The Mushroom at the End of the World

Tsing introduces people back into the narrative through metaphor, in which she compares matsutake picking to dancing. Picking relies on careful attention, the use of all senses, and can be highly emotional: “One gets up before dawn to be there first, lest others find the mushrooms. Yet no one can find a mushroom by hurrying through the forest: ‘slow down,’ I was constantly advised” (242). Pickers search the soil without caring much for scientific terms, and instead seek moisture and the presence of plants the mushroom is known to grow with: Instead, searching brings us to the liveliness of beings experienced as subjects rather than objects” (243). Mushroom picking is not objective, or abstract. Knowledge is constructed through activity, not formal study. Yet these methods are no less illuminating than those of scientists, and both groups are motivated by emotions. Studying spores was driven by “love” and the pursuit of the forest reads here like another form of passion.

Tsing introduces one of her subjects, an elderly Japanese man named Hiro who hunts matsutake so that he can give them away to others. On his walk, he recalls the patches that belonged to deceased friends, or places he was once successful in the past. His recollections rely on an “intimate historical knowledge of the forest” (244). He is less positive about Cambodian pickers, but Tsing says that her next account, of a Mien family, is simply “another dance” (245). This echoes the sense from earlier chapters that in Japan matsutake are only briefly part of capitalism: for Hiro, money is no object, essentially irrelevant. His “dance” proves Tsing’s earlier point that matsutake mushrooms exist both inside and outside capitalism.

Moei Lin and Fam Tsoi are Mien from Laos, who arrived in California via Thai refugee camps. Unlike Hiro, who picks as a cultural practice, they work long hours to make enough to live on. They track the movement of species that also eat the mushroom, like elk and deer, and revisit the tracks of others, as mushrooms frequently grow in the same places. On this journey, trash, frequently decried by the Forest Service, offers guidance as it shows the paths other pickers have taken. She finds it is difficult for her companions to explain how their lunch is prepared: “The trick of cooking is in the bodily performance, which isn’t easy to explain. The same is true for mushroom picking, more dance than classification. It is a dance that partners here with many dancing lives” (250).

In the previous chapter, Tsing argued that mushrooms may contain genetic multitudes discernible only when one lets go of traditional insights about species and reproduction. Here, scientific insight disappears entirely in favor of other knowledge forms: pickers and scientists both see the mushroom, even if they see it for their own purposes. Tsing’s task is to juxtapose the two, subtly insisting that no one mode should have primacy in understanding matsutake or understanding the modern world capitalism has made.