The Mushroom at the End of the World

This section covers Chapters 16-17, “Science as Translation” and “Flying Spores,” as well as Interlude 3.2, “In Gaps and Patches.”

Tsing argues that the drive for uniform cohesiveness is particularly visible in Western models of science: “Translation helps them watch the elements of science come together into a unified system of knowledge and practice. There has been less attention to the messy process of translation as jarring juxtaposition and miscommunication” (217). Science, like history, deserves untidiness in the interest of proper understanding. This diversity shows up within academic and scientific structures, as Japanese matsutake science is not well understood outside the country, and produces radically different views of human involvement, with Japanese scientists seeing intervention in forests as necessary, while Americans cast it as a threat. Though this may seem like two sides of an argument, Tsing disagrees, writing, “This is not a debate: despite the fact that both groups of scientists circulate internationally, there has been almost no communication about these positions” (218). Chinese experts see the US as the model to emulate and compete with, so they are more influenced by this model despite their forestry trajectories somewhat resembling Japanese ones.

Japanese matsutake research is aimed at a broad audience, what Tsing calls “vernacular knowledge” that includes farmers and ordinary people. The close relationship between matsutake and pine is a major research theme, so that efforts to grow the mushroom in a laboratory frequently involve bringing in trees. Japanese studies have not found an American audience because they emphasize local environments, not the pressures the Forest Service faces to produce manageable and profitable forests. Japanese advocacy for pine trees is unnecessary in Oregon, where these environments already exist in abundance. Tsing notes that the decline of Japanese science has a strong influence on which research questions Chinese forest scientists ask. They do not, as she might hope, ask, “How might people sustain oak-pine forests for matsutake? Instead, researchers imagine matsutake, American style, as a self-contained, scalable product, whose accounting requires no attention to relations with other species” (223).

This dominance of American models has its limits, however, as the American preoccupation with whether pickers are destroying mushrooms, and the possibility of reducing this is not of primary interest in China. Instead, their mushroom exporters are interested in the Japanese possibility of helping matsutake thrive, as this research agenda promises more profit. Thus, Japanese matsutake science is translated and disseminated by businesspeople, not scientists (223).

These national trajectories were on display when Tsing attended a matsutake conference with other anthropologists from North Korea, China, and Japan. They learned to collaborate, to share ideas, and to simply take in new information, but Tsing notes that “gaps and patches were maintained” by lack of American presence, and that Chinese businesspeople, not mushroom experts with laboratory backgrounds, attended. Tsing finds that the conference itself was the product of national trajectories coming together, as a young Chinese woman who had met Japanese anthropologists as a child found this interest persist into adulthood (224). As an adult matsutake trader, she helped bring the conference into being, a new “cosmopolitan science” (224). Understanding the mushroom requires emulating its transnational reach and salience across multiple cultures.

To understand how matsutake became objects of transnational interest, visible in many different forests, Tsing turns her analysis to mushroom spores and reproduction. This serves as another example of diversity in development, across multiple landscapes and temporal trajectories. The study of how species spread is not profitable or done in pursuit of scientific glory through research grants: “Scientists turn to these questions out of love—and because the methods and materials are there. Perhaps one day the combined results and speculations will lead us, like spores, to something new, they reason. For now, it is just the pleasure of thinking: the spore-filled airy stratosphere of the mind” (228). This suggests a moment of affinity between scientists and mushroom pickers in Oregon. The mushroom pickers are, fundamentally, in the woods because they want to be, and so it is for scientists chasing mushroom origin stories.

Mushroom species are preserved in collections called herbariums, which “emerged with the northern European passion for identifying plants, which also resulted in Latin binomial names” (229). This is also how scientists exchange information and specimens, by sending dried mushrooms through the mail. Modern methods of mushroom classification rely on studying DNA. While this makes use of earlier samples, DNA itself becomes an object of collection, though in computers rather than file drawers. To explain what a species is, Tsing first offers the established definition: “Classically, species boundaries were defined by the inability of individuals on each side to mate and produce fertile offspring” (230). This definition may not apply to mushrooms, however, as they cannot be grown in labs so that such experiments can be readily designed.

Instead, matsutake experts study the DNA of their samples across various continents, and sometimes discover that mushrooms with distinct names are in fact the same species. For some fungi, species boundaries may not be particularly informative: “Species are open-ended when even individuals are so molten, so long-lived, and so unwilling to draw lines of reproductive isolation” (231). Tsing recalls this as a moment of epiphany for her, as it is more reminiscent of how anthropologists and other social scientists treat their “frames”—as models that are “continually questioned” rather than made sacred or immutable (231).

Turning back to the questions of how mushrooms traverse landscapes, and take the transnational forms we now see, trees remain key to the story. In fact, they counter conventional wisdom, as matsutake may have originated in the Pacific Northwest, not in Japan, as tree migration patterns reveal. Others suggest that matsutake originated in the Himalayas, where they associate with both pine and oak trees, as the matsutake in modern China do. Human movement may also account for matsutake travel, taking place over millions of years. Understanding how matsutake reproduce causes another epiphany for Tsing at a meeting in Japan, as she learns about chromosome containing cells called haploid spores. But these are not the only way that matsutake reproduce:

We might expect them to mate with other haploid spores, thus making full pairs; they do. Human eggs and sperm join that way. But matsutake spores are capable of something else. They can join with body cells that already have chromosomal pairs. This is called “di-mon” mating, from the prefixes for “two”—the number of chromosome copies in fungal body cells—and “one”—the number in the germinating spore. It’s as if I decided to mate with (not clone) my own arm: how queer (237-238).

Mushrooms, then, can contain multitudes, just as they live with other species and may have attained global reach through interactions with various hosts. Tsing ultimately finds spores as inspiring as the idea of diffuse and “patchy” development (240). The genetic universe of mushrooms, and their evolutionary history.