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Landscapes are sites of struggle for many ways of being, human and nonhuman. This paper draws attention to weedy landscapes as places for anthropologists to get to know the Anthropocene, in all its heterogeneity. Weeds are creatures of human disturbance, and the forms they take depend on the kind of disturbance and the kind of unmanagement that follows. Weeds guide us to coordinations between human and nonhuman projects of world making—as exemplified, in this paper, by 'the dream of the stag,' an axis linking the imaginations of red deer and hunters, who are both opportunistic interlopers in the research site. The research concerns the weedy 'auto-rewilding' of a former brown coal mine in the sandy glacial outwash of central Jutland, Denmark. Previously an anthropogenic moorland used mainly for grazing sheep, labor-intensive mining emerged during World War II but was abandoned in 1970, leaving sand piles and holes that became acidic lakes. Beginning in 2013, Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA) began an experiment in fieldwork there that crosses natural science/social science boundaries, and this paper emerges from that continuing encounter. The dream of the stag draws the analysis into the political ecology of weedy emergence, which in turn opens reflections on more-than-human world-making and the possibility of thinking Anthropocene timelines through weeds.

Comments delivered during Anu Lounela's public defense of her Ph.D. Dissertation, 'Contesting Forests and Power: Dispute, Violence, and Negotiations in Central Java', September 26, 2009

This essay responds to a mandate created in conversation between the Culture and Natural Resources Program of the Ford Foundation and the UC Berkeley Environmental Politics group: to review scholarly literatures about the interaction of culture and natural resource management for the benefit of Ford Foundation program officers who might be interested in building programs in this area. Because it made sense to offer the paper as a contribution to the UC Berkeley Environmental Politics seminar series, I have also used it as an entry in what I hope will be a more extended dialogue among UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz environmental scholars on the subject of how to use the concept of "culture" in our research and teaching. A little more detail on these imagined audiences may prove a helpful orientation for readers of this essay.

In this highly original and much-anticipated ethnography, Anna Tsing challenges not only anthropologists and feminists but all those who study culture to reconsider some of their dearest assumptions. By choosing to locate her study among Meratus Dayaks, a marginal and marginalized group in the deep rainforest of South Kalimantan, Indonesia, Tsing deliberately sets into motion the familiar and stubborn urban fantasies of self and other. Unusual encounters with her remarkably creative and unconventional Meratus friends and teachers, however, provide the opportunity to rethink notions of tradition, community, culture, power, and gender--and the doing of anthropology. Tsing's masterful weaving of ethnography and theory, as well as her humor and lucidity, allow for an extraordinary reading experience for students, scholars, and anyone interested in the complexities of culture.Engaging Meratus in wider conversations involving Indonesian bureaucrats, family planners, experts in international development, Javanese soldiers, American and French feminists, Asian-Americans, right-to-life advocates, and Western intellectuals, Tsing looks not for consensus and coherence in Meratus culture but rather allows individual Meratus men and women to return our gaze. Bearing the fruit from the lively contemporary conversations between anthropology and cultural studies, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen will prove to be a model for thinking and writing about gender, power, and the politics of identity

A wheel turns because of its encounter with the surface of the road; spinning in the air it goes nowhere. Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light; one stick alone is just a stick. In both cases, it is friction that produces movement, action, effect. Challenging the widespread view that globalization invariably signifies a "clash" of cultures, anthropologist Anna Tsing here develops friction in its place as a metaphor for the diverse and conflicting social interactions that make up our contemporary world. She focuses on one particular "zone of awkward engagement"--the rainforests of Indonesia--where in the 1980s and the 1990s capitalist interests increasingly reshaped the landscape not so much through corporate design as through awkward chains of legal and illegal entrepreneurs that wrested the land from previous claimants, creating resources for distant markets. In response, environmental movements arose to defend the rainforests and the communities of people who live in them. Not confined to a village, a province, or a nation, the social drama of the Indonesian rainforest includes local and national environmentalists, international science, North American investors, advocates for Brazilian rubber tappers, UN funding agencies, mountaineers, village elders, and urban students, among others--all combining in unpredictable, messy misunderstandings, but misunderstandings that sometimes work out. Providing a portfolio of methods to study global interconnections, Tsing shows how curious and creative cultural differences are in the grip of worldly encounter, and how much is overlooked in contemporary theories of the global

"A wheel turns because of its encounter with the surface of the road; spinning in the air it goes nowhere. Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light; one stick alone is just a stick. In both cases, it is friction that produces movement, action, effect. Challenging the widespread view that globalization invariably signifies a "clash" of cultures, anthropologist Anna Tsing here develops friction in its place as a metaphor for the diverse and conflicting social interactions that make up our contemporary world. She focuses on one particular "zone of awkward engagement"--The rainforests of Indonesia--where in the 1980s and the 1990s capitalist interests increasingly reshaped the landscape not so much through corporate design as through awkward chains of legal and illegal entrepreneurs that wrested the land from previous claimants, creating resources for distant markets. In response, environmental movements arose to defend the rainforests and the communities of people who live in them. Not confined to a village, a province, or a nation, the social drama of the Indonesian rainforest includes local and national environmentalists, international science, North American investors, advocates for Brazilian rubber tappers, UN funding agencies, mountaineers, village elders, and urban students, among others--all combining in unpredictable, messy misunderstandings, but misunderstandings that sometimes work out." Book cover