The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (40 page)

Opening science, and knowledge more generally, to cosmopolitan history is an urgent task for scholars. Matsutake science in Japan turns out to be an ideal site for understanding the intersections between science and vernacular knowledge, on the one hand, and international and local expertise, on the other. Shiho Satsuka’s “The Charisma of a Wild Mushroom” delves into such intersections to show how Japanese science is always already cosmopolitan and vernacular. She develops a concept of translation in which all knowledge is based in translation. Rather than the immaculate “Japanese” knowledge of both Orientalist and nationalist imaginations, matsutake science is translation all the way down. Her work moves beyond familiar Western epistemologies and ontologies to explore unexpected forms of personhood and thingness within the poorly differentiated human-nonhuman world matsutake shows us.

What kind of book is this that refuses to end? Like the matsutake forest, each contingent gathering sponsors others in unexpected bounty. None of this would be possible without transgressing against the commodification of scholarship. Woodlands, too, offend the plantation and the strip miner. But it is hard to make woodlands fully disappear. Intellectual woodlands too: ideas born in common play still beckon.

In “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Ursula K. Le Guin argues that stories of hunting and killing have allowed readers to imagine that individual heroism is the point of a story. Instead, she proposes that storytelling might pick up diverse things of meaning and value and gather them together, like a forager rather than a hunter waiting for the big kill. In this kind of storytelling, stories should never end, but rather lead to further stories. In the intellectual woodlands I have been trying to encourage, adventures lead to more adventures, and treasures
lead to further treasures. When gathering mushrooms, one is not enough; finding the first encourages me to find more. But Le Guin says it with so much humor and spirit that I give her the last word:

Go on, say I, wandering off towards the wild oats, with Oo Oo in the sling and little Oom carrying the basket. You just go on telling how the mammoth fell on Boob and how Cain fell on Abel and how the bomb fell on Nagasaki and how the burning jelly fell on the villagers and how the missiles will fall on the Evil Empire, and all the other steps in the Ascent of Man.

If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again—if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.
¹

Notes

E
NABLING
E
NTANGLEMENTS

1
. William Cronon,
Nature’s metropolis
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).

2
. See Matsutake Worlds Research Group, “A new form of collaboration in cultural anthropology: Matsutake worlds,”
American Ethnologist
36, no. 2 (2009): 380–403; Matsutake Worlds Research Group, “Strong collaboration as a method for multi-sited ethnography: On mycorrhizal relations,” in
Multi-sited ethnography: Theory, praxis, and locality in contemporary research
, ed. Mark-Anthony Falzon, 197–214 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009); Anna Tsing and Shiho
S
atsuka, “Diverging understandings of forest management in matsutake science,”
Economic Botany
62, no. 3 (2008): 244–256. A special issue of articles by the group is currently under preparation.

3
. Elaine Gan and Anna Tsing, “Some experiments in the representation of time: Fungal clock,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, 2012; Gan and Tsing, “Fungal time in the satoyama forest,” animation by Natalie McKeever, video installation, University of Sydney, 2013.

4
. Sara Dosa,
The last season
(Filament Productions, 2014). The film follows the relationship of two matsutake pickers in Oregon: a white veteran of the U.S.-Indochina war and a Cambodian refugee.

5
. Hjorleifur Jonsson’s book
Slow anthropology: Negotiating difference with the lu Mien
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2014)
emerged from the stimulus of our collaboration—and Jonsson’s continuing research with Iu Mien.

P
ROLOGUE.
A
UTUMN
A
ROMA

Epigraph: Miyako Inoue kindly worked through this translation with me; we aimed for a version both evocative and literal. For an alternative, see Matsutake Research Association, ed.,
Matsutake
[in Japanese] (Kyoto: Matsutake Research Association, 1964), front matter: “The aroma of pine mushrooms. The path to the hilltop of Takamatsu, Tall Pine Tree Village, has just been barred by the rings and lines of rapidly rising caps (of pine mushrooms). They emit an attractive autumnal aroma that refreshes me a great deal …”

1
. Sveta Yamin-Pasternak, “How the devils went deaf: Ethnomycology, cuisine, and perception of landscape in the Russian far north” (PhD diss., University of Alaska, Fairbanks, 2007).

2
.
Desert
(Stac an Armin Press, 2011), 6, 78.

3
. Chinese matsutake traders first told me the story, which I took to be urban legend; however, a scientist trained in Japan confirmed the existence of this story in Japanese newspapers in the 1990s. I have not yet found it. Still, the timing of the bomb in August would have corresponded to the beginning of the matsutake fruiting season. How radioactive those mushrooms were is a continuing mystery. One Japanese scientist told me he planned to research the radioactivity of Hiroshima matsutake, but the authorities told him to stay away from this topic. The U.S. bomb exploded more than five hundred meters above the city; official wisdom has it that the radioactivity was carried into global wind systems, with little local contamination.

4
. In this book, I use the term “humanist” to include those trained in both the humanities and the social sciences. In using this term in contrast to natural scientists, I am evoking what C. P. Snow called “the two cultures.” Charles Percy Snow,
The Two Cultures
(1959; London: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Among humanists, I include, too, those who call themselves “posthumanists.”

5
. Marx used “alienation” particularly to speak of the separation of the worker from the processes and products of production, as well as other workers. Karl Marx,
Economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844
(Mineola, NY: Dover Books, 2007). I stretch the term from this use to consider the separation of nonhumans as well as humans from their livelihood processes.

6
. Alienation was also intrinsic to the state-led industrial socialism of the twentieth century. Because it is increasingly obsolete, I do not discuss it here.

7
. This section draws on
O
kamura Toshihisa,
Matsutake no bunkashi
[
The cultural history of matsutake
] (Tokyo: Yama to Keikokusha, 2005). Fusako
S
himura kindly translated the book for me. For other discussions of mushrooms in Japanese culture, see R. Gordon Wasson, “Mushrooms and Japanese culture,”
Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan
11 (1973): 5–25;
N
eda Hitoshi,
Kinoko hakubutsukan
[
Mushroom museum
] (Tokyo: Yasaka Shobô, 2003).

8
. Quoted in Okamura,
Matsutake
, 55 (trans. Fusako Shimura and Miyako Inoue).

9
. Haruo
S
hirane calls this “second nature”; see
Japan and the culture of the four seasons: Nature, literature, and the arts
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

10
. Quoted in Okamura,
Matsutake
, 98 (trans. Fusako Shimura and Miyako Inoue).

11
. The question of whether southern Europe and North Africa’s
T. caligatum
(which also sells as matsutake) is the same species has not yet been resolved. For the argument in favor of separate species status, see I. Kytovuori, “The
Tricholoma caligatum
group in Europe and North Africa,”
Karstenia
28, no. 2 (1988): 65–77. Northwestern America’s
T. caligatum
is another species entirely, but it too sells as matsutake. See Ra Lim, Alison Fischer, Mary Berbee, and Shannon M. Berch, “Is the booted tricholoma in British Columbia really Japanese matsutake?”
BC Journal of Ecosystems and Management
3, no. 1 (2003): 61–67.

12
. The type specimen for
T. magnivelare
is from the eastern United States, and it may prove yet to be
T. matsutake
(David Arora, personal communication, 2007). Northwestern American matsutake will need another scientific name.

13
. For recent research on classification, see Hitoshi
M
urata, Yuko
O
ta, Muneyoshi
Y
amaguchi, Akiyoshi
Y
amada, Shinichiro
K
atahata, Yuichiro
O
tsuka, Katsuhiko
B
abasaki, and Hitoshi
N
eda, “Mobile DNA distributions refine the phylogeny of ‘matsutake’ mushrooms,
Tricholoma
sect. Caligata,”
Mycorrhiza
23, no. 6 (2013): 447–461. For more on scientists’ views about matsutake diversity, see
chapter 17
.

14
. Quoted in Okamura,
Matsutake
, 54 (trans. Fusako Shimura and Miyako Inoue).

P
ART I.
W
HAT’S
L
EFT?

1
. For mushroom lovers: This was
Tricholoma focale.

C
HAPTER 1.
A
RTS OF
N
OTICING

Epigraph: Ursula K. Le Guin, “A non-Euclidean view of California as a cold place to be.” in
Dancing at the edge of the world
, 80–100 (New York: Grove Press, 1989), on 85.

1
. Philip Cogswell, “Deschutes Country Pine Logging,” in
High and mighty
, ed. Thomas Vaughan, 235–260 (Portland: Oregon Historical Society, 1981); Ward Tonsfeldt and Paul Claeyssens, “Railroads up the Deschutes canyon” (Portland: Oregon Historical Society, 2014),
http://www.ohs.org/education/oregonhistory/narratives/subtopic.cfm?subtopic_ID=395
.

2
. “Spotted owl hung in effigy,”
Eugene Register-Guard
, May 3, 1989: 13.

3
. Ivan Maluski, Oregon Sierra Club, quoted in Taylor Clark, “The owl and the chainsaw,”
Willamette Week
, March 9, 2005,
http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-4188–1989.html
.

4
. In 1979, the price of Oregon timber dropped; mill closings and corporate mergers followed. Gail Wells, “Restructuring the timber economy” (Portland: Oregon
Historical Society, 2006),
http://www.ohs.org/education/oregonhistory/narratives/subtopic.cfm?subtopic_ID=579
.

5
. See, for example, Michael McRae, “Mushrooms, guns, and money,”
Outside
18, no. 10 (1993): 64–69, 151–154; Peter Gillins, “Violence clouds Oregon gold rush for wild mushrooms,”
Chicago Tribune
, July 8, 1993, 2; Eric Gorski, “Guns part of fungi season,”
Oregonian
, September 24, 1996, 1, 9.

6
. Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble,” presentation for “Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet,” Santa Cruz, CA, May 9, 2014,
http://anthropocene.au.dk/arts-of-living-on-a-damaged-planet
, argues that “Anthropocene” gestures to sky gods; instead, she suggests we honor the “tentacular ones”—and multispecies entanglements—by calling our era the Chthulucene. Indeed, Anthropocene calls up varied meanings, as the 2014 debate over plans for a “good” Anthropocene illustrated. See, for example, Keith Kloor, who embraces the Anthropocene through a “green modernism” in “Facing up to the Anthropocene,”
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/collideascape/2014/06/20/facing-anthropocene/#.U6h8XBbgvpA
.

7
. World making can be understood in dialogue with what some scholars are calling “ontology,” that is, philosophies of being. Like those scholars, I am interested in interrupting common sense, including the sometimes unselfconscious assumptions of imperial conquest (e.g., Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism,”
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
4, no. 3 (1998): 469–488). World-making projects, as with alternative ontologies, show that other worlds are possible. World making, however, focuses us on practical activities rather than cosmologies. It is thus easier to discuss how nonhuman beings might contribute their own perspectives. Most scholars use ontology to understand human perspectives on nonhumans; to my knowledge, only Eduardo Kohn’s
How forests think
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), working through Piercian semiotics, allows the radical claim that other beings have their own ontologies. In contrast, every organism makes worlds; humans have no special status. Finally, world-making projects overlap. While most scholars use ontology to segregate perspectives, one at a time, thinking through world making allows layering and historically consequential friction. A world-making approach draws ontological concerns into the multi-scalar analysis that James Clifford’s
Returns
calls “realism” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

8
. Some social scientists use the term to refer to something more like a Foucaultian discursive formation (e.g., Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier, eds.,
Global assemblages
[Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005]). Such “assemblages” expand across space and conquer place; they are not constituted through indeterminacy. Because constitutive encounters are a key for me, my assemblages are what gathers in a place, at whatever scale. Other “assemblages” are networks, as in Actor-Network Theory (Bruno Latour,
Reassembling the social
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007]). A network is a chain of associations that structures further associations; my assemblages gather ways of being without assuming that interactional structure.
Assemblage translates philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s
agencement
, and this has sponsored varied attempts to open up the “social”; my use joins this configuration.