In Friction, Anna Tsing uses logging practices and timber consumption, environmental activisms and ideas about nature, local loss of livelihood and local despair over the loss of forest-as-life (as opposed to forest-as-resources), and Indonesian nation-making through business practices and international investment as her entry points for a richly argued and ethnographically nuanced analysis of the social processes by which the spatial, discursive, and metaphoric sites that have come to be known as the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ are made by each other. Her ethnographic contribution is her ability to demonstrate multiple experiences of events—from Meratus Dayak elders to Indonesian environmentalists, from Indonesian businessmen to consumers in an IKEA, from the Korean Development Company to Freeport McMoRan—which each person and institution understands and narrates differently. Indeed, Tsing shows that these people and institutions understand events and misunderstand each other in profound ways, but that the misunderstandings are productive, creating the social fact that is the Indonesian forest.

She begins by asking how one should approach the study of the global, then proceeds, throughout the book, to explode both the idea of an independent ‘global’ and the ‘local’/‘global’ dichotomy. She does so by showing how the two are mutually constituted in an on-going dialectic and by teasing out the friction between the imagined universal and the imaged particular. She grounds her analysis in a lengthy introductory discussion of the claims made for universals. The book itself is organized around three motivating dreams of the universal that are at the center of contemporary humanism: prosperity, knowledge, and freedom.

Tsing's basic argument is that everything and everyone in the world depends upon global connection and that capitalism, science, and politics, as processes, are especially dependent upon them. Throughout the book she tracks capital, scientific knowledge, and political ideas as they move and traces them back to a kind of ideology of the universal. Yet she argues, using her unique ethnographic style, that neither these processes nor the universal claims on which they are based make everyplace and everything the same. Her metaphor of friction works because she shows how previous attempts to track flows around the planet have fetishized the objects and subjects that are doing the moving and have focused too little on the social creativity at the sites where peoples, ideas, practices, and politics come together in the wake of these objects' and subjects' departure. Her flows do not image the globe as a marble—smooth, solid, and slick, but rather as something like a Durian fruit—pointy, messy, and sticky, with endless possibilities for surprises, impediments, and barriers, and well worth exploring beneath its surface. In places, Tsing's text also requires a good deal of work to penetrate, yet that, too, is well worth the effort.

Friction brings new life to the anthropological notion of multi-sited fieldwork by taking sites of ethnography to be everything from the mountains and villages of South Kalimantan to the offices of Wall Street investors and brokers to the imaginations of tourists seeking an exotic, wild, and untouched Indonesia. Cultural diversity is not lost in the mix—Tsing's story is not one of homogenization but rather of local social practices in her out-of-the-way places of long-term ethnographic research, making and being made by the frictions between places, peoples, and practices. Methodologically, Tsing argues that it is impossible to fully understand and appreciate every social group along the chains of any global connection, yet she holds onto the ethnographic methods of participant observation and interviews as her main source of data. As anthropology becomes more fixated on connections, commodity chains, and articulations between our ‘field sites’ and larger social, economic, and political processes, we must ask how this is changing our methods. She presents in this book an example of an ethnography that, while multi-sided and multi-temporal, does not simply skim the surface with thin descriptions. This book is about process, and it takes seriously the idea that cultural objects and subjects are never given, but rather are made within the friction of what Tsing calls throughout the book “worldly encounter.”

Friction will be of interest across disciplinary and geographic boundaries. As a methodological text—and in many ways that it is what it is meant to be—it will appeal to anthropologists, human geographers, sociologists, and others dependant on ethnographic methodologies. Though geographically focused on Indonesia, it could well serve as a model for those working to understand similar processes in other parts of the world.