Abstract
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins is, on its surface, a story of a particular kind of mushroom. In this beautifully written book, anthropologist Anna Tsing follows the matsutake mushroom from the forests of Oregon through the hands of pickers, buyers, and importers to its final destination in the kitchens of Japan. But the true strength of this book is its use of matsutake as a window onto the contemporary condition of our global system, which Tsing diagnoses as capitalist ruin, and the possibilities for living within it. Indeed, The Mushroom at the End of the World is a book with many intertwined stories – about mushrooms, mushrooms as metaphor for contemporary capitalism, the research methods required to comprehend and respond to capitalist ruin, and the politics of knowledge.
Matsutake mushrooms are delicacies in Japan, and their story there reveals Japan’s history: the deforestation of industrial expansion, post-war growth, and urbanization and the abandonment of rural life. Japan’s matsutake culture flourished in these transitions as deforested rural hillsides gave way to the white pine forests in which matsutake thrive. But Japanese matsutake forests have been reduced, and increasingly matsutake are produced elsewhere. They are highly valued on the international market, at times the most expensive mushroom in the world.
The Mushroom at the End of the World balances the production and consumption ends of the commodity chain, in Oregon and Japan. Matsutake are unique in that they cannot be cultivated by humans; the fungi grow only in the wild, in forests that have been degraded by human use. Matsutake thrive in Oregon’s vast national forests, which have long been exploited for timber production. The fall picking season brings a motley crew of itinerant pickers, themselves among the most precarious in American society, who live in makeshift camps. Since many of the pickers Tsing finds in Oregon are refugees from Laos and Cambodia, these camps are reminiscent of the Southeast Asian villages from Tsing’s earlier ethnographic work. Other commercial pickers are undocumented migrants and others white men – ‘Vietnam veterans, displaced loggers, and rural “traditionalists” who rejected liberal urban society’ (p. 68). And so, the story of the matsutake is also a story of the disaster of the Vietnam War, which created both the refugees and the veterans who build upon the skills and desires honed in jungle warfare in their hunt for mushrooms. Understanding mushroom forests requires attention to such histories: forests are shaped as much by past practices and policies as by current management or transnational opportunities (p. 205).
As Tsing describes these pickers and the circumstances of the matsutake trade, she emphasizes how matsutake are incompletely commodified. For instance, pickers don’t see their activities as labor, but rather as ‘looking for your fortune’ (p. 77). Pickers are driven to matsutake foraging as a way to enact and experience freedom – Tsing’s interlocutors describe mushrooms as ‘trophies of freedom’ rather than commodities, though they do transform into capitalist assets down the line (p. 62). Even in Japan, Tsing describes the flow of matsutake through the logic of the gift. Tsing uses these ‘pericapitalist’ forms – non-capitalist, but not outside of it – to build her ideas around ‘salvage capitalism’: the process of capitalist accumulation that takes advantage of the value produced without capitalist control. Tsing argues that salvage is integral to capitalism: ‘a feature of how capitalism works’ (p. 63). Mushrooms are particularly helpful as a metaphor here: the hidden mycorrhizal acrobatics that make the commodifiable fruit possible exemplify salvage.
Tsing also uses matsutake as an inroad into the politics of knowledge. She critiques the demands for scalability in science, arguing that such a strategy both banishes diversity and precludes what Tsing calls the contamination of encounter, where individuals and histories develop through interaction with others. She contrasts the matsutake forest to plantations of sugar clones, which provided the ‘landscape model of scalability…[the] inspiration for later industrialization and modernization’ (p. 39). Matsutake mushrooms, on the other hand, resist the conditions of the plantation; ‘they cannot live without the transformative relations with other species’ (p. 39). Tsing insists on a methodological approach that captures the messiness of the matsutake forest, arguing for a method based on the same skills required of the mushroom picker: the art of noticing.
This insistence has helped to produce an unconventional book. It consists of 24 short chapters that meander through the complexities of salvage capitalism in the same way that mushroom pickers traverse the forests, using all of their senses to notice – the bump of an underground mushroom cap, the white pine, the tracks of deer, the deep aroma of the matsutake. This is the method of the mushroom hunter, and the method of The Mushroom at the End of the World, wherein the art of noticing creates a body of empirical and theory-building work that draws our attention to the mycorrhizal encounters of salvage capitalism, and the collaborations required to salvage life within ruin.
The Mushroom at the End of the World is not a simple book to read, and the intertwined stories throughout make a stand-alone chapter difficult to pull out. Nonetheless, the book unfolds, circling like the mushroom picker, meandering through the commodity chain, to allow us to see both the forest and the trees – a fascinating telling of the story of contemporary capitalism. Ruination marks the history of human interaction with nature. But, as Tsing demonstrates, ‘some kinds of disturbances have been followed by regrowth of a sort that nurtures many lives’ (p. 190). Tsing tells us that matsutake are an acquired taste, but this book is a delicious foray into and underneath forests that invites us to imagine the mycorrhizal networks of collaboration that create the possibility for life within capitalist ruin. This book is, as Tsing hopes, ‘like the flushes of mushrooms that come up after a rain: an over-the-top bounty; a temptation to explore’ (p. viii).