The Mushroom at the End of the World

This section covers Chapters 4-7: “Working the Edge,” “Open Ticket, Oregon,” “War Stories,” and “What Happened to the State? Two Kinds of Asian Americans,” as well as Interlude 2.1, “Freedom.” 

Tsing acknowledges that her focus on “ephemeral assemblages and multidirectional histories” is a departure from other work on capitalism. The focus on factories and raw materials, partly driven by Marx’s preoccupation with this form of industrialization, led to an emphasis on a “coherent governance structure” (61). To explain how her approach differs, Tsing first defines a supply chain—“one in which lead firms direct commodity traffic” (62). Commodities generally refer to goods for sale, or, for Marxists, goods which result from the labor of workers, who sold their time and bodies to earn wages. Tsing argues that capitalism, rather than being homogenizing and predictable, relies on “translation”—bringing disparate landscapes and their cultural mores together at sites of exchange, as happens when mushrooms picked in Oregon are ultimately sold in Japan (62).

Tsing notes that part of her analysis is driven by a desire to challenge the idea that capitalism has always relied only on things its own processes generate. Instead, she suggests that factories also rely on “salvage accumulation,” the use of materials that existed before capitalism and cannot be directed by it, including landscapes and human labor (63). Tsing calls the places where salvage accumulation transpires “pericapitalist” to highlight that they are both within and outside the system (63).

Supply chains are places where pericapitalist products enter markets and are assigned monetary value. Tsing stresses that she is far from the first person to note this, as the “translation” of ivory to a global commodity is part of the subject of Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, a meditation on colonial violence. Additionally, the whalers in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick are engaged in “the conversion of whale life into investments” as whale oil sales help finance their expeditions. These processes are not, however, consigned to a distant past. For example, Wal-Mart engages in similar “translation” when it assigns objects its own barcodes, ignoring the labor and environmental conditions that produced them. Objects from many places can acquire new salience as “capitalist inventory” (64). She argues that “pericapitalist spaces are unlikely platforms for a safe defense and recuperation” (65).

Turning to the question of abolishing or reforming capitalism, Tsing notes that most of the system’s harshest critics consider it inescapable and ever-present, and that they similarly seek a totalizing transformation away from it. She is more interested in the idea that capitalism is also dependent on systems outside it, as when Mexican women enter garment factories already knowing how to sew, and employers assume this based on their gender. Capitalism, then, depends on “economic diversity” and mushroom hunting is where Tsing first investigates this under-appreciated reality (66). At this stage, Tsing’s project is descriptive as much as it is emancipatory. In her view, the reader must understand capitalism’s dimensions before transformation is possible.

To understand the matsutake commodity chain, Tsing first describes its many links: “lndependent foragers pick the mushrooms in national forests. They sell to independent buyers, who sell, in turn, to bulkers’ field agents, who sell to other bulkers or to exporters, who sell and ship, at last, to importers in Japan” (66-67). This process arose when Japanese matsutake were rare, and American ones particularly plentiful. Export companies relied on local knowledge to acquire their goods, which is why small companies and field agents who knew pickers retained importance for the overall chain. The demographics of mushroom pickers also changed over time—after 1989, white pickers who were usually white men disenchanted with modern life, often due to Vietnam service, were joined by refugees from the same region they had fought in. These interactions created a shared cultural value Tsing that calls “‘freedom’ which could mean many things dear to each group, even if they were not the same” (68). While Tsing is careful to highlight capitalism’s destructive powers, she also indicates where commodity chains also produce unique moral universes.

This insistence on freedom as a cultural value also explains why American pickers, buyers, and company owners could not enter Japanese markets directly. A Chinese seller Wei, who has more success, “buys matsutake for particular shipments, with particular characteristics, rather than buying for the pleasure and prowess of free competition, as the others do. He is already making inventory in the buying tents” (69). Tsing implies that Wei’s practices are explicitly capitalist and market-driven, and that the discourse of “freedom” in the rest of the Oregon camps is too messy to neatly enter capitalist mechanisms of exchange. American priorities also affected pricing, as American pickers insisted on competing for prices and exploiting fluctuations, rather than relying on stable rates. Mushroom importers work with various “cultural economies” to allow their companies to succeed (69). In a variety of industries, Japanese businesspeople decided that imposing Japanese labor laws and cultural norms were less important than the ability to make “legible inventory” (69). In this account, capitalism relies not merely on the exchange of currency or labor, but also on the sacrifice of values and norms to the pursuit of gains. The freedom produced in Oregon dissipates by the time mushrooms arrive in Japan. This aspect of capitalism, then, is flattening, relying on diversity at only some stages of production, effectively erasing them elsewhere.

Tsing suggests that mushroom encampments may be haunted places, as the current setup of campgrounds, regulated somewhat by the Federal Forest service, was prompted by a particular controversy. In the 1980s three Hmong pickers died in their tent, prompting more rules and oversight. Tsing describes how Forest Service campsites became home to mushroom pickers, many of them immigrants: “The campsites had no amenities, but the pickers […] quickly made them their own. Mimicking the structure of the refugee camps in Thailand where many had spent more than a decade, they segregated themselves into ethnic groups” (73).

Following the conventions of anthropology, Tsing explains that this chapter will describe multiple camps, and she will assign them the fictitious name of “Open Ticket” (75). The name is taken from a mushroom buying term. In a single night, the price of mushrooms may fluctuate through haggling, and an open ticket means that a picker may exchange their lower price for the higher one at the end of an evening. Tsing sees these events as a “performance” where pickers enact and display their “freedom” (75). Returning to her opening metaphor, Tsing argues that this freedom is a product of the “haunting” of the wartime pasts of pickers and the legacies of indigenous displacement in North America (76). Haunting is shaped by the interplay of opposites. Many people in Open Ticket are there to escape urban life, or to escape the form of capitalism where labor is sold to an employer on a schedule. One white picker sees his life as a recovery of masculinity most Americans are missing, while a Mien picker makes more money picking than he did working at Wal-Mart.

Tsing writes, “Matsutake picking is not “labor,” but it is haunted by labor. So, too, property: Matsutake pickers act as if the forest was an extensive commons” (78). The boundary between legal and illegal picking is not readily legible, and forest service enforcement is inconsistent. In this section, it becomes even clearer why Tsing has relied so directly on Marxist categories of analysis. The Communist Manifesto opens with the assertion that “a specter is haunting Europe, the specter of Communism,” but Open Ticket is haunted by a capitalism that endures centuries after the work’s publication (Marx 473). Further, her mushroom pickers operate with an awareness of capitalist norms and values to reject them and construct their alternative society. She notes, however, that “this scene only exists because the two-sided experience has purchase in a strange sort of commerce” (79). Capitalism does not have to be omnipresent, or present in its purest form, to shape norms, values, and the pursuit of profit.

The social ritual of Open Ticket depends on rapid information exchange:

Soon enough, calls ricochet between pickers, buyers, and field agents. The prices are shifting […] Meanwhile, field agents are on the phone to their bulking companies and exporters, learning how high they can go. It’s exciting and exacting work to put the others out of business as well as one can (80).

The public performance is as important as the money. Pickers choose their buyers for their sorting skill, as sorting by type and quality helps determine the final price. They re-enact the “performance of freedom” by waiting to find a buyer until the time is right (82).

Having described the process, Tsing turns to the philosophical question of whether Open Ticket is in fact capitalism. Money is exchanged, but it is not re-invested to make more capital—at least, not in the tents. And the competition for prices is devoted to “raising prices,” not hunting for the best deal (82). They imagine “an ever-flowing spring of money in Japan and the point of the competitive theater is to force open the pipes” (82). Pickers are particularly nostalgic for the radically high prices of the 1990s. Pickers further imagine that competitiveness will be rewarded by government policy on their behalf, and Japanese buyers are willing to support these habits if it results in the matsutake they want.

Tsing notes that while Japanese mushroom importers see these habits as “American,” Open Ticket’s inhabitants have varied histories and origins, so that it makes more sense to speak about an “assemblage—an open-ended entanglement of ways of being” rather than a single shared “culture” (84). From the outside (that is, the Japanese view), Open Ticket appears homogenous. How these mushroom camps may reflect a fundamentally American sociopolitical world is a subject Tsing herself will take up later.

Chapter 6 is preceded by an image, of a man in a cap holding a rifle. Tsing’s caption states: “Most pickers have terrible stories of surviving war. The freedom of the mushroom camps emerges out of varied histories of trauma and displacement” (85). In this instance, the photo placement foreshadows the topics to come. Tsing notes that war experiences unite many pickers, and their visions of emancipation and autonomy, especially experiences in the US-Indochina War, what most Americans know as the Vietnam War, but Tsing focuses on the conflict’s transnational and regional legacy.

The varying politics of the mushroom pickers are informed by history and race, as Tsing points out that white pickers may have sympathy with “U.S. conquest abroad, limited government, and white supremacy” while others are “iconoclasts” (86). Many find the woods comforting and safe, and manage their PTSD symptoms by retreating from society, though one man is still consumed by violent impulses toward Cambodian pickers. White non-veterans see the overall practice of hunting as an affirmation of their independence and masculinity. These descriptions of various communities shaped by war emphasize Tsing’s commitment to observation and description more than direct judgment. She does not condemn white pickers for their views (including their prejudices) as this distracts from fully understanding their values and placing them in context.

Cambodian pickers had their lives shaped by US policy both as survivors of war and as refugees. Mushroom picking was a survival strategy given the gutting of the US welfare state in the 1980s. Cambodians Tsing interviewed talked about the forest as freedom to recover and find new ways to thrive, including those who lost limbs in the conflict and thought they would not find paths to productivity or survival due to their new disabilities. White people’s habit of hunting in the woods also means that Southeast Asian refugees are surrounded by gunfire, as they were before emigrating

Hmong communities in the US are still shaped by war experiences. Pickers in Oregon sympathized with a Hmong hunter in Wisconsin who killed six men who confronted him for trespassing. Hunting and wartime survival is a key part of Hmong identity in Oregon, as well: “One Hmong elder whom I had asked about his life used the opportunity to tell me about how to throw back grenades and what to do if you are shot. The logistics of wartime survival were the substance of his life” (90). Mushroom picking is similarly affirming in these communities, as it also requires patience and knowledge of the forest. One Hmong elder told Tsing that as much joy as he took from the forest reminding him of Laos, nostalgia can be deadly, “Nostalgia can cause death, and then it’s important to have life insurance, because that allows the family to buy the oxen for a proper funeral” (91). In these accounts, as in those of white pickers, emotions dictate economic activity and practical concerns. The past remains dangerous even with geographic distance, as emotions may cause spiritual damage that then impacts the family’s survival.

Tsing notes that ethnic Lao tend to work as mushroom buyers because their Buddhist faith precludes hunting. They also frequently disregarded legal boundaries about where to pick, and “Lao pickers also—again like whites—took pleasure in boasting of their forays outside the law and their ability to get out of scrapes.” (92). Several of Tsing’s interview subjects reported willfully arguing with law enforcement officials to escape fines and prosecution. Lao defiance is partly driven by legal status—most are citizens, and they can take more risk than Latinx pickers who lack documentation. Tsing emphasizes that this overall diversity of backgrounds and experiences ultimately produces one economic result: “without any corporate recruitment, training, or discipline, mountains of mushrooms are gathered and shipped to Japan” (96).

Tsing continues her analysis of ethnicity and nationality in the forest, noting that Japanese American pickers felt “familiar to me, like family” which highlights for her that something fundamental has changed about the United States and its citizenship practices, over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

She notes that the first wave of Japanese immigration to the Pacific Northwest took place between 1882 and 1907, with many of the newly arrived Japanese finding work in farming, foraging, and logging. Despite legal barriers to property ownership, they thrived in these communities until World War II when forced internment removed them from their new homes and property. This led to increased pressure to assimilate and engage in Japanese cultural practices only in the domestic sphere. This explains, for Tsing, why the Southeast Asian pickers retain so much of their own history and culture: “Coercive assimilation showed me its contrast: Southeast Asian refugees have become citizens in a moment of neoliberal multiculturalism. A love for freedom may be enough to join the American crowd” (99-100).

Tsing identifies with this coercion experience; her mother pressured her and her siblings to become ideal Americans, not to learn Chinese. These pressures, for her, also show up in how the Japanese pickers encounter matsutake: “Even the matsutake dishes we cooked together were cosmopolitan hybrids that violated every Japanese culinary principle” (100). Japanese Americans entered the US when the welfare state was strong and affirmative action programs existed, in contrast to the 1980s environment Southeast Asians encountered: “Affirmative action has been criminalized, funds cut for public schools, unions chased out, and standard employment has become a vanishing ideal for anyone, much less entry-level workers. Even if they had managed to become perfect copies of white Americans, there would be few rewards” (102). Though Tsing clearly sees assimilation as a loss, the economic landscape that incentivized it was relatively more secure and predictable. In her view, retaining one’s original culture is not an ideological statement or act of defiance; it is a practical response to material realities that also offers social stability and wards off external threat.

With welfare and education largely out of reach to those who did not already have it, later arrivals found themselves “finding traction for the resources and skills they had, such as, for example, surviving a war” (102). Tsing compares earlier assimilation practices to a religious experience, where one “must convert, not to Christianity, but to American democracy.” Japanese American churches combined some aspects of Buddhism with physical buildings that resemble Protestant churches. In contrast, Southeast Asians stressed faith in survival through autonomy: “God operates like indigenous spirits, warding off danger. Instead of needing interior transformation, the converts I met came under protection through endorsing freedom” (104). Immigration is not merely a change of place, but also an interior effort.

These contrasting conversion processes also produce differing responses to matsutake. Because Japanese Americans often work typical jobs, they pick matsutake as a hobby and not for survival. They resent Southeast Asian intrusion into their tidy and cherished picking spots. The Oregon forests may be an escape for some, but they are not free of conflict. Turning to more recent years, Tsing notes that white people, including white mushroom pickers, have become more critical of immigrants. This new politics of resentment helps explain Southeast Asian habits in the forest: “As they [white pickers and white people] dismantle assimilation, new formations emerge. Without central planning, immigrants and refugees hold on to their best chances to make a living: their war experiences, languages, and cultures” (106).

White resentment produces a visible counterstrategy of resilience and mining the past for value. This emphasis on survival and autonomy means these communities are also prepared to adopt any economic role, without regard to stability or insurance benefits. Tsing declares, finally, “Whole communities can be mobilized—and for communal reasons. Universal standards of welfare hardly seem relevant. These are projects of freedom. Capitalists looking for salvage accumulation, take note” (106). Kinship structures have no inherent value to the economic universe Tsing describes. Instead, they can be “mobilized”—moved, effectively, into arenas where they would not otherwise exist, an extension of immigration.