The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

Taking as her subject the Matsutake mushroom—prized as a gift in Japan and scavenged in ruined post-industrial forests around the world—Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has created a grand synthesis that interrogates and integrates everything from current anthropological methodology to the foundations of Darwinism to the history of post-industrial capital formation. Tsing has done her homework: There are individual interviews with American pickers, Finnish planners, and Japanese scientists; there are histories of U.S. Forest Service regulations and Japanese village commons; there are scientific papers and field trips to labs and pickers’ camps. Using this wealth of data, Tsing creates mushroom and methodological “patches,” temporary and fluid “entanglements” of people, practices, economies, and stories that proceed from the scrub pine and Khmer pickers of the Pacific Northwest to the shipping containers and international traders of the Japanese market.For all its theoretical and political ambitions, The Mushroom at the End of the World is a response to a growing feeling of helplessness and despair: a sense of the precariousness of our current economic and ecological status combined with the indeterminacy of events beyond our control. And even though Tsing has managed to provide a convincing argument for a world free of the comforting fantasies of progress and stability, she has also revealed the hidden freedoms, alliances, discussions, and visions that might proceed from such a world. For Tsing, entanglement and patches are not just descriptive methodologies; they provide a new way to understand agency as shared and always emerging from interspecies, intercultural, and historical interactions. These are tools for a new type of being, a new type of knowledge, a new type of planet. Consistent for a book built on the indeterminate and precarious, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel for Anna Tsing. But there are campfires, shared stories, and, when the stars align, moments of revelation.

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This book was a really creative look at capitalism and systems outside of capital--I was really impressed with how accessible it was (she made assemblages seem reasonable and even useful!) The middle dragged a little bit for me- I'm not sure if it's because I have a hard time following economic flows or if because I was just too sleepy while reading it to understand, but it was still a brilliant book that I feel like will take me a long time to tease apart and really sit in.(I am interested, if anyone else is, in thinking about taking her 'latent commons' and putting it in conversation with José Esteban Muñoz's brown commons... hmu yo.)

This interdisciplinary work about mushrooms is a stimulating antidote to a lot of conventional wisdom about economics. Matsutake grows opportunistically on the roots of pine trees -- it can't be cultivated, nor, despite demand, can production scaled up in a conventional way. To get more matsutake you need to create conditions for more pine trees -- but you also need to forage, and understand a lot else about the forest environment. Those who gather matsutake aren't alienated from their work: the book's ethnographic chapters expose the multitude of meanings the process can have for those who gather the mushrooms. Nor do the usual "laws" of supply and demand apply: in some communities there is pressure for the prices to be paid to gatherers to go upwards.I plan to use this book in a college course about sustainability for business majors: I'm looking forward to their grappling with these ideas so contrary to Econ 101. Unlike other reviewers I don't see any evidence that the author (ALT) misunderstands basic economics -- but their view shows how confusing it may be for some readers to have their orthodoxy challenged. That's exactly why I think it's a useful book. In addition, the book has many interesting passages in its own right. For example, before reading this book I didn't know that mushrooms like matsutake are beneficial to the trees on whose roots they grow -- I thought they were "just" parasites. The importance of matsutake to various Southeast Asian immigrant groups in the Pacific Northwest was also something I'd had no inkling of previously.The main weak point of the book is that it speaks in an overly general way about Japan. The assertion that matsutake serve as gifts in Japanese society is repeated often in the text (e.g., @8, 62, 124-126). The suggestion also seems to be that the matsutake have meaning to those who pick them (as illustrated in the book's ethnographic chapters, set mostly outside Japan); then are turned into commodities farther down in the chain of commerce by participants who are indifferent to the circumstances of the mushrooms' harvesting; and then, when presented as gifts by someone who simply bought them, are meant to take on a more personal meaning again.There are two problematic aspects of these claims: are matsutake really given as gifts? and if so, are they the same matsutake as described in the ethnographic chapters? It turns out the answers to these questions are: rarely, and no.It's not at all a common practice in Japan for matsutake to be presented as a gift by someone who bought it as a commodity. I currently live in Iwate Prefecture, a northeastern rural area that is the #2 domestic producer of matsutake; before that I lived for a number of years in a Tokyo neighborhood well-known for preserving old traditions (Kagurazaka, in Shinjuku-ku). In neither place did I ever observe matsutake being used as a gift, unless the giver had picked it himself or herself on the same day (not possible in Tokyo!). My wife, who was born in Iwate but who lived in many areas all over Japan while growing up, had also never heard of matsutake as gifts, and she pointed out that the harvest time of matsutake doesn't coincide with any gift-giving holiday. In Iwate, which produces the highest-quality matsutake, they are either consumed locally or sent to the top restaurants and inns in Tokyo and Kyoto. My family only buys them to eat them.I contacted ALT about this point, and she very graciously and forthrightly explained that she was most familiar with Kyoto, and that very possibly what she described applies mainly there. Among Japan's 47 prefectures, Kyoto is in 9th rank as a producer of matsutake -- but its output is only around 1% of Iwate's. So it's hardly representative. (BTW the book refers to Kyoto as "central" Japan, which is how it might appear to an outsider who looks at a map, but the Japanese name for the region, Kansai, clearly labels it as "west.") She also mentioned that some expat Japanese families send American matsutake back to relatives in the Kyushu region, though this doesn't relate to Japanese production. Nor is it necessarily anything special: we send Iwate cabbages, cucumbers, and negi (Japanese leeks) as well as matsutake to friends and family in Tokyo, simply because they're cheaper and fresher where we live.Even in Kyoto and possibly other locales, do gift-givers make presents of matsutake harvested in North American, Finnish and Chinese forests and exported to Japan? From the sequence of chapters and particularly the discussion of intermediate wholesalers in the chapter entitled "From Gifts to Commodities -- and Back" (Ch. 9), you might get the impression that they do, even though ALT doesn't say this explicitly. But that's not at all the case: by the time foreign matsutake arrive in Japan they're too dry to be suitable as gifts. Yet well over 95% of Japanese matsutake consumption is imports, which thanks to their dryness are also much cheaper than domestically-harvested ones. Unfortunately, the book omits to mention the main destination of those fungi: the processed foods industry. They're sometimes sold sliced in cans or other packaging, and freeze-dried matsutake rice mixes are a popular item, as are bowls of matsutake-flavored instant ramen. Again, ALT was gracious in acknowledging this point, and mentioned that a related discussion seems to have been cut from her manuscript during the editing process.One other somewhat nebulous suggestion in the text is that matsutake grow mainly in forests disturbed by aggressive logging or other human exploitation. That may be true in North America and in some parts of Kyoto, but not at all in Iwate, Nagano or other high-production areas. In those regions, matsutake are harvested from what ALT calls "peasant forests," namely mountain forests that have been subject to a certain amount of maintenance by humans, such as having their undergrowth and debris periodically thinned, an activity known in Japan as satoyama. Although they are mentioned in the book, these forests are much less salient in the narrative than are the "capitalist ruins" of the book's subtitle.While I very much appreciated ALT's kind and forthcoming responses to my questions, the book's lack of accuracy or clarity on these points does somewhat blunt its most pointed and ironic commentary on capitalism, to the extent that commentary is meant to apply to Japan. But there is still plenty of value in the book. ALT's ironies are still justified by the ethnographic chapters, and the chapters that talk more about mushroom biology also get one to think critically about industrialized agriculture, with its emphasis on monoculture. All in all, a very imaginative approach to real-life economics, and one that pulls the rug, or forest floor, out from under some usual textbook concepts.

Good quality. A slow read.

This book is crucial to understanding the economic/social/ecological arrangements of our current world, but also in showing the kinds of biological and human relations that arise in the wake of ecological devastation. It is clearly and beautifully written with a profound feeling for the values that make living possible.Please do read it.

This book is really thought provoking. Anna is careful and generous, and she touches on subjects in a way that is wholly descriptive (vs prescriptive condemnation or celebration of any particular practice). I learned a lot and would recommend it to absolutely anyone.

Tsing's assessment is a fascinating look into one significant we can reoccupy and restore our world after this major shuffle.

The beginning is a bit dry and boring, but once Tsing gets into the meat of the entanglements - or the rythm of the story, if you will, you slowly become eager to find out more, until you look forward to every next page.

One of the best ethnographies I've ever read in my life! The edition is not very good, many blank pages, but it's worth a lot! An incredibly powerful critique of capitalism, and a careful look at other ways of life.

Excelente

This review is in part a response to another review - one I feel is unfairly critical (I have no problem with critical - but you be the judge. The book is thoughtful, complex in parts, but also inspirational in its attempt to follow traces, processes and enactments. It is uncomfortable because simple things suddenly become complicated from the picking of mushrooms, to Darwinism, unitary thinking, freedom, capitalism and much more. I don’t agree with all of the analysis / enactment of the capita but then I assume the author wants us to converse, engage, critique and think. It’s not a book to read in a hurry. Take your time. Read other things in between and contrast the ideas. By all means disagree, but don’t denigrate the scholarship. It is a wonderful and thorough piece of work - storytelling worth an ear

un libro veramente interssante e inusuale.Che vi interessi il tema nel suo complesso o in parti quali la vita di questi funghi e la loro convivenza con gli ospiti, o meglio ancora la storia biologica delle foreste in cui questo fungo vive, vale veramente la pena di leggero