The Mushroom at the End of the World

This section covers Chapters 8-10: “Between the Dollar and the Yen,” “From Gifts to Commodities—and Back,” and “Salvage Rhythms: Business in Disturbance”

Tsing explains that, having now described the unique livelihood of mushroom pickers, it is important to ask: What has happened globally to make such unstable jobs typical rather than unusual? Far from being a minor or insignificant narrative, Tsing declares: “Shifting relations between U.S. and Japanese capital, I argue, led to global supply chains—and to the end of expectations of progress aimed toward collective advancement” (110). Supply chains mean that labor and working conditions are no longer of concern if desired goods are accessible when and where they are desired.

This hitherto unappreciated history of capitalism is observable via two historical eras, beginning in the late 19th century. First, the US demanded that Japan join the global economy as a trading partner. Then, in the late 1980s, American corporations responded to Japanese dominance by adopting their practices, including the use of supply chains rather than national firms. The result was that “the expectation that U.S. corporate leaders ought to provide employment disappeared. Instead, labor would be outsourced elsewhere—into more and more precarious situations” (110). Tsing notes that uncovering this past requires going beyond mushrooms but also keeping them in view, as “big histories are always best told through insistent, if humble, details” (111). While Tsing is not interested in straightforward narratives of progress, she does have a philosophy of history. That is, she prioritizes not merely examining the obvious, or large units of action like the nation-state, but also looking beneath surfaces for what might be ignored. This is reminiscent of her attention to the practice of mushroom hunting; history, too, requires a willingness to wander and explore.

Tsing recounts how US economic pressure to open the country to foreign trade had serious and lasting domestic repercussions for Japan. As Japanese elites did not wish to be colonized, they decided to embrace Western culture and business practices. This required learning foreign languages, import-export practices, and how global markets operated. Japanese elites came to see “translation” between Western values and their own as fundamental to business. After World War II, trading companies formed partnerships with banks. Trading companies “advanced loans—or equipment, technical advice, or special marketing agreements—to their supply chain partners overseas. The trading company’s job was to translate goods procured in varied cultural and economic arrangements into inventory” (113). An early example of this was the logging trade. Because Japan did not have enough wood of its own, Japanese trading companies provided technical support and advice to Indonesian loggers but never worked there directly, relying on local experts and intermediaries. This was both politically convenient and cost saving.

Japanese corporations also adopted what they called the “putting out” approach. Tsing explains: “It involved merchants (or firms) supplying subcontractors with loans, credit, machinery, and equipment to produce or finish goods, which would be sold in distant markets by the merchant” (114). This allowed Japanese businesses to profit from the growth of South Korean export firms, which they supported partly to skirt American bans on Japanese imports. This model was so successful it began to threaten the dominance of the American auto industry and produce significant anxiety in American elite circles. This led to a wave of companies appearing and disappearing through mergers and acquisitions, with the result that “most of what had once been inside those corporations was contracted to distant suppliers. Supply chains, and thus commitment to their distinctive form of salvage accumulation, took off as the dominant form of capitalism in the United States” (116).

Another element of this process was the relationship between the dollar and the Japanese yen on the international currency market. Initially, the yen and the dollar were equivalent, which was unpopular in the US as the Japanese economy recovered, as American imports could not perform well. Eventually, US elites artificially lowered the dollar’s value through international agreements, which made the yen extremely competitive in the 1980s. This environment forced many industries to move out of Japan, because their goods were too expensive for American and international markets. The Japanese economy lost its dominant position, but the concept of moving supply chains abroad remained globally dominant. One key example is Nike, which produces its logo and marketing in the US while shoe manufacture takes place elsewhere.

This history, Tsing asserts, explains what she found in the forests of Oregon. Unlike with Nike, American pickers supply goods rather than corporate structure. This is due to the national and international position in which the mushroom pickers find themselves: “[N]o one in Oregon thinks of him- or herself as an employee of a Japanese business. The pickers, buyers, and field agents are there for freedom. But freedom has come to mobilize the poor only through the freeing of American livelihoods from expectations of employment” (118). The world economy, then, is far from an abstract structure. It emerges from national histories, monetary policy, and what Tsing calls specific “historical conjunctures” (118). Though capitalism is omnipresent, its structures are not predetermined, but contingent, shaped by politics, economic behaviors and the broader commitment to perpetual growth and competition. Tsing asserts that her next task will be to explain how mushrooms enter the global economy, turning from “freedom” into “commodities” (120).

Chapter 9 is accompanied by a picture within a picture: Tsing has captured a Hmong man photographing his wife, holding the cash that represents her payment for mushrooms. This is, possibly, a last moment before the mushrooms re-enter the fully capitalist economy.

To understand the conversion process mushrooms undergo, Tsing defines a term that will be pivotal to her future analysis: “It is time to return to the problem of alienation. In capitalist logics of commodification, things are torn from their life-worlds to become objects of exchange [,,,] I use the term as a potential attribute of nonhumans as well as humans” (128). Tsing’s idea of alienation, significantly, is broader than that of classical Marxism, which focuses on how people are alienated from each other and from their own labor when they sell their labor to those above them in a class hierarchy.

Tsing notes that her background in anthropology offers her insight into how mushrooms are alienated, as some studies of gift-giving highlight that objects can have value through social exchange, not merely because of their economic value. The classic case study is of kula bracelets, made from shells, traded in Malaysia. The difference, then, between gifts and capitalist commodities is the “absence or presence of alienation” (123). In much of the world now, gifts are originally capitalist commodities, bought with currency, and so the presence or absence of alienation is not static. This is particularly apparent once matsutake arrive in Japan, as they have already been sold and will now become cultural treasures again. This quest begins early, as mushroom wholesalers operate like “matchmakers” imagining which of their clients are best suited to the newly arrived mushrooms (124). As many matsutake are sold to specialty stores, owners there also often have clients in mind when they purchase from wholesalers. Meals with matsutake also carry more weight and social import, and the very idea of thoughtlessly consuming large amounts of the mushroom invokes ideas of desecration and taboo.

This emotional investment, however, has clear limits, as the Japanese participants in the mushroom chain are completely disinterested in where and how the matsutake were picked. Tsing returns to open ticket, to consider how the gift economy might operate there. She argues that what pickers are really acquiring when they sell mushrooms is their future capacity to remain in the woods, to continue their expeditions. Freedom is personal, and thus mushrooms are not alienated commodities at this stage of life in Open Ticket.

The conversion from gift to commodity happens in warehouses, where, before shipment to Japan, the mushrooms are sorted a second time. This is the moment of transformation, as it is directed by “small businessmen willing to position themselves between exporters guided by Japanese economic conventions and buyers committed to a local American gift-and-trophy economy of war and freedom […] then, they must transform the mushrooms into an acceptable export commodity” (130). This moment of conversion is relatively brief, but it is sufficient to demonstrate Tsing’s point that modern capitalism, and matsutake within it, rests on “salvage accumulation: the creation of capitalist value from noncapitalist value regimes” (130).

To return to forests, Tsing recalls a story from a from a colleague, who discovered that local villagers in Borneo had responded to deforestation by selling the scrap metal left behind by loggers. Tsing argues that this is a metaphor for all modern conditions, as all of us navigate devastated landscapes: “Without the singular, forward pulse of progress, the unregularized coordination of salvage is what we have” (131-132). Tsing argues that narratives of perpetual progress and business expansion obscure what people are doing, which is navigating their own landscapes with their own priorities, as the mushroom pickers do in their quest for freedom. This lack of discipline and predictability also co-exists with the reality that capitalism will impose homogeneity to continue to meet demand for materials.

After absorbing assemblages into its larger system, capitalism also “converts ownership into power. Those with capital can overturn communities and ecologies. Meanwhile, because capitalism is a system of commensuration, capitalist value forms flourish even across great circuits of difference” (133). To turn to another metaphor, Tsing’s capitalism is a perpetually hungry beast, a predator with few if any strong competitors and a mythological capacity to morph depending on the context. Tsing argues that commodities can begin and end their life cycles through salvage accumulation, as mineral mining as a survival mechanism makes cell phones, and computers can end their use as scrap metal after they are donated (134).

Because real capitalism is diverse, heterogenous, and operates in many contexts, Tsing posits that this creates specific challenges for political organizing, as there can be no easy basis for solidarity in such a system. She promises that she will next examine these political possibilities and the relationship between man and nature.