The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (47 page)
Read The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins Online
Authors: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
16
. Anthony Amend, Matteo Garbelotto, Zhengdong
F
ang, and Sterling Keeley, “Isolation by landscape in populations of a prized edible mushroom
Tricholoma matsutake
,”
Conservation Genetics
11 (2010): 795–802.
17
. Interview, 2006.
18
. According to Dr. Murata, matsutake does not have a somatic incompatibility system to restrict matings. See Murata et al., “Genetic mosaics” (cited in chap. 16, n. 9).
19
. Haploid nuclei in fungal body cells may not combine until production of fruiting bodies, meanwhile producing cells with two (or more) nuclei, each with one copy of the chromosomes. The “di-” refers to fungal body cells with two haploid nuclei.
20
. For an opposing view, see Chunlan
L
ian, Maki
N
arimatsu, Kazuhide
N
ara, and Taizo
H
ogetsu, “
Tricholoma matsutake
in a natural
Pinus densiflora
forest: Correspondence between above- and below-ground genets, association with multiple host trees and alteration of existing ectomycorrhizal communities,”
New Phytologist
171, no. 4 (2006): 825–836.
I
NTERLUDE.
D
ANCING
1
. See Timothy Ingold,
Lines
(London: Routledge, 2007).
2
. Lefevre, “Host associations” (cited in chap. 12, n. 11).
3
. My ethnographic present here is 2008. Hiro has since passed away.
P
ART IV.
I
N THE
M
IDDLE OF
T
HINGS
1
. Brown founded the Jefferson Center for Education and Research in 1994; the center folded after her death in 2005. After Brown’s opening work, other organizations took over mushroom picker organizing, including the Institute for Culture and Ecology, the Sierra Institute for Community and Environment, and the Alliance of Forest Workers and Harvesters. The project hired “mushroom monitors” from among the pickers. Their job was to identify pickers’ needs, to work with their forms of knowledge, and to help design empowerment programs. Even when monitors stopped being paid, some continued as volunteers. The efforts of many people and organizations came together in the project.
2
Peter Kardas and Sarah Loose, eds.,
The making of a popular educator: The journey of Beverly A. Brown
(Portland, OR: Bridgetown Printing, 2010).
3
. Beverly Brown,
In timber country: Working people’s stories of environmental conflict and urban flight
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).
C
HAPTER 18.
M
ATSUTAKE
C
RUSADERS
1
. Dr. Yoshimura’s concern to protect the slope from erosion thus contrasts with Kato-san’s attempt to expose mineral soils through erosion, noted in the opening to part 3.
2
. Kokki
G
oto (edited, annotated, and with an introduction by Motoko
S
himagami), “‘
Iriai
forests have sustained the livelihood and autonomy of villagers’: Experience of commons in Ishimushiro hamlet in northeastern Japan,” working
paper no. 30, Afrasian Center for Peace and Development Studies, Ryukoku University, 2007, 2–4.
3
. Ibid., 16.
4
. Haruo
S
aito, interview, 2005; Haruo Saito and Gaku
M
itsumata, “Bidding customs and habitat improvement for matsutake (
Tricholoma matsutake
) in Japan,”
Economic Botany
62, no. 3 (2008): 257–268.
5
. Noboru
K
uramoto and Yoshimi
A
sou, “Coppice woodland maintenance by volunteers,” in
Satoyama
, ed. Takeuchi et al., 119–129 (cited in chap. 11, n. 14), on 129.
C
HAPTER 19.
O
RDINARY
A
SSETS
1
. As Michael Hathaway reminds me (personal communication, 2014), privatization in Yunnan sometimes revives pre-Communist tenure relations. The abruptness of changes, rather than their absolute novelty, draws attention to property’s constitutive relations.
2
. For discussions of tenure, see Liu, “Tenure” (cited in chap. 13, n. 16); Nicholas Menzies,
Our forest, your ecosystem, their timber: Communities, conservation, and the state in community-based forest management
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). After 1981 policies took effect, most forests were divided into three categories: state-owned forest, collective forest, and forest for which individual households were to hold responsibility. In the second category, forest was also divided into individual household contracts. Rights to trees and other forest access were increasingly separated; in 1998, a logging ban was instituted in Yunnan. Regions within Yunnan varied in how things worked. Michael Hathaway and my field site in Chuxiong became known for individual-access arrangements. However, we found that the farmers we interviewed were often confused or dismissive of the niceties of these categories.
3
. In the view of the IMF and the World Bank, privatization avoids the “tragedy of the commons,” in which we destroy shared resources. Garrett Hardin, “The tragedy of the commons,”
Science
162, no. 3859 (1986): 1243–1248.
4
. For some English-language entries, see Jianchu
X
u and Jesse Ribot, “Decentralisation and accountability in forest management: A case from Yunnan, southwest China,”
European Journal of Development Research
16, no. 1 (2004): 153–173; X. Yang, A. Wilkes, Y. Yang, J. Xu, C. S. Geslani, X. Yang, F. Gao, J. Yang, and B. Robinson, “Common and privatized: Conditions for wise management of matsutake mushrooms in northwest Yunnan province, China,”
Ecology and Society
14, no. 2 (2009): 30; Xuefei
Y
ang, Jun
H
e, Chun
L
i, Jianzhong
M
a, Yongping
Y
ang, and Jianchu Xu, “Management of matsutake in NW-Yunnan and key issues for its sustainable utilization,” in
Sino-German symposium on the sustainable harvest of non-timber forest products in China
, ed. Christoph Kleinn, Yongping
Y
ang, Horst Weyerhaeuser, and Marco Stark, 48–57 (Göttingen: World Agroforestry Centre, 2006); Jun He, “Globalised forest-products: Commodification of the matsutake mushroom in Tibetan villages, Yunnan, southwest China,”
International Forestry Review
12, no. 1 (2010): 27–37; Jianchu Xu and David R. Melick, “Rethinking the effectiveness of
public protected areas in southwestern China,”
Conservation Biology
21, no. 2 (2007): 318–328.
5
.
S
u Kai-mei, Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, interview, 2009. See also
Y
ang Yu-hua,
S
hi Ting-you,
B
ai Yong-shun, Su Kai-mei,
B
ai Hong-fen,
M
u Li-qiong,
Y
u Yan,
D
uan Xing-zhou,
L
iu Zheng-jun,
Z
hang Chun-de, “Discussion on management model of contracting mountain and forest about bio-resource utilization under natural forest in Chuxiong Prefecture” [in Chinese],
Forest Inventory and Planning
3 (2007): 87–89;
L
i Shu-hong,
C
hai Hong-mei, Su Kai-mei,
Z
hing Minghui, and
Z
hao Yong-chang, “Resources investigation and sustainable suggestions on the wild mushrooms in Jianchuan” [in Chinese],
Edible Fungi of China
5 (2010).
6
. See X. Yang et al., “Common and privatized,” and Y. Yang et al., “Discussion on management model.” Very different governance over matsutake harvesting—with much more communal control—characterizes the Diqing Tibetan area of Yunnan, where most foreign researchers gravitate. Menzies,
Our forest
; Emily Yeh, “Forest claims, conflicts, and commodification: The political ecology of Tibetan mushroom-harvesting villages in Yunnan province, China,”
China Quarterly
161 (2000): 212–226.
7
. Other researchers in this region usefully describe the disjunction between management policies and local practices as an issue of different scales of governance. Liu, “Tenure”; Menzies and Li, “One eye on the forest” (cited in chap. 16, n. 7); Nicholas K. Menzies and Nancy Lee Peluso, “Rights of access to upland forest resources in southwest China,”
Journal of World Forest Resource Management
6 (1991): 1–20.
8
. I was unable to go on this trip; Michael Hathaway kindly described what happened.
9
. David Arora (“Houses” [cited in chap. 16, n. 25]) saw matsutake change hands eight times in two hours in a Yunnan mushroom market. My experience watching matsutake in dedicated mushroom markets was similar; exchanges were constant.
10
. The contrast between this buying scene and the much more competitive local matsutake markets Michael Hathaway studied in the Tibetan area of Yunnan is instructive. There, Tibetan pickers sell to Han Chinese merchants; the buying scene is intensely competitive from the first. In the area I am describing, both the bosses and the pickers are of Yi nationality. Ties of kinship and residence also link pickers and buyers.
11
. Brian Robinson’s account of “the tragedy of the commons” for Yunnan matsutake admits that picking mushrooms in the commons may not hurt the fungus. He focuses instead on the problem of reduced income. Brian Robinson, “Mushrooms and economic returns under different management regimes,” in
Mushrooms in forests and woodlands
, ed. Anthony Cunningham and Xuefei
Y
ang, 194–195 (New York: Routledge, 2011).
12
. I am in debt to Michael Hathaway’s sharp perceptions for noticing this plaque.
C
HAPTER 20.
A
NTI-ENDING
1
.
http://www.matsiman.com/matsiman.htm
.
2
. Lu-Min Vaario, Alexis Guerin-Laguette, Norihisha Matsushita, Kazuo Suzuki, and Frédéric Lapeyrie, “Saprobic potential of
Tricholoma matsutake
: Growth over pine bark treated with surfactants,”
Mycorrhiza
12 (2002): 1–5.
3
. For related research, see Lu-Min Vaario, Taina Pennanen, Tytti Sarjala, Eira-Maija Savonen, and Jussi Heinonsalo, “Ectomycorrhization of
Tricholoma matsutake
and two major conifers in Finland—an assessment of in vitro mycorrhiza formation,”
Mycorrhiza
20, no. 7 (2010): 511–518.
4
. Heikki Jussila and Jari Jarviluoma discuss tourism in depressed contemporary Lapland: “Extracting local resources: The tourism route to development in Kolari, Lapland, Finland,” in
Local economic development
, ed. Cecily Neil and Markku Tykkläinen, 269–289 (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1998).
5
. Another world, indeed, is forming. Through the recruiting activities of Thai women married into depressed rural Finland, a network of Thai pickers has entered the forest, picking berries, and, recently, mushrooms. Pickers come independently, using their own funds. Like pickers in Oregon, they sell what they pick and pay their own expenses. They crowd into abandoned schoolhouses in the shrinking villages of Finland’s countryside; they maintain their own forms of living, sometimes bringing their own cooks—and even some of their own food. Unlike their recruiters, the pickers are not from Bangkok, but from impoverished Lao-speaking northeast Thailand. Perhaps they are distant cousins of Lao pickers in the United States. The resemblance makes one wonder: How will Finnish foresters and community builders speak with these new pickers? Will their experience and expertise come into dialogue?
S
PORE
T
RAIL.
T
HE
F
URTHER
A
DVENTURES OF A
M
USHROOM
1
. Ursula Le Guin, “The carrier bag theory of fiction,” in
Dancing at the edge of the world
, 165–170 (New York: Grove Press, 1989), on 167–168.
Index
Note: Page numbers in italics indicate photographs.
agriculture,
24
akamatsu pine.
See
Japanese red pine
Akemi Tachibana,
7
alienation,
5
–
6
; defined,
121
; as feature of capitalism,
122
,
133
,
301n3
; in logging,
41
; matsutake trade and,
121
,
128
,
271
–
72
; in plantation labor,
39
–
40
; value making and,
122
–
23
allelic differences,
304n19
American dream,
103
animals: mushroom foraging by,
247
; pines and,
170
; reaction of, to matsutake,
45
–
46
,
51
.
See also
nonhumans
Armillaria root rot,
231
Asian Americans, Japanese vs. Southeast Asian,
99
–
106
Asian Canadians,
67
Asian Development Bank,
115
assemblages: concept of,
22
–
23
,
43
,
292n8
; coordination in,
23
; lifeways in,
23
; method of analyzing,
158
; narratives of livability and,
157
–
58
; political economy and,
23
; politics and,
134
–
35
; polyphonic character of,
22
–
23
assimilation: coercive,
99
–
100
,
106
; of Japanese Americans,
99
–
101
,
103
–
4
; of Native Americans,
197
; Protestant secularism and,
103
; of Southeast Asian Americans,
101
