Matsutake Worlds

The matsutake mushroom continues to be a highly sought delicacy, especially in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cuisine. Matsutake Worlds explores this mushroom through the lens of multi-species encounters centered around the matsutake’s notorious elusiveness. The mushroom’s success, the contributors of this volume argue, cannot be accounted for by any one cultural, social, political, or economic process. Rather, the matsutake mushroom has flourished as the result of a number of different processes and dynamics, culminating in the culinary institution we know today.

The matsutake mushroom continues to be a highly sought delicacy, especially in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cuisine. Matsutake Worlds explores this mushroom through the lens of multi-species encounters centered around the matsutake’s notorious elusiveness. The mushroom’s success, the contributors of this volume argue, cannot be accounted for by any one cultural, social, political, or economic process. Rather, the matsutake mushroom has flourished as the result of a number of different processes and dynamics, culminating in the culinary institution we know today.

"A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction."--Publisher's description.

How the prized matsutake mushroom is remaking human communities in China—and providing new ways to understand human and more-than-human worlds What a Mushroom Lives For pushes today’s mushroom renaissance in compelling new directions. For centuries, Western science has promoted a human- and animal-centric framework of what counts as action, agency, movement, and behavior. But, as Michael Hathaway shows, the world-making capacities of mushrooms radically challenge this orthodoxy by revealing the lively dynamism of all forms of life. The book tells the fascinating story of one particularly prized species, the matsutake, and the astonishing ways it is silently yet powerfully shaping worlds, from the Tibetan plateau to the mushrooms’ final destination in Japan. Many Tibetan and Yi people have dedicated their lives to picking and selling this mushroom—a delicacy that drives a multibillion-dollar global trade network and that still grows only in the wild, despite scientists’ intensive efforts to cultivate it in urban labs. But this is far from a simple story of humans exploiting a passive, edible commodity. Rather, the book reveals the complex, symbiotic ways that mushrooms, plants, humans, and other animals interact. It explores how the world looks to the mushrooms, as well as to the people who have grown rich harvesting them. A surprise-filled journey into science and human culture, this exciting and provocative book shows how fungi shape our planet and our lives in strange, diverse, and often unimaginable ways.

The World Multiple, as a collection, is an ambitious ethnographic experiment in understanding how the world is experienced and generated in multiple ways through people’s everyday practices. Against the dominant assumption that the world is a single universal reality that can only be known by modern expert science, this book argues that worlds are worlded—they are socially and materially crafted in multiple forms in everyday practices involving humans, landscapes, animals, plants, fungi, rocks, and other beings. These practices do not converge to a singular knowledge of the world, but generate a world multiple—a world that is more than one integrated whole, yet less than many fragmented parts. The book brings together authors from Europe, Japan, and North America, in conversation with ethnographic material from Africa, the Americas, and Asia, in order to explore the possibilities of the world multiple to reveal new ways to intervene in the legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism that inflict damage on humans and nonhumans. The contributors show how the world is formed through interactions among techno-scientific, vernacular, local, and indigenous practices, and examine the new forms of politics that emerge out of them. Engaged with recent anthropological discussions of ontologies, the Anthropocene, and multi-species ethnography, the book addresses the multidimensional realities of people’s lives and the quotidian politics they entail.

Multi-Sited Ethnography has established itself as a fully-fledged research method among anthropologists and sociologists in recent years. It responds to the challenge of combining multi-sited work with the need for in-depth analysis, allowing for a more considered study of social worlds. This volume utilizes cutting-edge research from a number of renowned scholars and empirical experiences, to present theoretical and practical facets charting the development and direction of new research into social phenomena. Owing to its clear contribution to a rapidly emerging field, Multi-Sited Ethnography will appeal to anyone studying social actors, including scholars within human geography, anthropology, sociology and development and migration studies.

What is food and why does it matter? Bringing together the most innovative, cutting-edge scholarship and debates, this reader provides an excellent introduction to the rapidly growing discipline of food studies. Covering a wide range of theoretical perspectives and disciplinary approaches, it challenges common ideas about food and identifies emerging trends which will define the field for years to come. A fantastic resource for both teaching and learning, the book features: - a comprehensive introduction to the text and to each of the four parts, providing a clear, accessible overview and ensuring a coherent thematic focus throughout - 20 articles on topics that are guaranteed to engage student interest, including molecular gastronomy, lab-grown meat and other futurist foods, microbiopolitics, healthism and nutritionism, food safety, ethics, animal welfare, fair trade, and much more - discussion questions and suggestions for further reading which help readers to think further about the issues raised, reinforcing understanding and learning. Edited by Melissa L. Caldwell, one of the leaders in the field, Why Food Matters is the essential textbook for courses in food studies, anthropology of food, sociology, geography, and related subjects.

There is no doubt that “economy” is a keyword in contemporary life, yet what constitutes economy is increasingly contested terrain. Interested in building “other worlds,” J. K. Gibson-Graham have argued that the economy is not only diverse but also open to experimentations that foreground the well-being of humans and nonhumans alike. Making Other Worlds Possible brings together in one volume a compelling range of projects inspired by the diverse economies research agenda pioneered by Gibson-Graham. This collection offers perspectives from a wide variety of prominent scholars that put diverse economies into conversation with other contemporary projects that reconfigure the economy as performative. Here, Robert Snyder and Kevin St. Martin explore the emergence of community-supported fisheries; Elizabeth S. Barron documents how active engagements between people, plants, and fungi in the United States and Scotland are examples of highly productive diverse economic practices; and Michel Callon investigates how alternative forms of market organization and practices can be designed and implemented. Firmly establishing diverse economies as a field of research, Making Other Worlds Possible outlines an array of ways scholars are enacting economies differently that privilege ethical negotiation and a politics of possibility. Ultimately, this book contributes to the making of economies that put people and the environment at the forefront of economic decision making. Contributors: Elizabeth S. Barron, U of Wisconsin–Oshkosh; Amanda Cahill; Michel Callon, École des mines de Paris; Jenny Cameron, U of Newcastle, Australia; Stephen Healy, Worcester State U; Yahya M. Madra, Bogazici U; Deirdre McKay, Keele U; Sarah A. Moore, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Ceren Ŏzselçuk, Bogazici U; Marianna Pavlovskaya, Hunter College, CUNY; Paul Robbins, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Maliha Safri, Drew U; Robert Snyder, Island Institute; Karen Werner, Goddard College.