What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make
Rui Sun
Abstract
To imagine seeing without an eye and smelling without a nose brings us to Michael J. Hathaway's ethnography of the world-making of fungi—the matsutake mushroom, specifically. The central theme reveals that fungi are as agentive as humans or animals, a line of thinking that itself grows from the fertile soil of two anthropological engagements. One is biosemiotics, which theorizes that organisms interpret, instead of react to, their surroundings. The other is a world-making approach where curiosities reside in “qualities, properties, and lifeways of specific living beings,” in making multiple and idiosyncratic worlds that intersect and overlap (19). Such perspective is distinct to the mainstream attention toward nonhuman agency that has arisen since the 1980s.Chapters 1–3 channel the experience of fungi from an inner perspective. Over deep time, fungi have fostered terrestrial life by converting rock into minerals, forming symbiosis with plant roots, and exchanging messages in the surrounding ecosystem. Today, fungi continue to shape the planet in ways we have only begun to recognize. Hathaway writes of the scientific experiments on fungi's power to clean up anthropogenic pollution, such as cigarette butt–eating fungi, plastic-eating fungi, and fungi that turn radiation into food (chapter 7). Still, decomposition may take tens of millions of years to complete. By then humans may have vanished from the earth.Chapters 4–6 situate readers in China's Southwest Yunnan Province, the contextual home of the matsutake mushroom. It remains unknown when matsutake arrived in Yunnan, but they settled down well and have become one main livelihood of the Yi and the Tibetans. In response to the Japanese market's insatiable appetite for matsutake, ethnic Yi pickers entered a global economy where they are a primary labor force, but the smallest shareholders in profits in the commodity chain. Nonetheless, due to the meager options for local subsistence, matsutake has been a blessing for Yi villagers, allowing them to imagine a better life. Tibetan matsutake hunters, in slight contrast, are less desperate participants in the emerging matsutake economy, as their livelihood has long been entangled with yaks and barley, and most recently tourists.Perhaps due to the lack of scientific information on matsutake, the implicit promise of matsutake-insect encounters built on in the first half of the book is not satisfactorily delivered in the second half. Careful readers would sense a bit of gap between the earlier emphasis on fungal world-making without human presence and the matsutake economy centering humans. And yet the delineation of the entanglements between matsutake and humans is informative and bears witness to the most ethnographically strong representations of matsutake in the Anthropocene. Indeed, the methodological challenge of such research is one that displays the limitations anthropologists face in accessing the nonhuman realms of world-making, should they exist.Situated in an anthropology beyond humans, the book contributes to the long-running Matsutake Worlds project (see this book's foreword and Hathaway's personal website, https://www.michaeljhathaway.net). Meanwhile, with Hathaway's enumeration of scientific research and hypotheses on fungi, the book demonstrates an approach to doing an anthropology of biology—a subject glittering in a scientific symbolism, once seemingly beyond the reach of anthropologists. Moreover, the book invites further curiosities beyond disciplinary boundaries. What are “plant bioacoustics” (79), “infochemicals” (94), and “sporinators” (97)? These new terms evoke anthropological imagination (What questions can anthropology ask today that haven't been asked before?) and reflect on scientific evaluation (What can be qualified as a scientific subject, instead of an object?).The final note is on the two theoretical approaches Hathaway takes to interweave a world of matsutake beyond humans. The world-making approach proves a stronger argument. Readers would benefit from an elaboration on the mutuality between world-making and biosemiotics. Hathaway insightfully points out that what a mushroom lives for is different from how mushrooms think, the latter being “a semiotic-only approach” (96). But how can humans know how other organisms think without observing and interpreting what they live for? From biosemiotics to a world-making philosophy, what is the tension between how nonhumans think and how they live? With that, I highly recommend this book to academics who share an interest in the prospering domain of environmental humanities, as well as anyone who cares to consider the diverse possibilities of how these magical mushrooms exist, in all of their mystery, beyond the human world.