THE MUSHROOM AT THE END OF THE WORLD - ANNA LOWENHAUPT TSING

I don’t remember why this book came onto my radar. I typically don’t read all that deeply into ecology (too depressing) and I’m not a fan of eating the non-psychedelic mushrooms (tho, I am somewhat interested in fungus/mushrooms for their biological strangeness) but this book did manage to hold my attention and deliver some deep insights. Tsing is an anthropologist and the book, basically, could be considered an anthropological study of matsuke, an apparently delicious mushroom, the human worlds this mushroom interacts with, and the ways these people both understand and alter ecology in order to get more matsuke. She places emphasis in a number of places. First, since the mushroom can’t be cultivated in a traditional sense, it must be foraged for. In the US, specifically in my neck of the woods, the PNW, this work is largely done by immigrants of SE Asian extraction. Cambodians, Hmongs, Loatians, etc. The parts about their interactions with one another, and the way the SE Asian war (which is what we should be calling the Vietnam War) distorted and changed so many lives, was very engaging to me. Likewise, the portions where Tsing investigates the edges of capitalism, how these mushrooms move back and forth between gift economies and fully alienated commodities, often crossing these boundaries several times, is really fascinating. She has really smart things to say about the idea of global supply chains in general, how they’ve allowed a company like NIKE to turn itself basically into a marketing firm, since they outsource the actual making of the shoe to companies in Asia that they have as little a relationship with as possible. For a company like that (and this is basically all companies that make consumer goods at this point), the alienation is the point and the source of the profits. These mushrooms are interesting, again, because they move back and forth across this line. The other major theme of the book concerns how the mushrooms grow, and how little they are still understood. I like her framing of mycology as a sort of anti-plantation ideology. Where you cannot maximize for a single crop a la a plantation, you have to build an ecosystem that is conducive to matsuke growth then hope for the best. The sections about how this works, practically, about the differences between Japanese, Finnish and American forestry philosophies got a bit too in the weeds for me (pun intended). She intriguingly made references to how Natives in the PNW managed the forests with controlled burns but did not go into how this worked, practically. She has a weird habit of telling you, in a sentence towards the beginning, what each chapter is about, which I found off-putting, but otherwise, this was a real tour-de-force of anthropological writing and not only had real insight about how people interact with one another and form economies, but also about how we are going to have to start thinking of the environment if we intend to avert a climate disaster. Capitalism is going to kill us. We need to find a way out. We need more books like this to suggest directions and alternatives. I’ll be getting this book as a gift for my more forest-y friends. 1953 delicate mushrooms.