Fragile as Matsutake: Commentary on "Doomsday Matsutake"

Clotilde Riodor

Shiplean Tasser / Text

Wang Liqiu / Translator

Translated from Clotilde Riotor & Cyprien Tasset, “As Fragile as a Matsutake”, Books & Ideas, 2 July 2018, https://booksandideas.net/As-Fragile-as-a-Matsutake.html , the translation is for academic exchange only, Reprints must indicate relevant information and sources, and do not use them for commercial purposes.

This is a book review that reviews

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing: The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins , Princeton University Press.

The Chinese translation of this book is:

Luo Anqing: "Apocalypse Matsutake: Possible Life on the Ruins of Capitalism", translated by Zhang Xiaojia, East China Normal University Press, July 2020.

Can a mushroom help us understand capitalist change and gridlock? By studying the collection and trade of matsutake mushrooms, anthropologist Luo Anqing describes a world that runs counter to progress, in which survival depends on the fragile cooperation between people and the world around them.

An Anthropology of Survival in Precarious Times

Unexpectedly, one of the most talked about and discussed social science books recently turned out to be an anthropological treatise on an aromatic mushroom that plays an important role in Japanese society. The original English version of "Mushrooms at the End of the World" was published in 2015, and its French version was translated in September 2017, and like the original, the French version also generated a lot of comments. If this book has been so successful, it is because Luo Anqing is so skilled in exploring the many facets of her subject: against a backdrop of uncertainty and environmental crisis, she works through Multi-site ethnography (US, China, Japan, Finland, and Canada), leading to innovative thinking about the changing face of capitalism and the prospects our current era offers.

The anthropologist first heard about matsutake pickers from a fellow mycologist in 1993, when she was looking for examples of a culturally colorful global commodity. In medieval Japan, farmers traditionally paid tribute to their feudal lords with matsutake mushrooms. During the Edo period, the matsutake mushroom gradually became an elite symbol of refinement and a symbol of the coming autumn, celebrated in various arts and poetry. However, after the modernization of the Meiji Restoration, Matsutake was not abandoned, and its traditional usage was carried over and even emphasized again. With Japan firmly embedded in the global economy, matsutake mushrooms are also used as gifts and sometimes as bribes to nurture or maintain personal connections. It was sent abroad, sold in gourmet restaurants, and enjoyed in fancy restaurants. However, after the 1970s, Matsutake mushrooms became rare in Japanese forests, which caused the price and import volume of Matsutake mushrooms to skyrocket.

And, its biological properties—matsutake's preference for coniferous forests with poor soil or destroyed—raises another problem: an environmental crisis, for which Luo Anqing is gloomy. Although we can understand the "end of the world" in her title geographically, as the "end of the world" to which the book sends readers, this paper is indeed in a climate so disturbed so great

“It is uncertain whether life on earth will continue” (p. vii)

Thinking in the "doomsday light" of the impending cataclysm in the world (p. 274).

According to Luo Anqing, breaking the promise of progress does not mean that the social sciences should take the opposite stance, that is, embrace a narrative of outright environmental disaster. In this sense, it makes sense to be busy around this mushroom: they show that there are forms of life in the ruins that, however fragile and imperfect, give That's why we shouldn't despair. What "Mushrooms at the End of the World" is dedicated to doing is not so much to prove an argument, but to use anthropological research to open up an original idea, which is shaped by two guiding concepts: First, take seriously the importance of the Anthropocene [1], and second, reject absolute pessimism [2].

From fringe to globalization: the trajectory of an anthropologist studying Southeast Asia

This book adds another dimension to its author's work. Anqing Luo is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Before that, she was mainly cited for ethnographic research on the Dayak people of the Meratus Mountains in South Kalimantan, Indonesia. Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-way Place (1993) builds on her doctoral dissertation in an "ethnographic fiction" form, presenting this "isolated society" (Guerreiro, 1997). In Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005), which won the American Society of Ethnology's Senior Book Award A landscape of irreversible damage to the predatory exploitation of resources under the pressure of economic interests that stand to foster. This book is already written in the context of global anthropology. It is of particular interest for its analysis of "friction", ie tensions and haphazard cooperation between local, governmental, multinational and environmental actors driven by conflicting interests.

Brush after stroke paints a portrait of a fragmented world

In "Mushrooms at the End of the World," Luo Anqing proves that she is loyal to her desires—a desire she expressed when she entered the industry, saying that she wants to pursue a "do not let coherence overwhelm curiosity" writing strategies” (Tsing, 1993, p. 33). In her works, a whole dynamic can be seen.

The first part of the book begins with a piece of "Oregon's plantation ruins" (p. 14). In the twentieth century, when the soil became poor, matsutake mushrooms developed here. A scouting for this new "platinum" (p. 18) began in the late 1980s, when the Japanese stopped importing matsutake mushrooms from Europe after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster contaminated matsutake-growing areas . Since then, the landscape, albeit from a "science fiction nightmare" (p. 14), has become a motley army of pickers - "crippled white veterans, Asian refugees, Native Americans, Undocumented Hispanics” (p. 18)—an annual hectic event stage. In the evening, after returning to camp, they would sell the day's harvest to the highest bidder. Thanks to Matsutake's high price, it provides a substantial -- and sometimes major -- source of income for most industrious pickers.

The second part of the book dispels any impression that "this mushroom may be anecdotal" and shows how matsutake fits into a world economy reshaped around "global supply chains."

Luo Anqing traced how Japanese industry, in the context of international competition, gradually used subcontracting to compensate for the appreciation of the yen encouraged by the United States. But as these "global supply chains" became the main cogs of global capitalism, they also sounded the death knell for wage labor and expectations for progress: on the basis of an expanded division of labor in production chains, they "allowed Leading companies loosen their commitment to controlling labor” (p. 110).

These companies become producers and retailers who no longer have to guarantee the employment conditions, health, or training of their workers, and they don't even have to demonstrate that they respect the environmental standards of the countries where their wholesalers are located.

Thus, the trade in this mushroom has turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg of “salvage capitalism”[3], which the authors argue is a major feature of the current global economy. Exploitative accumulation is the process of producing value from uncertain places, including those with particularly abundant natural resources, for profit. Although Luo Anqing does qualify the concept of "the whole world is under the rule of capitalist empires"[4], her conclusion, in the perspective she offers, is more about the style of life that makes life on the fringe possible , rather than radical change or resistance to capitalism, remains relatively pessimistic.

Other parts of the book discuss practices related to matsutake mushrooms in other areas studied in this book: for example, in China, matsutake cultivation has contributed to the reshaping of various social roles in the context of the privatization of forest space. Stories about plants and landscapes in these various forests are sometimes "without human protagonists" (p. 155), say, pine trees that reoccupy defined areas in the boreal forests of Finnish Lapland. Luo Anqing also introduced a discussion on the sociology of science in a chapter devoted to the different scientific approaches to matsutake research in Japan and the United States. In Japan, studies are more in the form of monographs, focusing on local structures and knowledge; in the United States, studies are often part of forest studies designed for extended application to timber tree management. Finally, she shows that this mushroom has led to attempts to produce "potential commons" (p. 135), for example, projects to reactivate Japanese woodland areas that, according to the customs of traditional villages, deliberately disturb the soil.

The overall structure of the book is overwhelmed by a branching, entangled form of writing, as if, the book is organically organized, simulating the world the author describes, as opposed to obeying the constraints of explicit logical proof. This apparent dispersion, which may be misleading, reflects one of Luo Anqing's core commitments, namely, to defend anthropology. Anthropology's sensitivity to detail and marginal spaces allows authors to explore exceptions and contradictions that metanarratives (whether they focus on progress or collapse) avoid talking.

post-progressive lifestyle

What are the possibilities of "life in the ruins of capitalism" highlighted by "Mushrooms at the End of the World"? Contrary to the "popular American fantasy" according to which "survival is only about saving yourself by smashing others" [p. 27], what Luo wants to show is that survival is based on different actors (also (including non-human actors) on the basis of "cooperation" or, in a concept she borrowed from Bruno Latour, "assemblage"[5]. Still, her account of the bickering between pickers, rather than plantation foresters and environmentalists, who scatter into Oregon's forests each year is not pacifist. The war and displacement they experienced so often gave them the skills and judgment that allowed them to adapt to life in the forest, but also excluded them from "standard" employment or its remnants:

"There are no wages and no benefits; the pickers just sell the mushrooms they find. Some years without mushrooms, the pickers are on their own."

Should we describe these pickers as "uncertain"? The term, a hallmark of contemporary social critique, also appears in the book, but with variable meanings.

Luo Anqing did use the term in a limited sense to describe the condition of pickers who were deprived of stable employment conditions. However, they also don't seem to expect much from modern wage employment, and, in their various iterations of "freedom" (anti-communism, anti-statism, autonomy, or even the right to live a traditional communal life) ) found common ground. The economic trends at work in this process, and especially the environmental tipping point we are currently reaching, mean that the distinction between job security and job security is only relative. Temporary work is becoming commonplace, it is "the condition of our time" (p. 20), made up of fragility and interdependence,[6] and leaves room only for "combinations" of indeterminate duration. The notion of temporary labor has a flavor of adventure, and the informal work of the pickers illustrates a form of "cooperative survival" (p. 2) that, it seems, is destined to spread over the ruins of industry. In other words, indeterminate work is no longer the exception to be normalized, but rather, for better or worse, an experiment in a post-progressive lifestyle.

The final pages of the book raise questions about the state of research in academia. Luo Anqing strongly emphasizes the collective aspect of the research she cites, exploring the rampant privatization that threatens universities (p. 285). Like forest ecosystems, intellectual life requires open encounters and cooperation. In this field, individual performance also depends on fragile collective entanglement. It is important to criticize the logic of these commodifications, but at the same time it is important to acknowledge that the “ruins” are clearly visible in the university and that the activism of the academy has picked up the idea of living in the ruins[7]. In this, as in others, Mushrooms at the End of the World offers illuminating insights into understanding a particularly important question.

further reading

- Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, L'Événement anthropocène (Paris: Seuil, 2013).

- Laura Centemeri, 'Review of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins', Tecnoscienza. Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies 8 , n°1 (2017): 159- 162.

- Francis Chateauraynaud and Josquin Debaz, Aux bords de l'irréversible (Paris: Pétra, 2017).

- Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, 'L'arrêt de monde', in Émilie Hache (ed.), De l'univers clos au monde infini (Dehors, 2014), p. 221-339.

- Antonio J. Guerreiro, 'A. Lowenhaupt Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen', L'Homme 37, n° 142 (1997): 160-164.

- Donna Haraway, 'Staying with the Trouble: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene', in Jason W. Moore (ed.), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press, 2016), p .34-76.

- Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime . (Cambridge: Polity, 2017)

- Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity. Government of the Precarious (London: Verso, 2015).

- Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

- Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

- Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

- Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times. Resisting the Coming Barbarism (Open Humanities Press: 2015).

[1] The term Anthropocene refers to the era in which man became a dangerous geographically determined actor. See C. Bonneuil and J.-B. Fressoz (2013) for various ideas and discussions on this concept. Luo Anqing is in conversation with several authors who are talking about the concept: D. Danowski and E. Viveiros de Castro (2014), B. Latour (2017), D. Haraway (2016) and I. Stengers (2015), after The author is the author of the preface to the French edition of the book.

[2] This rejection of outright pessimism aligns closely with F. Chateauraynaud and J. Debaz (2017), who admit that Mushrooms at the End of the World inspired their concept of the "Anthropocene".

[3] When Luo Anqing explained "salvage accumulation", he explained "salvage" in this way: "...here, utilization refers to the integration of other (human and non-human) social relationships historical material into capitalist wealth.” See Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2015. “Salvage Accumulation, or the structural Effects of Capitalist Generativity”, Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights , March 30. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/ salvage-accumulation-or-the-structural-effects-of-capitalist-generativity

[4] The author explains this by making his position in relation to the work of Antonio Negri and Michael Hart.

[5] Composition is relative to the traditional concept of organic and seamlessly connected entities. From the perspective of composition, the whole is composed of a collection of individual, separate, different, and individual parts. These parts can perform their functions autonomously, and can become part of the combined whole, or they can be separated from the original combined whole and then combined into a new combined whole. Composition emphasizes that the relationship between the parts of the composition whole is influenced both by the parts inside the whole that make up the whole, and by the parts outside the composition whole that may enter the whole. ——Annotation

[6] This is close to the concept of "precariousness" proposed by I. Lorey by citing J. Butler.

[7] See Out of the Ruins: The Emergence of Radical Informal Learning Spaces, ; 'De la ZAD à l'Université"