The Tree with a Thousand Faces

Anthropologist Anna Tsing’s work on supply chains has been vital in understanding the pulp supply chain in Portugal. Tsing’s approach to thinking about capitalism and ‘the economic’ more broadly is rooted in the feminist diverse economies¹ approach to thinking about capitalism – that is, seeing capitalism not as a monolithic system but rather a “diverse, intimate network of human and non-human relations”². Supply chains refer to the more recent organisation of the economy around them³. As Tsing suggests, in an age dominated by finance, businesses must make themselves attractive to finance by outsourcing everything from “labour recruitment, training and discipline” to “natural resource management and environmental degradation”⁴. Such chains are global, stretching across continents and countries, connecting prosperity with precarity. But they are also regional and local, connecting between classes, poor areas with rich, or rural with urban. I think that following supply chains ethnographically can be an important way of debunking the existence of the “away,” ecological, social or otherwise.

1. Bear, Ho, Tsing, & Yanagisako, 2015; Gibson-Graham, 2008 ↩︎
2. Bear et al., 2015 ↩︎
3. Tsing, 2012 ↩︎
4. Tsing, 2012, p. 52 ↩︎