The concept of entanglements, developed by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing in The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), redefines survival under late capitalism through messy, interdependent, and unplanned relational webs, where humans, non-humans, ecologies, and economic systems coexist without harmony or hierarchy, sustained instead by what she terms contaminated relationality—unintentional collaborations, precarious symbioses, dependencies, and antagonisms that allow life to persist amid ecological and economic devastation; rather than assuming linear progress or autonomous individuals, Tsing emphasizes multispecies assemblages, where beings like matsutake mushrooms, pine trees, and displaced foragers co-shape damaged landscapes through vulnerability, friction, and mutual transformation; central to this view is the notion of latent commons, emergent collectives of survival that operate without institutional frameworks or utopian blueprints, formed through unstable yet productive connections—like fungal networks threading through disturbed forests and linking fragmented human lives to shifting environments; Tsing expands this ecological-political vision in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017), co-editing concepts like monsters (symbiotic interdependencies) and ghosts (hauntings of past ecologies), calling for transdisciplinary attention to how life forms amid ruin through interwoven temporal and material scales; while her work resonates with relational theories such as actor-network theory and rhizomatic models, it distinguishes itself through ethnographic specificity, grounding philosophical ideas in concrete, situated observations of ecological entanglement, survival, and transformation in degraded worlds where resilience emerges not from mastery but from openness to contaminated coexistence. (Tsing, 2015; Tsing et al., 2017; Latour, 2005; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987)
