The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
8 Rating(s)
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The Mushroom at the End of the World
On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

Author: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Narrator: Susan Ericksen

Unabridged: 11 hr 6 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 11/28/2017


Synopsis

Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world—and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made?

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.


About Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Niels Bohr Professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, where she codirects Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA). She is the author of Friction and In the Realm of the Diamond Queen.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Joshua on February 05, 2016

Coulda been great: it's an experiment that failed, or, maybe, never needed to be taken in the first place. At its most fundamental, Tsing's book is an ethnography of those people involved in the trade of the matsutake mushroom. Valued in Japan, the mushroom has become scarce there; now there are atte......more

Goodreads review by Bayliss on December 18, 2021

Do you ever have one of those evenings where you're listening in on a really erudite, engaging conversation? A conversation among smart people where everyone is totally into the subject, and in discussing it bring each other to all kinds of new insights and connections among widely disparate things?......more

Goodreads review by Sunny on November 18, 2024

This wasn’t as critical of imperialism, and specifically Japanese imperialism, as I thought it could or should be. Otherwise a really interesting blend of anthropological and ecological epistemologies when it comes to a specific type of mushroom and the economies surrounding it.......more

Goodreads review by Nathan on August 27, 2024

Is this a fine work of academic exploration into our deteriorating society and world? Umm … it tried… But is it a good read to pull you away from things and let you spend a little time thinking about mushrooms and walking through forests? Yes......more

Goodreads review by Jessica on January 14, 2020

this is definitely an academic, theory-heavy book, and I'd honestly be surprised if anyone with no background in (what I perceive to be) often-esoteric theory would have had the fortitude to finish the book. as someone who hasn't read this kind of writing in a long long time, I'm definitely not real......more