responding to each other.

240 Anna Tsing

 7. “Landscape” is a term that must be redefined and reclaimed in order to be useful
­ ere. ­After cultural geographers turned against landscape as an exemplification of
h
Western objectification, as in Eu­ro­pean “landscape painting,” anthropologists stopped
­doing anything of much interest with the term. My attempts to reclaim the term begin
with Kenneth Olwig’s (1996) discussion of the Nordic genealogy of landscape as a
moot, a gathering to discuss ­things of importance. My landscapes are heterogeneous
sites of assemblage, in which assemblage is a moot of ­human and nonhuman ways
of being. Many ­things of importance coalesce, ­whether intentionally or not. This
approach allows dialogue with ecologists’ “landscape,” a heterogeneous ecological
matrix. “History” is another term I redefine and reclaim. My histories are more-­than-­
human tracks and traces and stories about them. Progress-­oriented teleology is only
one kind of history, and hardly the most impor­tant one for learning about landscapes.
8. I understood the contrast most clearly from Verran’s pre­sen­ta­tion at a University
of California, Davis, Sawyer Seminar (Verran 2013), but see also Verran (2001).
9. Our team includes Nils Bubandt, Rachel Cypher, Maria Dahm, Natalie Forssman,
Peter Funch, Frida Hastrup, Colin Hoag, Mathilde Højrup, Thomas Kristensen, Katy
Overstreet, Pil Pedersen, Meredith Root-­Bernstein, Jens-­Christian Svenning, Heather
Swanson, Line Thorsen, and Stine Vestbo.
10. In choosing the term “bare-­ground ecohistories,” I wrestle with a conversation
ecologists have started on “novel ecosystems” (Hobbs, Higgs, and Harris 2009). The
latter term is used against ecological restoration, since advocates refuse to discrimi-
nate against any kind of disturbance; this seems irresponsible. The term’s intellectual
prob­lems are equally pressing. What is novel, and what is not? When can we assume
the stable and self-­regulating features of a system? In contrast, the term “bare-­ground
ecohistory” admits to anthropogenic alternation but does not assume that self-­regulating
sustainability ­will follow.

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