The Mushroom at the End of the World

Turning from hard science to social science, Tsing defines mushrooms as the “fruiting bodies of fungi” which eat and do not make food through photosynthesis (137). When fungi process nutrients, they may change their environments, like the soil, which means they can cultivate relationships with plants, some of them very closely, as “‘[e]endophytic’ and ‘endomycorrhizal’ fungi live inside plants” (138). These relationships are often mutually beneficial, as fungi can produce water and nutrients for their hosts. Tsing calls this capacity “world-building work” and decries the historical interest of much of science in antagonism and predation rather than mutual interchange (139).

Like prior ideas of capitalism, the discovery of genetics predisposed scientists to think in terms of autonomous and separate “scalability”—the capacity of lifeforms to reproduce based on known genetic codes, unaltered by their environments (140). This, too, created a narrative of enclosed progress, which Tsing compares to “Max Weber’s iron cage” (140). This is an allusion to German sociologist Weber’s famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber sees capitalism as a cage once it has been divorced from the moral framework of Christian productivity as key to salvation—there is no escaping the equation of productivity and moral worth, even in a modern period where religious faith is declining. Tsing, like Weber, sees narratives of perpetual progress as haunting rather than comforting (Weber 181-184).

The discovery of DNA disrupted the progress narrative, however. Genes cannot easily be siloed away from environmental influences, and “many organisms develop only through interactions with other species,” including humans, as digestion is facilitated by the microbiome contained in the stomach (141). For Tsing this means: “Interspecies relations draw evolution back into history because they depend on the contingencies of encounter” (142). Though Tsing is an anthropologist, many historians stress the importance of context and contingency to understand how things happen, as opposed to ideas of inevitability and readily predictable laws of behavior. To return to history, then, is to reject certainty in favor of examination of what is transpiring.

Further attention to the realities of fungi supports this hypothesis, as experts increasingly find it is difficult to closely demarcate fungal species, and fungi can collaborate with insects as well as plants. This process reminds Tsing of the economic term, “outsourcing” and she posits that it may have value, “As in capitalist supply chains, these chains of engagement are not scalable. Their components cannot be reduced to self-replicating interchangeable objects, whether firms or species” (143). Fungi are not, in this sense, comparable to the parts of an engine, easy to take apart and put back together, or easily repaired via the reproduction of mechanized components. Understanding capitalism, like understanding nature, requires making the familiar strange, discarding assumptions and conventional wisdom. Tsing suggests that trained observation may offer more insight than rigid models, offering herself as the reader’s continued guide.