“What do you do when your world starts to fall apart?” 

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing poses this question at the beginning of her book, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Anthropologist Tsing’s answer is that she goes on a walk.  That is something that I have started to do more during these pandemic times too.

Over the past summer, I’ve taken up foraging on my New England college campus. My guide has been a good friend, who did the same in her year off in Georgia. When we go on walks together, we point out plants and mushrooms and different things we see. Excitement ensues when we find something we know we can eat, like a Chicken of the Woods or a Black Trumpet mushroom. 

Chicken of the Woods (foragerchef.com)

Reading Tsing has given my adventures in foraging new meaning.  

When we forage we become part of what Tsing describes as an “assemblage”. This term is used as a way to give flexibility to the term “ecological community.” 

An ecological community is rigidly defined by its members and place, but an assemblage says that these members can change as they move from place to place, or even pass away. The assemblage expands as mushrooms travel from the place they grow to the hands of foragers and buyers, and ultimately eaters. 

In The Mushroom at the End of the World, Tsing follows the matsutake mushroom, which has become a hot commodity within the framework of our global economy, from its foragers to its gourmets. There matsutake means something different for the Southeast Asian refugee who is foraging mushrooms for a livelihood post-war compared to the white forager who picks without permits, or the Latino forager who picks while living in the forests.

Within the commodity chain of the matsutake mushroom the foraging of the mushroom is not inherently equivalent to economic wealth, but there is a possibility for the commodity to transform into a gift. These mushrooms have both economic and social value based on their cultural significance, but the economic value comes into play with their cost value at gourmet Japanese restaurants. The process of foraging and selling 

Like any good contemporary anthropologist, Tsing artfully and intentionally inserts her voice throughout the chapters in order to give life to the text. She does this especially in the interludes, which explicitly bring in how her views influence her work, such as by describing the smell of the matsutake mushroom. Although she discusses complicated subjects 

The matsutake mushroom is one of the most valuable mushrooms in the world, especially in Japan. I was surprised to learn how the mushrooms of different countries were described as colored differently because of the perceptions of the people who live in those places. To be specific, Tsing mentions that … 

It’s no surprise that The Mushroom at the End of the World was the constant recommendation I received when I first became interested in multispecies ethnography, which are narratives about human and nonhuman interspecies relationships. This book is part of the canon of multispecies ethnography, providing new ways to think about and complicate interspecies relationships. 

The book allowed for me as a student of Anthropology to think about how prominent concepts (like embodiment, capitalism, and participant observation) come into play within a nontraditional ethnographic approach that focuses and centers the human. 

Focusing on the matsutake mushroom at the same level of importance as people exemplifies the fluidity of the “nature” concept as inclusive of the human. Tsing further complicates “nature” with her focus on human-made constructs of capitalism and global trade because of the ways in which they affect interspecies relationships. Within the context of the matsutake mushroom, 

Now, I’ll definitely think a little bit deeper as I spot some mushrooms during my walks in the middle of the woods. I become part of an assemblage by interacting with the beings around me, whether I end up picking the mushrooms I see or not. Just my presence makes a difference.

When my friend and I go on our next walk, I’ll be sure to tell her all about the mushroom lives we walk into and Tsing’s tales of the matsutake mushroom.