The Mushroom at the End of the World - Anna Tsing

Journal of Peasant Studies, 2018

Lo Sguardo - rivista di filosofia N. 27, 2018 (II) - Politica delle passioni?, 2018

Science is a translation machine. Not only because protocols and zealous technicians select the parts to be integrated into a unified system of knowledge. Science is also translation because its insights are drawn from diverse ways of life. (217) Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing develops a science of the ecologies of encounter. This science looks at every form of life across every link of the supply chain. Every link is a source of surplus; and every link is valorized in the translation from one form of life into another. This science behaves as unresolved translation. Interpreting nature, as in the case of the Japanese matsutake science of Shiho Satsuka, requires training with both the machinic parts and "the eruption of difference." Adventures of difference are at the core of Tsing's groundbreaking work The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibilities of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Tsing's biocentrism decenters the tales of the anthropos. The matsutake mushroom is the nonhuman protagonist. The nonhuman lens allows multiple transformative commodifications to emerge, and to reveal how a commodity organizes life-cycles across the species. Or better yet, how life organizes itself around patches of local semantics. Tsing revels in the messiness of science. Here the mushroom plays as a metaphor for unpredictable insurgencies. A delicacy on the Japanese and international market, the matsutake is mostly picked in Oregon and other similarly deforested areas. This labor is carried out by Southern Asian immigrants, as a post-modern manifestation of freedom, and a side-job. The entanglements of markets, rituals, the stories of pickers, environmental histories, laws, philosophies and everyday life are so tight, that the book enhances a morphology of worldhistorical processes.

The Heart of the Wild: Essays On Nature, Conservation, and the Human Future

i walk with my wife, Edie, on the south side of Granite Mountain, the peak that looms above our northern Arizona town, at the base of which both of our children were born. At the trailhead, rain droplets begin to spatter and the sky rapidly darkens, as the sound of thunder grows closer and more frequent. We head out through the ponderosa pine forest, reveling in the feel of damp ground under our feet-this landscape has endured two years of drought, and the possibility of fire has threaded through our conscious and subconscious mind for the past several months. But this year the summer monsoon-localized thunderstorms seeded by subtropical moisture pulled up from México-has blessedly materialized. Life feels bountiful at every turn, and colors glow vibrantly, in spite of the gray sky. Abundant creamy white flowers of mountain mahogany, a wild rose, sweeten the air. An occasional scarlet Penstemon brightens the forest floor. Then, the day's highlight. Edie notices, just a few feet off the trail, a miniature snake curled into a tight circle, just three or four inches across. Bold brown patches along its back contrast with a creamy background, and strong black marks cross its pe tite face and extend back toward its tail. We are so staggered by this compact and unexpected beauty that

2016

No, no, you are not thinking; you are just being logical.-Physicist Niels Bohr defending "spooky action at a distance" To lISten to And tell A ruSh oF StorIeS IS A method. And why not make the strong claim and call it a science, an addition to knowledge? Its research object is contaminated diversity; its unit of analysis is the indeterminate encounter. To learn anything we must revitalize arts of noticing and include ethnography and natural history. But we have a problem with scale. A rush of stories cannot be neatly summed up. Its scales do not nest neatly; they draw attention to interrupting geographies and tempos. These interruptions elicit more stories. This is the rush of stories' power as a science. Yet it is just these interruptions that step out of the bounds of most modern science, which demands the possibility for infinite expansion without changing the research framework. Arts of noticing are considered archaic because Conjuring time, Tokyo. Arranging matsutake for auction at the Tsukiji wholesale market. Turning mushrooms into inventory takes work: commodities accelerate to market tempos only when earlier ties are severed.

Texts, Animals, Environments: Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics, 2019

The chapter serves as an introduction to "Texts, Animals, Environments. Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics". It examines the concepts of "zoopoetics and "ecopoetics" and delineates the objectives of the volume. The authors of the book probe the multiple links between ecocriticism and animal studies, assessing the relations between animals, environments and poetics. While ecocriticism usually relies on a relational approach to explore phenomena related to the environment or ecology more broadly, animal studies tends to examine individual or species-specific aspects. As a consequence, ecocriticism concentrates on ecopoetical, animal studies on zoopoetical elements and modes of representation in literature (and the arts more generally). Bringing key concepts of ecocriticism and animal studies into dialogue, the volume explores new ways of thinking about and reading texts, animals, and environments – not as separate entities but as part of the same collective

Philosophies, 2023

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