The Mushroom at the End of the World

This section covers Chapters 1-3: “Arts of Noticing,” “Contamination as Collaboration,” and “Some Problems with Scale.”

The chapter epigraph is a quotation from science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin, about her desire to look for human futures that will “put a pig on the tracks” rather than depict stolid utopias (17). Tsing begins with her own narrative of progress, the early 20th century lumber boom in Oregon. This story of people reshaping landscapes to create economic booms is the “story we know” (18). She argues that this story should not be considered the end, however, and poses a question: “What emerges in damaged landscapes, beyond the call of industrial promise and ruin?” (18). In Oregon, the answer turns out to be matsutake mushrooms for export to Japanese consumers. Tsing argues that while many commentators consider how to continue economic precarity without wreaking further ecological devastation, climate change implies that everything is in jeopardy. “We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination,” Tsing argues (19).

Tsing notes that it is common to speak of our age as the “Anthropocene,” a time driven by human interactions with the world. For her part, Tsing is most interested in “landscapes, multiple temporalities, and shifting assemblages of humans and nonhumans: the very stuff of collaborative survival” (20). The Oregon landscape reinforces her conviction that “precarity,” rather than predictability, is humanity’s current condition, and that it is essential to let go of narratives of “progress” as fundamental to existence (20).

For Tsing, this is a recuperative project, as “we might look for what has been ignored because it never fit the timeline of progress” (21). These assertions reveal Tsing’s scholarly identity and political commitments. Though her view of economics and ecology is somewhat grim (focused as it is on devastation and loss) she views her work as somewhat liberatory. Letting go of the assumptions of perpetual growth allows her to see what others might not, to walk in the woods with curiosity as she grieves.

Tsing argues further that humans have never been lone protagonists in a story of dominating nature. Instead, human projects have always intersected with the survival impetus of other species: “Humans shape multispecies worlds when our living arrangements make room for other species. This is not just a matter of crops, livestock, and pets. Pines, with their associated fungal partners, often flourish in landscapes burned by humans” (22). Destruction, then, can also be a generative force. These projects, too, should not be oversimplified, as ecologists increasingly replace the word “community” with “assemblage.” This term allows for the possibility that species may influence each other directly, or simply co-exist, without being locked into rigid roles (22). Assemblages are not mechanistic or linear, and, for Tsing, this makes the concept particularly useful for considering the modern economy. To explain how, she turns to musical, economic, and agricultural metaphors, such as polyphonic music with multiple melodies or agriculture where many crops grow in a single field, or factories that produce multiple products for various markets and at multiple price points (23).

Tsing relies on metaphor to explain her theoretical apparatus, describing a world of pluralism and complexity with a backdrop is one of ecological devastation and increasing uncertainty about humanity’s goals and survival. Indeed, she admits, “progress felt great; it meant there was always something better ahead” (24). She replaces it not gleefully, but out of necessity, as “life on earth seems at stake” (26). Tsing is interested not only in truth for its own sake, but because exploring ecology and humanity within her framework may offer some redemption, a way forward beyond surrendering to inevitable loss.

Continuing her de-emphasis on progress and celebration, Tsing notes that assemblages rest on “contamination” that is, “they change who we are as we make way for others” (27). She posits that these interplays are the “stuff of survival” (27). This framing, too, challenges existing ways of thinking, as most narratives in social science see survival as individual rather than multiple or communal. This thinking, she notes, “made it possible to ignore contamination, that is, transformation through encounter” (28). Tsing’s elaboration of her project frequently returns to negation and rejection; however productive previous epistemologies were, they do not serve her now, and they obscure as much as they reveal. Progress has given way to survival—a less self-congratulatory effort, but one that, she suggests, must be made. She even offers a new meaning in an otherwise negative term; “contamination” is a driving force for change, and the results are necessary even if they may not be beautiful.

Individualist frameworks rest on an illusion of self-sufficiency, where, for Tsing, “survival always involves others” even if that “other” is an object, such as a walking stick used after injury (29). This, too, is not necessarily to be celebrated: “The diversity that allows us to enter collaborations emerges from histories of extermination, imperialism, and all the rest” (29). For Tsing, recovering the truth about collaboration is not a moral project, or, at least, not a project that restores lost moral rectitude or innocence.

Turning from the theoretical to the immediate, Tsing says she will examine Oregon’s Mien mushroom pickers, and its forests, as “assemblages” but not without defining the meaning of both “Mien” and “forest” (29). The Mien people are an ethnic group from the country of Laos, and their lives before becoming refugees, and their survival stories, are an important theme within Tsing’s text.

Mushroom picking happens in United States national forests, so it is inextricable from the history of the nation’s Forest Service and its conflicting projects to maintain existing trees and somehow revive or not threaten the lumber industry. Lodgepole pines, left behind from forest burns to control the population (and not of much interest to the lumber industry) are a key home base for matsutake mushrooms.

To explain the life trajectories of Mien mushroom pickers working in Oregon, Tsing turns to the deeper past of Southeast Asia. Originally subjects of China’s empire (though exempt from taxation), the Mien moved into territory that currently encompasses Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. Mien, like the Hmong people of Laos, have routinely crossed national borders and engaged in many kinds of trade, including opium farming.

Hmong people socially organize in clans, and when clan leader Vang Pao endorsed the imperial project of the United States in Vietnam, many of them did as well. Tsing sees this as another example of “contaminated diversity” as Pao eventually claimed to speak for all Hmong people and identify them with anticommunism (32). Mien who lived in Laos when the American war ended qualified for refugee resettlement in the United States, as the Hmong did. This choice locked them into certain precarious ways of earning a living. Tsing explains:

Most of those from Laos and Cambodia had neither money nor Western education; they moved into off-the-grid jobs such as matsutake picking. In the Oregon woods, they use skills honed in Indochinese wars. Those experienced in jungle fighting rarely get lost, since they know how to find their way in unfamiliar forests. Yet the forest has not stimulated a generic Indochinese—or American—identity. Mimicking the structure of Thai refugee camps, Mien, Hmong, Lao, and Khmer keep their places separate. Yet white Oregonians sometimes call them all “Cambodians” or, with even more confusion, “Hong Kongs.” Negotiating multiple forms of prejudice and dispossession, contaminated diversity proliferates (33).

One way to understand Tsing’s view of “contamination” is transformation, evolution, or adaptation. Southeast Asian mushroom pickers had their entire lives shaped by successive empires: Chinese, French, and American. Contamination is dynamic and forces adaptation—it underlines Tsing’s insistence that progress is no longer an accurate metaphor for history or society. The mushroom pickers carry their past, and identity with them, only to have it obscured by white insistence that all people from their part of the world are the same. Tsing argues that recovering the multiplicity of life in the Oregon forests is not a tidy project. It is made of “troubled stories” and Tsing underlines that exploring matsutake took her all over the world, but the journey will reveal “a still lively temporal alternative to the unified progress-time we still long to obey” (36). Throughout the work, Tsing repeatedly looks for the stories of progress that may still tempt her, and her readers, while presenting far messier realities, insisting that these truths offer their own promise, even if that promise is simply a more nuanced understanding.

Where the previous chapter defined some key terms, philosophical preoccupations, and sociopolitical terms, Tsing next turns to defending her intellectual apparatus. Specifically, she argues that her multiple narratives belong to academic modes of inquiry and that they have value. She asserts, daringly, “To listen and to tell a rush of stories is a method. And why not make the strong claim and call it a science, an addition to knowledge? Its research object is contaminated diversity; its unit of analysis is the indeterminate encounter” (37). But, she admits, her subjects cannot immediately be applied to ever-larger populations, what she calls “scaling up” (38). For Tsing, scalability is inherently static, dedicated to assumptions rather than dynamism, as “a scalable research project admits only data that already fit the research frame” (38).

To explain scalability (and her interest in its opposite) Tsing turns to a historical analogy: plantation agriculture. Sugar plantations relied on basic choices: “exterminate local people and plants; prepare now-empty, unclaimed land; and bring in exotic and isolated labor and crops for production. This landscape model of scalability became an inspiration for later industrialization and modernization” (39). Sugarcane, as an imported plant, had no competitors or existing relationships, not unlike the enslaved people brought to Brazil from Africa to harvest it. Workers became “interchangeable parts” depending on which jobs they had been assigned (39). Factories, anthropologists argue, have worked on a similar scale, which led elites to assume that scalability could dominate the entire globe and economic relations.

Tsing posits that matsutake are the opposite of sugarcane. They depend on certain trees to thrive, and they nourish the trees they depend on. Foragers, similarly, do not work for large companies; they follow their own will to harvest matsutake. This does not mean, however, that Oregon’s forests are somehow separate from industrialization or economics at large. Their current existence as sites of matsutake foraging, instead, depend on the fact that the forest industry in Oregon collapsed, and mushroom picking takes place in its “ruins” (40).

In Oregon, forests were grown and maintained like sugarcane, but new trees were less profitable than the ancient ones they replaced. The timber industry collapsed, but by the 1990s, “Matsutake had stimulated a nonscalable forest economy in the ruins of scalable industrial forestry” (42). Tsing underlines that her interest in matsutake does not signify that nonscalable projects are inherently more moral or less destructive, insisting, “they run the range” (42). Again, Tsing’s project is a moral one insofar as she is interested in accuracy and the recovery of unseen possibilities for thriving, but she does not romanticize her subjects. Though she does not strive for objectivity or distance—often literally immersing herself in the world of mushrooms—her immersion does not preclude criticism.

Tsing notes that many chapters and sections in her text will focus on the interplay between capitalist and non-capitalist economies and that she will treat matsutake forests as “anti-plantations” (42). This indicates that she will discuss them as locations that resist order, predictability, and as sites that may exist outside human direction.

The chapter closes with an assemblage of pictures: matsutake mushrooms in a basket, a Japanese chef smelling a plate of mushrooms, and then the plate of mushrooms themselves, arranged on a white platter with a lime. This suggests the reader is to keep the mushroom in sight, even as Tsing will explore complex historical and economic structures that are much larger than a single fungus.