The Mushroom at the End of the World

This preface serves as an introduction both to the work itself and her intellectual stance. Tsing’s goal is to restore a view of nature that complicates the “passive and mechanical” framework set up by the European enlightenment in the 18th century (Location 122). Her alternative is a framework of “entanglements” (127), which she posits as better suited to a modern age of ecological devastation that also includes marginalized voices. This contrasts with the Enlightenment’s privileging of the experiences of white men. Nature is not an object, and its complexity has historically been undervalued. Tsing sees her work as iconoclastic but also more suited to understanding the world as it is.

She next turns to questions of structure, arguing that her chapters are not linear and may repeat points. Her use of photographs, she argues, is meant to “present the spirit of my argument rather than the scenes I discuss” (Location 133). She declares further that “my experiment in form and my argument follow each other” (Location 140). Tsing rejects, then, rigid narrative structure, and, to an extent, the typical structure of much academic writing. The work is an experiment, not a prescription for future work or a dictate.

Tsing does, however, position her work in dialogue with other scholars, particularly those who examine the environment and the economy. Citing environmental historian William Cronin, she acknowledges her intellectual debt to traditional frameworks of understanding nature. If “first nature” is a landscape that predates modernity, “second nature” is what happens to landscapes under capitalism (Location 140). Her work, she argues, is about what “manages to live despite capitalism” and in direct opposition to the insistence that the story of nature and humanity is one of “progress” (Location 140). Tsing’s wording deliberately contrasts with the idea of a straight line or forward march, perhaps evoking tangled thread, though Tsing suggests her goal is to describe rather than unravel what she observes.

Next, she explains something of her methodology and sources. As an anthropologist, Tsing conducted fieldwork on matsutake mushrooms for several years, between 2004-2011. These observations undergird her conclusions. Tsing then acknowledges her collaborators and intellectual comrades, including a research group of other social scientists interested in what matsutake mushrooms reveal about nature and humanity. She sees her own work as only one “adventure story” and thanks those who guided her through the world of Southeast Asian mushroom pickers, and the world of mushrooms in China, Japan, and Finland. She notes that the work was particularly enriched by “feminist science studies” with its emphasis on critical deconstruction of capitalism and scholarly disciplines (Locations 163-187).

Tsing makes explicit that her work is particularly influenced by Marxist analytical categories. Karl Marx, the 19th century German philosopher, framed capitalism as a system that exploited both man and nature to generate wealth for those who held the means to purchase the labor of others by paying them wages. Marx saw capitalism as both destructive and ultimately unsustainable, as the exploited class of workers, the proletariat, would eventually overthrow those who held capital, the bourgeoisie, leading to a world revolution that would ultimately produce communism, a utopian state where all human needs were met. Tsing is both observer and critic of the world as it is, looking, perhaps, for alternatives to the world she observes. She notes that this approach may be somewhat at odds with “thick description” (Location 187). This term is closely associated with anthropologist Clifford Geertz who defined the nature of anthropological work as close, detailed observation of specific cultural realities and behaviors, with attention to their context. (Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” 1973).

Tsing also thanks her collaborators and those who funded her research, crediting research assistants with many of her photographs. Her gratitude to those she shadows and interviews, however, is undergirded by her specific sense of professional ethics. Most of her subjects are given pseudonyms, and place names are obscured, to protect the identities of those who live and work there.