Resisting devastation: looking at the world through the matsutake mushroom
How can wild mushrooms help rethink survival and interdependence? This essay reviews the 2015 book The Mushroom at the End of the World, by the American anthropologist Anna Tsing. Tsing explores the world through the humble yet extraordinary matsutake mushroom, much loved in Japanese cuisine. Her book is a polyphonic journey through landscapes devastated by capitalism, war, and ecological collapse – yet teeming with unexpected life and collaboration. The matsutake resists cultivation and thrives only in specific landscapes. It becomes a powerful metaphor for resilience and the possibility of life after deep misfortune.
The work of an anthropologist is similar to collecting mushrooms: having entered the woods, the hunter might find a bounty of fungi or nothing at all. The American anthropologist Anna Tsing, author of The Mushroom at the End of the World: Or the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, once noted that unlike scholars in other disciplines, anthropologists may end up, during their fieldwork, finding answers to questions they never even thought to ask.
Mushrooms themselves inspired the structure of the book. Tsing writes in the foreword, “I wanted [the chapters] to be like the flushes of mushrooms that come up after a rain: an over-the-top-bounty; a temptation to explore; an always too many.” Indeed, the text is full of “many”: a study of industrial landscapes, globalization, and economic insecurity, on the one hand; on the other, the importance of multispecies entanglements. The mushroom from the title is not a mushroom cloud (something Tsing also mentions). Tsing’s point is that our fascination with modernization and progress leaves ecological destruction in its wake: we have arrived at the end of the world. In these ruins, collaboration – especially multispecies collaboration – becomes especially important. Her research is justly considered innovative for its deft integration of academic inquiry with the personal stories of her respondents. Moreover, Tsing operates within no hierarchy of personal or scholarly material: all forms of knowledge are equally valuable. Similarly, she avoids hierarchies of human and non-human stories, weaving them together in the text as a reminder that no species exists on its own.
Tsing is not writing about all mushrooms; she has selected as the object of her research the matsutake, a species that is exceedingly important for the Japanese, but which also grows in China, the USA, Bhutan, Türkiye, Finland, Switzerland, and other countries. Tsing is able to observe various cultural, political, and social strata by tracing global matsutake supply chains. The matsutake turns out to be a surprisingly fruitful starting point for her research: it’s as if this mushroom is looking for adventure. It selects devastated, deforested territories since it cannot compete with other mushrooms in richer soils. These are the places where pines take root, trees that also struggle to flourish in healthier forests. Thus pines are the matsutake’s ancient companion, and matsutake don’t simply grow on them, but actually help them grow by nourishing the soil. The existence of both species is made possible through their collaboration, which in turn enriches the life of the entire forest.
The matsutake’s talent for collaboration leads Tsing to conclude that “humans cannot survive by stomping on all the others.” She often refers to the concept of “assemblage”, which for her is always polyphonic: the universe contains a multitude of different rhythms and world-making projects, human and non. Matsutake seasons and the sale of mushrooms are the rhythms of industry, which people must adapt to. Tsing has indicated that polyphonic music, where multiple independent melodies are sung simultaneously, helped her understand that people are not the only actors with world-making projects. World-making is actually impossible without collaboration: an ordinary garden changes thanks to the interventions of fungi, plants, and people. All of them act independently, but their separate activities give rise to something shared.
The book’s story of the matsutake is also polyphonic. It is told by mushroom hunters and scholars, but Tsing doesn’t limit herself to a human perspective. She attempts to imagine the landscape as a space which human expression cannot do justice to, and where animals, trees, and parasites, such as the pinewood nematode, must also tell their stories.
Various actors’ world-making projects unfold simultaneously in The Mushroom, without a clear hierarchy, with an emphasis on their interconnectedness. Tsing explores these connections through the concept of contamination, which she frames as an opportunity for collaboration and transformation. Also significant is the concept of a patchiness, borrowed from landscape geology and modified here. This is an idea Tsing returns to in the majority of her research: in her understanding, the Anthropocene era is itself a patchwork. The patchiness of industrial projects means that ecological changes happening in certain places (for example, the clear-cutting of Oregon forests) differ from the changes in other locales. Tsing writes that in studying matsutake, she constantly found herself “surrounded by patchiness, that is, a mosaic of open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life, with each further opening into a mosaic of temporal rhythms and spatial arcs.”
The key to Tsing’s way of storytelling is provided by Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, cited in The Mushroom. Le Guin muses on the absurdity of telling stories that culminate in a conflict in which the Hero must defeat someone – usually by killing – to survive. Western pop culture also treats survival as something that requires conquest. Even the plots of documentaries often revolve around predators lying in wait for victims, the stronger aiming to vanquish the weaker. Darwinism (or at least its common understanding) has had an undeniable influence on the modern notion of the natural world as a battlefield, as has the Enlightenment, with its view of nature as a passive entity that must be conquered. As a counter to narratives about murder, Le Guin offers stories about life, and she symbolizes them with a basket or bag you can put something useful, edible, or beautiful in. By shifting our attention away from conflict, we can concentrate on tracking and collecting stories. And in telling these stories, Tsing tosses mushrooms into the metaphorical basket, but also the narratives that accompany them.
It is not just the mushrooms themselves that matter when out mushroom hunting. The activity requires concentration and slowness, which, on the face of it, seem at odds with the pace of contemporary life. At one point, Tsing compares this process to a dance, one shaped by communal histories. Gathering mushrooms can be a social activity, even if the mushroomer heads out alone: the tracks of those who were in the woods earlier, overturned earth, or even litter can help the ones who come later. Ultimately, any search relies on help from others, even when the help is unintentional.
Organic collaboration can be found everywhere, for example, in books such as Tsing’s The Mushroom. She writes with great tenderness about people she had the fortune of talking to during her matsutake research. It’s as if their love was guiding her. In her foreword to What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make, a book by fellow member of the Matsutake Worlds Research Group Michael Hathaway, Tsing recalls how she and her colleagues initially underestimated the magnitude of their research. “Do mushrooms make the world?” she asks. Hathaway, like Tsing, refuses to see humans as the only actors in the world: in his book, mushrooms are both researchers and creators of a wide range of connections – with soil and with plants.
Another member of the research group that Tsing often mentions, Shiho Satsuka, is currently at work on her own book. The matsutake is especially important in Japanese culture: in the Middle Ages it was offered to the gods, aristocrats gave it to one another (a practice later adopted by other segments of the population), and today its smell is associated with autumn in Japan. However 90% of the matsutake consumed in Japan today is imported from other countries. The domestic harvest has fallen with the decline of satoyama – the traditional patchwork landscapes where forests coexist with rice paddy fields.
One might assume that the matsutake encourages humans to work together to create large farms for the mushroom’s wholesale cultivation for the market. But no. This mushroom resists cultivation, which explains its high price and the attraction it holds for hunters. In order to bring back the matsutake, Japan is attempting to restore its satoyama, which, unlike monoculture, are marked by biodiversity. Satsuka introduced Tsing to people who have been trying to change the landscape to facilitate the further growth of matsutake. These conservationists are renewing the landscape, and, in the process, their relationship to it and to each other. This is something else that distinguishes satoyama from plantations: work on the satoyama deepens our bonds with nature, whereas factory farms entail the exploitation of natural and human resources.
Of course, nostalgia also plays a large part in the way matsutake are perceived. Among matsutake hunters in Oregon are Japanese Americans whom the mushroom reminds of their ancestral homeland. Gathering matsutake helps them maintain intergenerational ties. Other Asian Americans have their own emotional reference points. Tsing conducted a survey about mushrooms among Cambodian, Vietnamese, Laotian, Burmese, and Hmong immigrants who arrived in the US after the American invasion of Vietnam and the subsequent civil wars in the region. Respondents largely associated mushrooms with war, as did American veterans of the Vietnam War. “Mushroom picking layers together Laos and Oregon, war and hunting,” Tsing writes.
Here again, interactions with the landscape are paramount to Tsing: the Oregon woods remind pickers of the woods in their home countries, so when they’re out gathering mushrooms, they can feel at home. This introduces another important category: freedom, which many of the Southeast Asian respondents feel both in their native forests and in those of their new country. The veterans seek a slightly different sort of freedom – freedom from anything that could trigger their war memories. The desire to heal from what they’ve experienced paradoxically intersects with the relived experience of war.
The matsutake hunting boom in Oregon started in the 1980s. When European mushrooms were contaminated after the Chornobyl catastrophe, traders had to find fungus suppliers elsewhere. The harmful effects of radiation respected no species bounds, poisoning not only people, but animals and the soil. Tsing is also one of the curators of a multimedia project entitled Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene, which is dedicated to human infrastructures that exist beyond human control. As part of this project, MIT professor Kate Brown wrote an essay about radioactive blueberries from Ukrainian Polissia finding their way to American breakfast tables. Brown’s study is an elegant illustration of an obvious truth: even local ecological disasters have global consequences. An interesting side note here is that the local pickers relied on their knowledge of the area when searching for berries. Radiation not only cuts off human and animal lives, but also ties to the land: after the explosion of the Chornobyl reactor, people were forced to evacuate their homes permanently.
Time after time Tsing asks how to talk about terrible things without paralyzing her readers, but instead engaging them in the issues at hand and spurring them to action. The story of the matsutake, though it often touches on suffering and destruction, is full of hope. Ultimately, this is a story about a mushroom that can grow among ruins. It is even believed that the matsutake was the first living organism to appear in the aftermath of another mushroom – the mushroom cloud in Hiroshima.
The matsutake’s ability to thrive amid devastation stems from its collaboration with other species. However, as Tsing says in one of her interviews, she isn’t fully convinced that hope prevails in her texts. To a certain degree, everyone who comes in contact with the destructiveness of the Anthropocene comes to depend on its promises of progress and victory. But not all stories give cause for hope. Many of them tell of failure and collapse.
In Tsing’s opinion, no progress is possible without facing the horrors that have come before. In order to tell the story of the matsutake, one has to tell of the devastated forests where they grow and the refugees and veterans who collect them in Oregon. Donna Haraway, Tsing’s colleague from the University of Santa Cruz, asserts that storytelling can heal – but only if it is seen not as a shield against the apocalypse or a panacea, but as a tool to build a less violent future, one of coexistence. Stories heal when we approach them with the goal of sitting with horror, not running from it: after all, we’re all stuck here in the ruins of capitalism.
Anna Tsing is not running away from the ruins. On the contrary, she is taking a magnifying glass to them while still managing to avoid catastrophizing and aestheticizing. She has no ready solutions for how to live in the desolate expanses that are increasing their reach and even become home for some – such as the matsutake. But, if nothing else, the example of this mushroom shows that no one can thrive among ruins on their own.
Translated from Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella.
Copy-edited by Katharine Quinn-Judge.
