Friction Addiction

I think I understand friction. It's the way that you can take a group of people across cultures into the forest and they would each come out with a different adjective to describe it. Unspoiled, boring, sacred, dangerous, refreshing, dirty, clean, obstructive, open, cathartic, novel. Some would see trees as a natural resource others as a natural treasure, some as inanimate and without character, some would see an aura around them. Even among those who see this aura (and if you don't I feel sorry for you), there are different ideas about how important they are and how they can best be protected.

Tsing's exploration into Indonesian conservation/preservation is wonderful because she explores (fricative) views as diverse and the bio-region they squabble and struggle over. She guides us gently away from universalism and into a realm of "awkward understanding." Thinking about global connections under the lens of universality is viewed as quaint and dangerously complacent I read the focused my analysis on the final section: "Freedom." Tsing follows friction in Manggur over two decades and through multiple "histories." Addressing the problems of organizing a rebellion across so much friction was what really got me thinking about the problems of global environmentalism.

Taking into account the utopianism of student activists, the romanticism of outdoors-men, the rights to habitation of the natives and threatened species, the needs of the market-place, and the transcendental nature of personal experience in a rain-forest. We see the Manggur as closer to what it ever could be through a theorized definition, such as "protected wildlands."

Without the natives struggling against an immediate threat, and the support of environmental activists worldwide, victory may not have been won. This can be viewed as evidence for a "universal vision," but I like the way Tsing examines the different histories and motivations for the environmentalism the "overlap of understandings" (256). This helped me personally understand friction as something that isn't necessarily abrasive, but complex.

With such a tapestry of histories and desires, the world is better understood as in-understandable, better that we celebrate our confluences than mourn our conflicts.
It makes us view our challenge as ethnographers as it is: one of collecting understandings, and forming connections between them, but not necessarily finding harmony. I applied this to my ethnography. Is it fair that I just interview evangelical sim-owners? What about the perspective of converts, or sex shop owners, or rigid atheists who view evangelism as invasive? What frictions exist in the world of second life, a place where ease of communication facilitates unprecedented interactivity.