The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (41 page)

9
. Nellie Chu, “Global supply chains of risks and desires: The crafting of migrant entrepreneurship in Guangzhou, China” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 2014).

10
. As a method, one might think of this as combining insights from Donna Haraway and Marilyn Strathern. Strathern shows us how the startle of surprise interrupts common sense, allowing us to notice different world-making projects within the assemblage. Haraway follows threads to draw our attention to the interplay across divergent projects. By taking these methods together, I trace out assemblages informed by the disconcerting interruptions of one kind of project by others. It may be useful to point out that these scholars are the source points for anthropological thinking, respectively, with ontology (Strathern) and world making (Haraway). See Marilyn Strathern, “The ethnographic effect,” in
Property, substance, and effect
(London: Athlone Press, 1999), 1–28; Donna Haraway,
Companion species manifesto
(Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003).

C
HAPTER 2.
C
ONTAMINATION AS
C
OLLABORATION

Epigraph: Mai Neng Moua, “Along the way to the Mekong,” in
Bamboo among the oaks: Contemporary writing by Hmong Americans
, ed. Mai Neng Moua, 57–61 (St. Paul, MN: Borealis Books, 2002), on 60.

1
. Multicellular life was made possible by multiple, mutual contaminations of bacteria. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan,
What is life?
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

2
. Richard Dawkins,
The selfish gene
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).

3
. Many critics have refused the “selfishness” of these assumptions and inserted altruism into these equations. The problem, however, is not selfishness but self-containment.

4
. A species name is a useful heuristic with which to introduce an organism, but the name does not capture either the particularity of that organism or its position within sometimes-rapid collective transformations. An ethnic name has the same problem. But doing without these names is worse: we are left imagining that all trees, or Asians, look alike. I need names to give substance to noticing, but I need them as names-in-motion.

5
. Harold Steen,
The U.S. Forest Service: A history
(1976; Seattle: University of Washington Press, centennial ed., 2004); William Robbins,
American forestry
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985).

6
. For the related ecologies of Oregon’s Blue Mountains, see Nancy Langston,
Forest dreams, forest nightmares
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996). For a fuller discussion of eastern Cascades ecology, see
chapter 14
.

7
. Interview, forester Phil Cruz, October 2004.

8
. Jeffery MacDonald,
Transnational aspects of lu-Mien refugee identity
(New York: Routledge, 1997).

9
. Hjorleifur Jonsson,
Mien relations: Mountain people and state control in Thailand
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

10
. William Smalley, Chia Koua
V
ang, and Gnia Yee
V
ang,
Mother of writing: The origin and development of a Hmong messianic script
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

11
. William Geddes,
Migrants of the mountains: The cultural ecology of the Blue Miao (Hmong Nyua) of Thailand
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).

12
. Quoted by Douglas Martin, “Gen. Vang Pao, Laotian who aided U.S., dies at 81,”
New York Times
, January 8, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/08/world/asia/08vangpao.html
.

13
. Sources for this history include Alfred McCoy,
The politics of heroin: CIA complicity in the global drug trade
(Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2003); Jane Hamilton-Merritt,
Tragic mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the secret war in Laos, 1942–1992
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999); Gary Yia
L
ee, ed.,
The impact of globalization and transnationalism on the Hmong
(St. Paul, MN: Center for Hmong Studies, 2006).

14
. Personal communication, 2007.

15
. Hjorleifur Jonsson, “War’s ontogeny: Militias and ethnic boundaries in Laos and exile,”
Southeast Asian Studies
47, no. 2 (2009): 125–149.

C
HAPTER 3.
S
OME
P
ROBLEMS WITH
S
CALE

Epigraph: Niels Bohr quoted in Otto Robert Frisch,
What little I remember
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 95.

1
. A rich interdisciplinary literature—comprising anthropology, geography, art history, and historical agronomy, among other fields—has gathered around the sugarcane plantation. See especially Sidney Mintz,
Sweetness and power: The place of sugar in modern history
(Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986); and Mintz,
Worker in the cane
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960); J. H. Galloway,
The sugar cane industry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Jill Casid,
Sowing empire
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); and Jonathan Sauer,
A historical geography of crop plants
(Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1993).

2
. Sugarcane plantations were never as fully scalable as planters wished. Enslaved labor escaped into maroon communities. Imported fungal rots spread with the cane. Scalability is never stable; at best, it takes a huge amount of work.

3
. Mintz,
Sweetness and power
, 47.

4
. For introductions to matsutake biology and ecology, see
O
gawa Makoto,
Matsutake no Seibutsugaku
[
Matsutake biology
] (1978; Tokyo: Tsukiji Shokan, 1991); David Hosford, David Pilz, Randy Molina, and Michael Amaranthus,
Ecology and management of the commercially harvested American matsutake mushroom
(USDA Forest Service General Technical Report PNW-412, 1997).

5
. Key references include Paul Hirt,
A conspiracy of optimism: Management of the national forests since World War Two
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); William Robbins,
Landscapes of conflict: The Oregon story, 1940–2000
(Seattle: Univer
sity of Washington Press, 2004); Richard Rajala,
Clearcutting the Pacific rainforest: Production, science, and regulation
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998).

6
. For what went wrong, see Langston,
Forest dreams
(cited in chap. 2, n. 6). For the eastern Cascades, see Mike Znerold, “A new integrated forest resource plan for ponderosa pine forests on the Deschutes National Forest,” paper presented at the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources workshop, “Tools for Site Specific Silviculture in Northwestern Ontario,” Thunder Bay, Ontario, April 18–20, 1989.

7
. Susan Alexander, David Pilz, Nancy Weber, Ed Brown, and Victoria Rockwell, “Mushrooms, trees, and money: Value estimates of commercial mushrooms and timber in the Pacific Northwest,”
Environmental Management
30, no. 1 (2002): 129–141.

I
NTERLUDE.
S
MELLING

Epigraph: John Cage, “Mushroom haiku,”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNzVQ8wRCBo
.

1
. See
http://www.lcdf.org/indeterminacy/
. For a live performance, see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJMekwS6b9U
.

2
. This translation is found on p. 97 of R. H. Blyth, “Mushrooms in Japanese verse,”
Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan
, 3rd ser., 11 (1973): 93–106.

3
. For Cage’s discussion of the translation, see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNzVQ8wRCB0
.

4
. Alan Rayner,
Degrees of freedom: Living in dynamic boundaries
(London: Imperial College Press, 1997).

5
.
K
yorai Mukai, reproduced and translated in Blyth, “Mushrooms,” 98.

6
. Walter Benjamin, “On the concept of history,”
Gesammelten Schriften
, trans. Dennis Redmond, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), sec. 6, 1:2.

7
. Ibid., sec. 14. He is comparing fashion and revolution here; each harvests from the past to meet the present.

8
. Verran, personal communication, 2010. Verran develops the concept of the here and now in many of her writings concerning the Yolngu. Thus, for example: “Yolngu knowledge is the intrusion of the Dreaming into the secular. The Dreaming is brought into the here and now by the doing of particular things at particular times by particular people…. Knowledge can only ever be a performance of the Dreaming, a bringing to life in the here and now of the elements of the other domain” (Verran quoted in Caroline Josephs, “Silence as a way of knowing in Yolngu indigenous Australian storytelling,” in
Negotiating the Sacred II
, ed. Elizabeth Coleman and Maria Fernandez-Dias, 173–190 [Canberra: ANU Press, 2008], on 181).

9
. David Arora,
Mushrooms demystified
(Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1986), 191.

10
. William F. Wood and Charles K. Lefevre, “Changing volatile compounds from mycelium and sporocarp of American matsutake mushroom,
Tricholoma magnivelare,” Biochemical Systematics and Ecology
35 (2007): 634–636. I have not found the Japanese research but was told about it by Dr. Ogawa. I don’t know if the same chemicals were isolated as the essence of the smell.

C
HAPTER 4.
W
ORKING THE
E
DGE

1
. A commodity chain is any arrangement connecting producers and consumers of commodities. Supply chains are those commodity chains organized by lead firms’ outsourcing. Lead firms may be producers, traders, or retailers. See Anna Tsing, “Supply chains and the human condition,”
Rethinking Marxism
21, no. 2 (2009): 148–176.

2
. Shiho
S
atsuka,
Nature in translation
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). Satsuka draws on extended meanings of “translation” in postcolonial theory and science studies; for further discussion, see
chapter 16
.

3
. The term takes off from Marx’s “primitive accumulation,” the violence through which rural people destined for industrial work are disenfranchised. As in Marx’s analysis, I step outside industrial formations to see how capitalism comes into being. In contrast to primitive accumulation, salvage is never complete; accumulation always depends on it. Salvage accumulation is also required for the production of labor power. Factory workers are produced and reproduced through life processes never fully controlled by capitalists. In factories, capitalists use the abilities of workers to make goods, but they cannot produce all those abilities. To transform workers’ abilities into capitalist value is salvage accumulation.

4
. I reserve the term “noncapitalist” for forms of value making outside capitalist logics. “Pericapitalist” is my term for
sites
that are both in and out. This is not a classificatory hierarchy but rather a way to explore ambiguity.

5
. Joseph Conrad,
Heart of darkness
(1899; Mineola, NY: Dover Books, 1990).

6
. Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick
(1851; New York: Signet Classics, 1998).

7
. Misha Petrovic and Gary Hamilton, “Making global markets: Wal-Mart and its suppliers,” in
Wal-Mart: The face of twenty-first-century capitalism
, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein, 107–142 (New York: W. W Norton 2006).

8
. “Was a high wall there that tried to stop me, A sign was painted said: Private Property, But on the back side it didn’t say nothing—This land was made for you and me.” Woody Guthrie, “This land,” 1940,
http://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/This_Land.htm
.

9
. Sources include Barbara Ehrenreich,
Nickled and dimed: On (not) getting by in America
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001); Lichtenstein, ed.,
Wal-Mart
; Anthony Bianco,
The bully of Bentonville: The high cost of Wal-Mart’s everyday low prices
(New York: Doubleday, 2006).

10
. J. K. Gibson-Graham,
A post-capitalist politics
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

11
. Susanne Freidberg,
French beans and food scares: Culture and commerce in an anxious age
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

12
. Susanne Freidberg, “Supermarkets and imperial knowledge,”
Cultural Geographies
14, no. 3 (2007): 321–342.

13
. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
Empire
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

14
. The interplay between Hardt and Negri’s
Commonwealth
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009) and Gibson-Graham’s
Post-capitalist politics
is particularly good to think with. See also J. K. Gibson-Graham,
The end of capitalism (as we knew it): A feminist critique of political economy
(London: Blackwell, 1996).

15
. Jane Collins,
Threads: Gender, labor, and power in the global apparel industry
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

16
. Lieba Faier offers a related view of the matsutake commodity chain in Japan: “Fungi, trees, people, nematodes, beetles, and weather: Ecologies of vulnerability and ecologies of negotiation in matsutake commodity exchange,”
Environment and Planning A
43 (2011): 1079–1097.

C
HAPTER 5.
O
PEN
T
ICKET,
O
REGON

1
. When pickers buy Forest Service picking permits, they are given maps that show picking and no-picking zones. However, the zones are marked only in abstract space. The maps show only major thoroughfares and no topography, railroads, small roads, or vegetation. It is almost impossible for even the most determined reader to make sense of the map on the ground. Besides, many pickers cannot read maps. One Lao picker showed me a no-picking zone on his map by indicating a lake. Some pickers use the maps as toilet paper, which is scarce in the campgrounds.