![]() ![]() Their common values of “freedom” are left on the sorting room floor as the mushrooms become translated into capitalist forms of value, turned into alienated goods that are then converted back into gifts that mediate social relations in Japan. ![]() Tsing follows the supply chain, starting at the edge of public and private lands in Oregon where a motley crew of pickers-who include Hmong and Cambodian refugees from the Indochinese wars, second-generation Japanese Americans who experienced internment, white Vietnam War vets, and Latino migrants-have created a space of “rowdy cosmopolitanism” (76) on the edges of capitalism. Since the national supply began dwindling in the 1990s, it has become a global commodity that links forests, pickers, sellers, buyers, and consumers across three continents. The fungal protagonist of this story of global capitalism is matsutake ( Tricholoma matsutake or its North American variety Tricholoma magnivelare), a highly valued delicacy in Japan that plays a central role in the gifting economy. ![]() At once an experiment in method, an argument for “the arts of noticing” (37), a product of multiple collaborations, and an exemplification of Anna Tsing’s approach to ethnography as a poetics of polyphony and negative capability, The Mushroom at the End of the World is a multisited, multispecies, multisensorial experience of a book. ![]()
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