REFERENCES:
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Basso, K. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places. University of New Mexico Press: New Mexico.
Is this the last blog of the quarter already?
Anna Tsing's latest act is most imaginative, daring, and timely. It speaks eloquently to the ‘mattering' ponderance of late across the disciplines, and of the assemblages and entanglements of infrastructure we have discussed in this seminar.
The structure of the book is ‘a riot of short chapters' because Tsing “wanted them to be like the flushes of mushrooms that come up after a rain: an over-the-top bounty; a temptation to explore; an always too many. The chapters build an open-ended assemblage, not a logical machine; they gesture to the so-much-more out there. They tangle with and interrupt each other — mimicking the patchiness of the world I am trying to describe”.
I wonder - given the ethnographies we have read and the unevenness between the chapters (such as in Roads or Undersea Network) - if Tsing is able to pull it through? In other word, did the intentional riotic organization of the book serve to fulfill the author's purpose?
This book reminds me much of the discussion in political ecology - particularly in regard to the departure from the separation between the human and the non-human worlds, and the work of capitalist investment and its ruins. Tsing dislodges the oppressive treatment of Nature by ‘Man’ and invoke the experiences of men, women, and people of color. She writes, “Without Man and Nature, all creatures can come back to life, and men and women can express themselves without the strictures of a parochially imagined rationality”.
In terms of capitalist readings, Tsing reminds us of the ‘arts of noticing,’ that we ought to “not just look ahead, but around.” As we look around, we will notice things that might have been left out of the discourses of ‘progress' and ‘modernization.’ The undersides of things. The non-dominant stuff in the view of world power structures, but the real things that help us understand our own world in new and necessary ways. To this end, she argues for a ‘third nature’:
Imagine "first nature" to mean ecological relations (including humans) and "second nature" to refer to capitalist transformations of the environment. This usage—not the same as more popular versions—-derives from William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis. My book then offers "third nature," that is, what manages to live despite capitalism. To even notice third nature, we must evade assumptions that the future is that singular direction ahead.
So I pair this daring read with Keith Basso's award-winning book Wisdom Sits in Places. Basso conducts fieldwork with the Apache people and recounts how four different groups view the significance of places in their culture. By looking at the Apache conceptions of their own culture and way of life, Basso shows a place has deep intimacy with the people that live on it and their experiences and vice versa, an intimacy that is much more fluid and interactive than the sacrosanct division between nature and society that Tsing calls out at the start of her book.
Why such pairing? One reason is because of the sense of placeness that Tsing communicates through the stories and images - the way she weaves fieldnotes with the ecology, capitalist processes, global undertakings, world making, and most of all - the mushrooming stuff. A second reason is because for me, Tsing's audacious text evokes a kind of neglected wisdom that can help us reorient our understanding of our own world: “the uncontrolled lives of mushrooms are a gift—and a guide—when the controlled world we thought we had fails". Third, the coupling of places and wisdoms seems to bring together both Tsing's offerings and place as a kind of infrastructure - the entanglement of human lives, the ecology, and the global markets.
And check out this beauty (an image, not even the mushroom itself), at just $450, complimentary shipping:
http://www.houzz.com/photos/44330679/Matsutake-Mushroom-Limited-Edition-Photograph-photographs
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