In Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Tsing echoes calls to move away from human exceptionalism and toward a type of anthropology that thinks about non-human beings seriously. The matsutake mushroom, a Japanese delicacy and coveted global fungi, is our guide into the complex entanglement of humans and non-humans in a landscape defined by capitalist ruin. We transverse not only the boundary between nature and culture but also temporal and spatial orders, as the “matsutake forests in Oregon and central Japan are joined in their common dependence on the making of industrial forest ruin” (Tsing 212). I begin with examining the implications of Tsing’s ethnographic work, in the forests on Oregon, as offering us a new set of encounters with
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The livelihoods of both plants and animals depend on resurgence, remediation, and resilience. How the meager mushroom emerges in the midst of the “blasted landscapes” (10) of capitalism offers clues to the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Forests and fungi form joint organs with the roots of trees, they make each other spread. The forests spread through the interaction of plants and fungi; the fungi make the trees more successful; the trees and forests make all kinds of habitats for other plants, animals and humans. Forest resurgence makes liveable landscapes, but resurgence is always a multispecies affair (Tsing 2015: 180). The Oregon forests brings Khmer, Hmong, Lao, and Mien refugees from the U.S. wars in Southeast Asia together with Latino migrant workers, Japanese Americans, and the U.S. Forest Services, all to gather and sell the matsutake. The mushroom picking practices are a way to understand ethnicity as collaboration with other ethnicities and species as “white vets enact trauma; Khmer heal war wounds; Hmong remember fighting landscapes; Lao push the envelope…mobilizing the practice of picking mushrooms as the practice of ethnic freedom” (Tsing 2015: 94). As the forests and fungi collaborate to “work across difference” (29) so do our human actors. They collaborate and contaminate each other in ways in which challenge traditional boundaries between nature and
The livelihoods of both plants and animals depend on resurgence, remediation, and resilience. How the meager mushroom emerges in the midst of the “blasted landscapes” (10) of capitalism offers clues to the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Forests and fungi form joint organs with the roots of trees, they make each other spread. The forests spread through the interaction of plants and fungi; the fungi make the trees more successful; the trees and forests make all kinds of habitats for other plants, animals and humans. Forest resurgence makes liveable landscapes, but resurgence is always a multispecies affair (Tsing 2015: 180). The Oregon forests brings Khmer, Hmong, Lao, and Mien refugees from the U.S. wars in Southeast Asia together with Latino migrant workers, Japanese Americans, and the U.S. Forest Services, all to gather and sell the matsutake. The mushroom picking practices are a way to understand ethnicity as collaboration with other ethnicities and species as “white vets enact trauma; Khmer heal war wounds; Hmong remember fighting landscapes; Lao push the envelope…mobilizing the practice of picking mushrooms as the practice of ethnic freedom” (Tsing 2015: 94). As the forests and fungi collaborate to “work across difference” (29) so do our human actors. They collaborate and contaminate each other in ways in which challenge traditional boundaries between nature and