A few days after starting Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, I went for a short hike around a nearby pond. And, to my surprise, there were mushrooms everywhere! I had traveled the same path just a few weeks earlier and I hadn’t noticed them. Or perhaps they weren’t there? How could I have missed hundreds of mushrooms of different shapes and sizes spread throughout the woody trail?
Tsing’s book is a call to notice, a reminder of the power of noticing. If we notice a bit better, if we attend theoretically to noticing, Tsing hopes we will find our way past the capitalist ruins which we inhabit. Notice the mushrooms, save the world. Or if not save the world, at least find a way to salvage something from it.
This book is not tidy. It’s not a clear, linear argument. It’s not meant to be. It’s a set of interrelated explorations around a collection of themes—precarity, assemblage, capitalism, ruin, salvage, noticing, and, above all, matsutake mushrooms and the forests they inhabit. If, like me, you were not familiar with matsutake mushrooms before encountering Tsing’s work, a few brief facts might help to set the stage.
Matsutake grow in some forests, but not others. In particular, matsutake like pine forests, and those pine forests often emerge after other trees (like oaks) have been cut down. Matsutake and pine grow together, symbiotically.
Matsutake are valuable. They are given as fancy gifts in Japan, prized for their distinctive aroma, and eaten in fancy cuisine. Matsutake are also expensive. Their price has soared since the 1970s, in part due to the decline of matsutake in Japan: forests previously managed by peasants were left to their own devices, which in turn weakened the pines that had thrived with human intervention, and thus weakened the matsutake. The price of matsutake ranges widely, depending on the origin and season, with the best Japanese mushrooms reportedly costing $1,000/kilogram.
Matsutake are global. They are found in many places, and commodity chains link pickers across the world to intermediate buyers and eventually to (primarily) Japanese consumers. The Pacific Northwest in the United States has a particularly important collection of pickers and buyers who find matsutake in the wake of the collapsed Oregon logging industry, but matsutake are to be found everywhere from Yunnan, China to northern Finland. (Matsutake’s wide range and interesting reproductive behaviors feature in scientists’ speculations on the evolution and migration of matsutake, as discussed in a fascinating section: “Mushrooms with genetically diverse spores! Mosaic bodies! Chemical sensing that creates communal effects! How strange and wonderful the world” [238].)
Finally, matsutake cannot be grown in the lab, despite many attempts. Nor can they be easily cultivated in anything like an industrial context. Matsutake can be brought into capitalist circuits, but they are born in capitalist ruins.
For Tsing, matsutake are good to think with. They are a route into understanding “the possibility of life in capitalist ruins”, as the book’s subtitle suggests. Note that she emphasizes capitalist ruins, not the ruins of capitalism. That is, these are the ruins that capitalism leaves in its wake. These are the bodies no longer needed for wage labor, and the forests no longer used to produce industrial timber.
Tsing draws on the tools of cultural anthropology, science studies, environmental history, and biology. She weaves these disparate disciplines and discourses together into a compelling narrative, unafraid of crossing boundaries that others might perceive as impassable. Tsing names her technique “the art of noticing”, an alliance of ethnography and natural history. These are the same arts that mushroom pickers employ as they see, smell, and feel their way towards the elusive matsutake.
Although her purpose is not primarily comparative, and her overall argument emphasizes connections rather than isolated cases, Tsing makes wonderful use of the contrasts between matsutake forests, matsutake markets, and matsutake science in the US and Japan in the tradition of the best comparative work. For example, in Chapter 16 on “Science as Translation”, she documents how US scientists worry that matsutake are being disrupted by too much intervention (raking by mushroom pickers, reckless overharvesting) while the Japanese scientists worry that matsutake are being threatened by too little human intervention (the decline of traditional village forest management practices, which has weakened the pines needed for matsutake to grow). Similarly, Chapter 15 on “Ruin” brilliantly compares the history of forest management in the US and Japan, focusing on shared choices (and often shared mistakes) despite different forests and contexts.
The book is divided into four parts. Parts 1 and 4 are extended introductions and conclusions, beautifully and poetically written. Part 2 focuses on the economics, the labor of pickers and buyers, and the markets linking everything together. Part 3 focuses on the scientists and environmental history.
The book’s interventions are difficult to summarize and thus difficult to export, to delocalize. I think this is intentional. This book is a model of how to notice particulars, and in part a rejection of the urge to generalize, to disconnect. That said, some of the concepts that Tsing dances around and plays with resonate deeply. In particular, the extended discussion of “salvage accumulation” may (ironically) be the easiest intellectual fruit from the book to export to other contexts.
Tsing is interested in how capitalism extracts value from non-capitalist spaces. She reminds us that while we may all live with and under capitalism, capitalism is “a contraption limited to the sum of its parts. This machine is not a total institution, which we spend our lives inside; instead, it translates across living arrangements, turning worlds into assets” [133]. For her, capitalism has an outside, it has borders, edges, and ruins—abandoned spaces, transformed by capitalism but no longer directly fueling the machine. Tsing identifies “pericapitalist” spaces at the intersections of capitalism and not-capitalism. Salvage accumulation, then, is “the creation of capitalist value from noncapitalist value regimes” [128]. Salvage accumulation echoes Marx’s primitive accumulation, with its emphasis on how capitalism emerges from outside “industrial formations” but, unlike primitive accumulation, “salvage is never complete; accumulation always depends on it” [296].
For example: matsutake. Matsutake fuel a vast global market. But Matsutake do not grow in capitalist plantations or industrial laboratories. They grow in the Oregon forests abandoned by loggers after cheaper Indonesian timber entered the market, and they grow in the pine forests carefully cultivated by Japanese volunteers looking to revitalize traditional peasant forest management practices.
Matsutake pickers, too, are products of not-capitalism. In Oregon, Tsing travels with pickers who came to the US as refugees from Cambodia and Laos, and also pickers who were born in the US and served in the military in the same wars that the refugees fled. These pickers learned how to notice the forest during the war. Their skills, now put to use hunting matsutake, were not developed through a process of rational investment in education and training (as human capital theorists would have it). Their skills are salvaged.
Salvage accumulation is not the only portable concept Tsing introduces. Attentive readers will find conceptual morsels nestled in-between the roots of the main threads of the book: polyphonic assemblages, latent commons, contaminated diversity, survival as collaboration, and more. These concepts are laden with hope. Not revolutionary hope, the hope for utopia, but a hope for the possibility of life. Tsing hopes that by learning to notice we can learn to survive together—human and non-human, matsutake and pine, all of us working together to produce the “livable collaborations” [28] needed to survive.
Readers can practice the art of noticing by resisting the urge to skim and look for discussions and conclusions, summary charts and tables, and the like. Instead, spend a little time with the book. Pause at each photograph and caption. Notice the weight of the pages. What do you smell? What do you feel?
Tsing opens The Mushroom at the End of the World with her strategy for coping with the current conjuncture: “What do you when your world starts to fall apart? I go for a walk, and if I’m really lucky, I find mushrooms” [1]. Try it out. You might find something. What have you got to lose?
