📚WELL-ASIA June Reading Group Update 📚

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Last Tuesday, we had our June reading group on the topic of Environment & Wellness.

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We read the first chapter titled “Arts of Noticing” in The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and the article “Selling Anthropocene space: situated adventures in sustainable tourism" by Amelia Moore.

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In “Arts of Noticing” Tsing (2015) argues that modern capitalism has caused major environmental destruction, damaged landscapes, and industrial transformation. Yet, despite these major disturbances, Tsing also notices the resilience of the matsutake mushroom, which is not only surviving, but also creating new environments in ways that can not be cultivated. She mainly focuses on the anthropocene, a term used to describe the current period of human’s irreversible impact on the environment, acknowledging that humans in a capitalist system have caused “economic and ecological ruination” but points out that solely focusing on the "anthropo" or human neglects the other aspects such as, the nonhumans. Tsing (2015) notes that it is crucial to pay attention to multispecies worlds, unpredictable encounters, and shifting assemblages or what she conceptualizes as polyphonic assemblages, a musical metaphor for our intertwined world of humans and nonhumans. She also notes that people tend to focus on large-systems, economic growth and progress but neglect many simpler and small-scale activities like mushroom picking. This point made us ask the overarching questions: “What does one do to stay well in today’s world and to what extent can the wellness industry be seen as a form of resilience? What encounters does it facilitate or hinder?”.

In her article, Moore (2019) also focuses on the anthropocene but by analyzing its connections to tourism, noting that the anthropocene has been increasingly used as a marketing tool when it comes to advertising approaches like sustainable tourism. Through examples of the case of Bahamian farms, Moore (2019) illustrates the many changes in landscape and local communities that tourism has caused. Despite how these purported sustainable tourism models claim to address the new(er) environmental and societal issues in the anthropocene, they may also, paradoxically, reinforce old inequalities along class and ethnic divides. Moore, like Tsing, urges for a more holistic understanding of the impacts of sustainable tourism on the anthropocene by drawing multidirectional linkages that connect the environment and local communities with the postcolonial, political, and historical contexts they are embedded in.

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The two readings gave us many insightful takeaways in preparations for the field such as, the importance of considering both the human and nonhuman; geographical imaginaries, landscape changes in local communities, and to be open to unexpected interlinkages.

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Stay tuned on our website for all the future project updates and reading group recaps!

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