The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing Page A
Authors: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Ads: Link
maintained, through their use for firewood and charcoal-making as well as nontimber forest products. Today, the most valuable product of the satoyama woodland is matsutake. To restore woodlands for matsutake encourages a suite of other living things: pines and oaks, understory herbs, insects, birds. Restoration requires disturbance—but disturbance to enhance diversity and the healthy functioning of ecosystems. Some kinds of ecosystems, advocates argue, flourish with human activities.
Ecological restoration programs around the world use human action to rearrange natural landscapes. What distinguishes satoyama revitalization, for me, is the idea that human activities should be part of the forest in the same way as nonhuman activities. Humans, pines, matsutake, and other species should all make the landscape together, in this project. One Japanese scientist explained matsutake as the result of “unintentional cultivation,” because human disturbance makes the presence of matsutake more likely—despite the fact that humans are entirely incapable of cultivating the mushroom. Indeed, one could say that pines, matsutake, and humans all cultivate each other unintentionally. They make each other’s world-making projects possible. This idiom has allowed me to consider how landscapes more generally are products of unintentional design , that is, the overlapping world-making activities of many agents, human and not human. The design is clear in the landscape’s ecosystem. But none of the agents have planned this effect. Humans join others in making landscapes of unintentional design.
As sites for more-than-human dramas, landscapes are radical tools for decentering human hubris. Landscapes are not backdrops for historical action: they are themselves active. Watching landscapes in formation shows humans joining other living beings in shaping worlds. Matsutake and pine don’t just grow in forests; they make forests. Matsutake forests are gatherings that build and transform landscapes. This part of the book begins with disturbance—and I make disturbance a beginning, that is, an opening for action. Disturbance realigns possibilities for transformative encounter. Landscape patches emerge from disturbance. Thus precarity is enacted in more-than-human sociality.
Coming Up among Pines …
… in Gaps and Patches
Elusive life, Kyoto Prefecture. Maintaining a forest in which matsutake might thrive is a dance—of clearing, raking, and staying alert to distinctive life lines within the forest. Picking, too, is dancing .
Interlude
Dancing
F ORAGERS HAVE THEIR OWN WAYS OF KNOWING THE matsutake forest: they look for the lines of mushroom lives. 1 Being in the forest this way might be considered dance: lines of life are pursued through senses, movements, and orientations.. The dance is a form of forest knowledge—but not that codified in reports. And, although every forager dances in this sense, not all the dances are alike. Each dance is shaped by communal histories, with their disparate aesthetics and orientations. To lead you into the dance, then, I step back into the Oregon forest. First I go alone, then with a Japanese American elder, and then with two middle-aged Mien.
To find a good mushroom, I need all my senses. For there is a secret to matsutake mushroom picking: one rarely looks for mushrooms. Every now and then one spots a whole mushroom—probably discarded by animals or so old that worms have consumed it. Good mushrooms, however, are under the ground. Sometimes I pick up the pungent aroma before Ifind any mushrooms. Then my other senses are alert. My eyes sweep the ground, “like windshield wipers,” as one picker explained. Sometimes I get down on the ground to look at a better angle, or even to feel.
I am searching for the signs of the mushroom’s growth, its activity line. Mushrooms move the ground slightly as they grow, and one must look for that movement. People call it a bump, but that implies a well-defined
Ecological restoration programs around the world use human action to rearrange natural landscapes. What distinguishes satoyama revitalization, for me, is the idea that human activities should be part of the forest in the same way as nonhuman activities. Humans, pines, matsutake, and other species should all make the landscape together, in this project. One Japanese scientist explained matsutake as the result of “unintentional cultivation,” because human disturbance makes the presence of matsutake more likely—despite the fact that humans are entirely incapable of cultivating the mushroom. Indeed, one could say that pines, matsutake, and humans all cultivate each other unintentionally. They make each other’s world-making projects possible. This idiom has allowed me to consider how landscapes more generally are products of unintentional design , that is, the overlapping world-making activities of many agents, human and not human. The design is clear in the landscape’s ecosystem. But none of the agents have planned this effect. Humans join others in making landscapes of unintentional design.
As sites for more-than-human dramas, landscapes are radical tools for decentering human hubris. Landscapes are not backdrops for historical action: they are themselves active. Watching landscapes in formation shows humans joining other living beings in shaping worlds. Matsutake and pine don’t just grow in forests; they make forests. Matsutake forests are gatherings that build and transform landscapes. This part of the book begins with disturbance—and I make disturbance a beginning, that is, an opening for action. Disturbance realigns possibilities for transformative encounter. Landscape patches emerge from disturbance. Thus precarity is enacted in more-than-human sociality.
Coming Up among Pines …
… in Gaps and Patches
Elusive life, Kyoto Prefecture. Maintaining a forest in which matsutake might thrive is a dance—of clearing, raking, and staying alert to distinctive life lines within the forest. Picking, too, is dancing .
Interlude
Dancing
F ORAGERS HAVE THEIR OWN WAYS OF KNOWING THE matsutake forest: they look for the lines of mushroom lives. 1 Being in the forest this way might be considered dance: lines of life are pursued through senses, movements, and orientations.. The dance is a form of forest knowledge—but not that codified in reports. And, although every forager dances in this sense, not all the dances are alike. Each dance is shaped by communal histories, with their disparate aesthetics and orientations. To lead you into the dance, then, I step back into the Oregon forest. First I go alone, then with a Japanese American elder, and then with two middle-aged Mien.
To find a good mushroom, I need all my senses. For there is a secret to matsutake mushroom picking: one rarely looks for mushrooms. Every now and then one spots a whole mushroom—probably discarded by animals or so old that worms have consumed it. Good mushrooms, however, are under the ground. Sometimes I pick up the pungent aroma before Ifind any mushrooms. Then my other senses are alert. My eyes sweep the ground, “like windshield wipers,” as one picker explained. Sometimes I get down on the ground to look at a better angle, or even to feel.
I am searching for the signs of the mushroom’s growth, its activity line. Mushrooms move the ground slightly as they grow, and one must look for that movement. People call it a bump, but that implies a well-defined
Similar Books
