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The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
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Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world - and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made?
A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction.
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Audible Audiobook
Listening Length: 11 hours and 6 minutes
Program Type: Audiobook
Version: Unabridged
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Audible.com Release Date: November 28, 2017
Whispersync for Voice: Ready
Language: English, English
ASIN: B077FJS1BX
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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.
Many of us who study human/plant relationships have been waiting eagerly for this book, and I at least am not disappointed. Anna Tsing is a fine writer, a superb ethnographer, and an insightful and original thinker, and this long and detailed book shows off her skills perfectly. It's a worldwide survey of gathering, trading, and selling matsutake mushrooms, the gourmet mushrooms that currently run over $50 a pound in markets. They are prestigious in Japan, and necessary or nearly so for high-end gifts, and the world has caught on. The most interesting ethnography herein is of the matsutake pickers in Oregon--a mixed lot of southeast Asian hill people, Latin American migrants, and Anglo-Americans who want to live far out in the woods--many of them Vietnam vets. Tsing takes us also to Japan, Finland, and Yunnan (southwest China).In addition to the ethnography, Tsing is thoroughly grounded in the science of mushrooms. In dramatic contrast to those political ecologists and critical thinkers who make it a point of pride not to know any science, Tsing not only knows it but is sharply insightful into what really matters, and shows her usual skill at telling the reader. She starts with basics but goes into some real detail, e.g. on matsutake taxonomy.The take-home messages of the book include a focus on assemblages--transient or long-term linkages of people, environments, plants, and policies--and on ruined landscapes. In Oregon, matsutakes grow in overcut, undermanaged conifer land that went to lodgepole pine (on whose roots they grow as symbionts). In Japan, similar mismanagement long ago led to matsutake forests, but now those forests are what is wanted, and management is trying to restore them from overgrowth. In China, mismanagement is threatening forests in general. But from the ruins come new assemblages, which will support new lifeways.All this comes at the end of capitalist expansion and "progress," if not of the whole world.The book is something of a breathless speed-travel, but you can find full details about much of the stories in her other writings, and especially in articles and forthcoming works by her collaborators, especially Michael Hathaway.My main complaint is about the startoff. The very first page (vii) tells the old story about western philosophy seeing Nature as just a mechanical, passive backdrop, and says "The time has come for new ways of telling true stories beyond civilizational first principles" of that sort. This is mildly annoying to those of us who have been doing exactly that for 50 years. It rather elides the whole tradition from Thoreau and Emerson through Burroughs and Muir and Leopold and down to Bill McKibben and Gary Snyder. The arrogant nature-as-stuff-to-waste paradigm created its own backlash long ago.A minor point. More important is that capitalism and socialism may both come to an end as resources run out, so Tsing's book is timely and valuable; more to the point, it will be a classic.
A beautifully written, smart, absorbing book that is also profoundly moving
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 attempts to create a philosophical platform to rationalize current environmental issues all from the perspective of matsutake hunting. An interesting approach that falls short in all aspects and fails to leave a lasting impact due to overly complicated philosophical metaphors and difficult to understand writing.
A beautiful and successful blending of science and philosophy. The dialectic at work in the hidden commons that evade privatization.
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