The Mushroom at the End of the World

This section covers Chapter 20, “Anti-Ending: Some People I Met Along the Way,” and the Conclusion, “Spore Trail, The Further Adventures of a Mushroom.”

To conclude her work, Tsing intersperses anecdotes across her research sites, “recouping moments when I glimpsed the kinds of boundary confusions that mark the edges of alienation—and thus, perhaps, latent commons” (278). Thus, her final quest is to find the places where capitalism brushes up against a more collectivist reality, even as it always remains in evidence. She introduces another research subject, a mushroom picker and amateur mycologist named “Matsiman” (the first part of his name refers to slang for the matsutake Mushroom, hence, he is “mushroom man”). He works hard to live outside capitalist structures, a lifestyle that requires constant alertness, and a devotion to what Tsing calls “arts of noticing” (279). This noticing is precisely what she has done for most of the work: watching people, forests, mushrooms, and academic disciplines, to uncover the possibilities that may await humanity in an increasingly uncertain time. Perhaps, in this reckoning, all mushroom hunters are anthropologists—or all social science requires patience, fortitude, and a willingness to examine what others have discarded.

Tsing meets a Chinese scientist who studied in Japan with a Finnish husband, Lu-Min Vaario, who shows her another aspect of matsutake as communal: the mushroom’s ability to feed off dead matter as well as living hosts. This research agenda, focused as it is on the mushroom’s wider universe, has struggled to find an academic audience, but Tsing considers it especially valuable: “Imagining the interactions among roots, hyphae, charcoal, and bacteria—as well as among Chinese, Japanese, and Finnish scientists—is as good a way as any to refigure our understanding of survival as a collaborative project” (280). Returning to arctic Finland, Tsing finds others who make their living foraging, or as nature guides, as factory jobs no longer exist. Uncertainty and unpredictability exist beyond borders, a shared reality between people only an anthropologist has thought to connect. But, in Dr. Vaario, Tsing finds someone else who knows her field sites, the worlds she has briefly entered. She is not alone in her interest in a life beyond nation-states or markets.

A Japanese friend, Tanaka-san, proudly shows his nature center, a personal project of his retirement where he hopes to teach children about the trees and matsutake. She meets a girl in Yunnan with an innate curiosity about nature, and Tsing notes that it “It was just the kind of curiosity Tanaka-san wanted to nurture in his town’s children. Multispecies living depends on it” (284). Children are key to the future less because of their youth and more for the open mindsets, free of assumptions. Perhaps they are natural anthropologists, with no innate interest in capitalist narratives of progress that are no longer true. Tsing writes, “Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human” (284), and the mushrooms can still be found. Capitalism may have alienating, destructive powers—readily visible in the ruined forests of many nations. And its “horror” abounds—Tsing does not suggest it’s escapable, rather that the ruin is animate, and, indeed, full of animus, perhaps even resentment. There is no easy path, no guaranteed future for the child she meets in Yunnan. However, none of this must happen in isolation—there are still people, connections to be made, and a natural world that persists, at least for now. There may be no progress, but there is no reason, yet, to give up, to stop looking, or declare a definitive end to either humanity or matsutake.

In her conclusion, Tsing notes that academia itself is subject to pressures of privatization, as scholars count their individual publications and professional structure reward constructing siloes rather than shared spaces. She argues that intellectual life should be conceptualized less as the “plantation” and more as the “woodland” open to many (286). This woodland approach animates Tsing’s collective project, the Matsutake Research Group, a collective of scholars interested in matsutake’s implications for their various disciplines. This has included studies of global trade, and studies of Japanese matsutake scholarship as a social and cultural enterprise.

To finally end the work, Tsing references science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s theories of fiction. Le Guin argues that in storytelling that moves beyond lone heroes, narrative becomes more like “foraging […] in this kind of storytelling, stories should never end, but rather lead to further stories” (287). Le Guin suggests in her work that it is exactly this perpetual foraging quest that distinguishes humanity: “‘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’” (288). This quote, and Tsing’s ode to the advantages of the matsutake research group, suggest that she has found bright spots amid desolation. The modern academy may still insist on atomization, but her work exists, as does those of her collaborators. Stories driven by foraging impulses still exist—though her work is not fiction, so much of her work is about foraging, and relies on foraging metaphors, that it seems fair to suggest she has written one. Her own humanity has been discovered and rediscovered, and perhaps, by being invited along, the reader may reap similar benefits.