Exploring the Possibility of Life in a Capitalist Wasteland: A Study of Mushrooms at the End of the World

Kathryn Sheehan: Quick delivery. Item exactly as described.

United States on Oct 16, 2023

worthbooks: Good quality. A slow read.

United States on Apr 15, 2023

Eugène Fournier: The beginning is a bit dry and boring, but once Tsing gets into the meat of the entanglements - or the rythm of the story, if you will, you slowly become eager to find out more, until you look forward to every next page.

Canada on Jun 20, 2021

grace: good

Canada on Jan 24, 2021

Luisa: One of the best ethnographies I've ever read in my life! The edition is not very good, many blank pages, but it's worth a lot! An incredibly powerful critique of capitalism, and a careful look at other ways of life.

Brazil on Aug 09, 2020

GEORGIOS: The book expands among practices of mushroom picking within communities, precarious households, alone at four regions capitalised in various speeds. Tsing guides us through small stories, well-cared stories of individuals,couples, families, communities routing to and around matsutake, an exciting species originating from Japan, but thriving in collapsing environments.

United Kingdom on Nov 10, 2019

R. M. Mcmurray: This review is in part a response to another review - one I feel is unfairly critical (I have no problem with critical - but you be the judge. The book is thoughtful, complex in parts, but also inspirational in its attempt to follow traces, processes and enactments. It is uncomfortable because simple things suddenly become complicated from the picking of mushrooms, to Darwinism, unitary thinking, freedom, capitalism and much more. I don’t agree with all of the analysis / enactment of the capita but then I assume the author wants us to converse, engage, critique and think. It’s not a book to read in a hurry. Take your time. Read other things in between and contrast the ideas. By all means disagree, but don’t denigrate the scholarship. It is a wonderful and thorough piece of work - storytelling worth an ear

United Kingdom on Apr 17, 2019

A. J. Sutter: This interdisciplinary work about mushrooms is a stimulating antidote to a lot of conventional wisdom about economics. Matsutake grows opportunistically on the roots of pine trees -- it can't be cultivated, nor, despite demand, can production scaled up in a conventional way. To get more matsutake you need to create conditions for more pine trees -- but you also need to forage, and understand a lot else about the forest environment. Those who gather matsutake aren't alienated from their work: the book's ethnographic chapters expose the multitude of meanings the process can have for those who gather the mushrooms. Nor do the usual "laws" of supply and demand apply: in some communities there is pressure for the prices to be paid to gatherers to go upwards.

I plan to use this book in a college course about sustainability for business majors: I'm looking forward to their grappling with these ideas so contrary to Econ 101. Unlike other reviewers I don't see any evidence that the author (ALT) misunderstands basic economics -- but their view shows how confusing it may be for some readers to have their orthodoxy challenged. That's exactly why I think it's a useful book. In addition,...

United States on Feb 23, 2018

Ai: This book was a really creative look at capitalism and systems outside of capital--I was really impressed with how accessible it was (she made assemblages seem reasonable and even useful!) The middle dragged a little bit for me- I'm not sure if it's because I have a hard time following economic flows or if because I was just too sleepy while reading it to understand, but it was still a brilliant book that I feel like will take me a long time to tease apart and really sit in.

(I am interested, if anyone else is, in thinking about taking her 'latent commons' and putting it in conversation with José Esteban Muñoz's brown commons... hmu yo.)

United States on May 14, 2017

Vince Leo: Taking as her subject the Matsutake mushroom—prized as a gift in Japan and scavenged in ruined post-industrial forests around the world—Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has created a grand synthesis that interrogates and integrates everything from current anthropological methodology to the foundations of Darwinism to the history of post-industrial capital formation. Tsing has done her homework: There are individual interviews with American pickers, Finnish planners, and Japanese scientists; there are histories of U.S. Forest Service regulations and Japanese village commons; there are scientific papers and field trips to labs and pickers’ camps. Using this wealth of data, Tsing creates mushroom and methodological “patches,” temporary and fluid “entanglements” of people, practices, economies, and stories that proceed from the scrub pine and Khmer pickers of the Pacific Northwest to the shipping containers and international traders of the Japanese market.

For all its theoretical and political ambitions, The Mushroom at the End of the World is a response to a growing feeling of helplessness and despair: a sense of the precariousness of our current economic and ecological...

United States on Oct 09, 2016