75 pages • 2 hours read
Anna Lowenhaupt TsingA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Preface
Prologue
Part 1, Introduction
Part 1, Chapters 1-3
Part 1, Interlude 1.1
Part 2, Introduction
Part 2, Chapters 4-7
Part 2, Interlude 2.2
Part 2, Chapters 8-10
Part 2, Interlude 2.3
Part 3, Introduction
Part 3, Chapters 11-13
Part 3, Chapters 14-15
Part 3, Chapters 16-17
Part 3, Interlude 3.3
Part 4, Introduction
Part 4, Chapters 18-19
Part 4, Chapter 20 and Conclusion
Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
Tsing asserts that her study of mushrooms is also a study of “ruin,” an adjective she often uses to describe older forests after they have been depleted by the constant quest for wood to meet market and consumer demands (1). In setting the scene for the work, she makes clear that hunting for mushrooms takes place in a period of profound uncertainty (2). Humans live in a world of our own making, and it is not in any sense a paradise, rational, or stable. Tsing also resists the idea that any of this is easily redeemable. While human destruction has made matsutake thrive in unexpected places, like the abandoned industrial forests of Oregon, she is not seeking to “make lemonade from lemons” (212). Instead, the reality of deforestation in both Oregon and Japan is tied to timber markets. The argument is about capitalism’s destructive power, and the aftermath of that destruction, not merely a hopeful tale of an anthropomorphized and amorphous “nature” fighting humanity to a hard-fought victory.
Tsing underlines this further when she turns to the forests of Yunnan, China, and the capitalist impulses in that cultural context. In the forest itself, matsutake picking and selling depends on communal ties and personal relationships. These disappear once mushrooms enter markets, with negative ecological consequences. One entrepreneur removed all the “flowering trees” from a particular forest because of urban demand, knowing many of the trees would not survive transplantation. Enough of them made the gamble worth it, and that justified the resulting damage.
Tsing calls these behaviors “entrepreneurial stunts” (273), and underlines that they also depend on the communal labor that maintains forests as rural livelihoods, and as a source of matsutake. The word choice of “stunt” underlines the personal pride and impulsivity of the decisions: entrainers are not hyper-rational, and neither is their pursuit of profit. The impulse to perpetually extract resources is thus rooted in a fundamental denial of communal values, in favor of the relentless pursuit of individual profit. This theme is not unique to China, however, as Japanese capitalists pioneered the commodity chains that contributed to deforestation in Southeast Asia and in Oregon. While the profit motive, and capitalism as a system, is clearly human, and designed by humans, Tsing underlines that this aspect of human nature has been celebrated for too long, leaving her and many of her subjects in a world that may not recover.
Tsing’s anthropological perspective underlines that while it relies on observable phenomena, data collection, and empirical studies, science is also a human enterprise and behavior matters. Professor K, who she meets in Japan, finds that his work as an environmental economist depends on “nostalgia” and reintroducing his students to rural life (182). Though the US Forest Service in Oregon has historically been interested in scientific modes of resource management, its bureaucracy also confronts human realities, particularly, the desire of mushroom pickers to maintain the pine forests that nurture matsutake. The social reality of the forest essentially forced a government bureaucracy focused on trees and resource extraction to care about mushrooms. Forests, in essence, cannot be understood without people, just as economies cannot. The Forest Service now meets with mushroom pickers to hear their grievances. Forest management is thus a human science that includes trees but goes beyond them. In these dynamics, Tsing sees opportunities for political change: “we are learning to listen—even if we don’t yet know how to have a discussion” (253). Though the mushroom pickers and the Forest Service may never reach common cause, their willingness to communicate may have repercussions for the landscape as well as the humans who work there.
Tsing makes further points about the connection between society and science when she considers recent discoveries around DNA, and the science around mushroom genetics and matsutake. Tsing notes that, like social scientists, natural scientists became invested in narratives of progress and predictability, especially in the twentieth century. They eventually discovered that they could not study organisms “isolated from history” and instead that genetics is shaped by the environment (141). Tsing finds that her own “radical curiosity” as an anthropologist may make her uniquely suited to challenge fixed mindsets (143). Curiosity, too, is an emotion: a drive to know, an openness to seek out information. Tsing’s anthropological gaze is often personal, including her life experiences of prior fieldwork and as the daughter of a Chinese American. Implicitly, she argues that confronting the end of the world requires acknowledging sentiments beyond profit, and the complex mental universes humans inhabit.
Similarly, Academic and research science does not provide obvious material or professional incentives for studying how mushrooms reproduce, or their genetics, but Tsing finds several people interested in these issues and willing to discuss them with her. Instead of being driven by profit, scientists “turn to these questions out of love” (228), as the pursuit of knowledge is sufficient to motivate them.
At the same time, the absence of emotional investment has consequences for how matsutake science operates. Japanese matsutake science combines academic study and popular understanding, as befits the mushroom’s cultural value there. But these “descriptive” studies are not valued in the US, where matsutake are understood as part of “forest management” (221). Japanese scientists are interested in increasing mushroom yields, while Americans, shaped by the ruined forests of Oregon, are concerned with the mushrooms as a finite resource that must not be overharvested. These preoccupations are “objective” in the sense that they are rooted in national experiences, but they also reflect desires and preoccupations.
This theme is most obvious in Tsing’s account of forests in Oregon. The logging of the original ponderosa pine made more room for lodgepole pines, and Forest Service management policy opposes using periodic burning to thin the forest. The mature pines are a legacy of white settlement and colonization of Oregon. Though white people found the original Ponderosa pine forests more profitable, Forest Service management prioritized capitalist imperatives over the methods that would have maintained them. The lodgepole Tsing walks in would not exist in similar number under Klamath stewardship of the land. They are home to the matsutake mushrooms that are then shipped to Japanese consumers. Tsing declares, “mistakes were made…and mushrooms popped up” (204). Error is productive, in this sense, but the corrective emergences by chance, not deliberation.
Similarly, the demand for mushrooms in Japan only exists because the pine forests there were cut down. Japanese timber is no longer in demand, so pine forests may return (211). But this resurgence is only possible because deforestation continued elsewhere—first in Oregon, then in Southeast Asia. Thus, the livelihoods of mushroom pickers in Oregon come from both older Japanese cultural practices along with specific policy decisions about deforestation and timber cultivation. And no human specifically intended either to diminish Japanese matsutake or create the conditions for its flourishing in Oregon.
More broadly, no single actor intended the dire circumstances in which humanity finds itself, or the more unpleasant consequences associated with resource extraction. Capitalist focus on profits to the exclusion of other concerns, and an obsession with progress compared to more sustainable modes of being, has created the world Tsing documents in such detail. It is unsurprising, then, that many of the less dire episodes in the narrative involve intention. Specifically, the Japanese matsutake crusaders intentionally cultivate the conditions that matsutake thrive in, without any certainty their efforts will work. They devote much of their leisure time to this pursuit, finding it more satisfying than the constant pursuit of urban success. They deliberately seek to form relationships, both with each other and the land. In Oregon, Forest Service personnel intentionally cultivate interactions with mushroom pickers, for lack of other options, unable to ignore the importance of matsutake. Tsing briefly profiles one Chinese scientist who married a Finnish man, who found a home for her research there. The intentional pursuit of connection and knowledge is presented as a more productive alternative than the perpetual quest for more mushrooms, more timber, more money, or more customers.
Tsing’s work is tinged with melancholy, as befits her certainty that an age of progress is no longer an accurate way to describe humanity’s present or future in the 21st century. She declares, “terrors, of course, there are, and not just for me. The world’s climate is going haywire, and industrial progress has proved much more deadly to life on earth than anyone imagined a century ago” (1).
The most obvious thread of loss in Tsing’s work is the decline of matsutake in Japan, and the deforestation that has so strongly influenced the mushroom’s trajectory there and in other countries. Many of her Japanese subjects, due to the new dominance of urban living, have similarly lost their connection to the forests, and to matsutake as anything other than a product available in grocery stores.
Loss predominates even more in Tsing’s stories of Oregon’s forests, and the multinational and multiethnic world of its mushroom pickers. These forests, she argues, are “haunted” (73) by the memories of war and devastation that so many pickers confront. Mien and Hmong pickers have left their old homes behind, for a much more precarious existence in the forest, with no guaranteed income, and government support for refugees a distant part of the past. She argues further that their work in Open Ticket is “haunted” by the distant specters of capitalist modes of being, especially more traditional ideas about selling labor and owning property (76-78). White and Asian pickers share a similar idea that “freedom” is what they really seek in the forest, though they define it, and its opposition to the state, in distinct ways based on their war experiences and political status (96-97).
Southeast Asian pickers arrive in a notably distinct political landscape than that of Japanese American pickers, or Tsing’s own family. Before the Reagan era and its attacks on the welfare state, Japanese Americans could assimilate in exchange for stable jobs and social status. This was deemed an acceptable loss, a trade off key to becoming American in the aftermath of Japanese internment during World War II. Southeast Asian pickers do not lose their cultures of origin; Tsing finds that they cook many of the same foods and speak their native languages. However, they have lost stability, particularly stable employment. In a sense, their story is one of survival and endurance. So too is the story of Japanese matsutake crusaders in their home country. Unhappy with the world as it is, they cultivate a relationship with the mushroom that may offer them a more satisfying future.