This book tells of travels with mushrooms in order to explore indeterminacy and the conditions of precarity: life without the promise of stability. I once read that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, thousands of Siberians, suddenly deprived of state guarantees, ran to the woods to collect mushrooms. These are not the mushrooms Anna Tsing follows, but the image makes her point well: the uncontrolled lives of mushrooms can become both a gift and a guide when the controlled world we thought we had begins to fail.
What interests Tsing is not simply another critique of modernization and progress. Many analysts before her have already dissected the twentieth-century dream that history had a direction, that development would deliver stability, and that collective life could be organized around secure futures. Her question is different and, in a way, more difficult: how do we live once those handrails are gone? How do we inhabit a world in which the promises of development still beckon, but the means to fulfill them have largely disappeared? If we let ourselves be drawn by what she calls the “fungal attractions” of matsutake, we may be pushed into curiosity, and curiosity may be the first requirement for collaborative survival in precarious times.
That framing matters because, on the one hand, no place in the world remains untouched by the global political economy built through postwar development. On the other hand, the old promises no longer hold. Modernization was supposed to fill the world, whether communist or capitalist, with jobs, and not just any jobs, but standard employment: stable wages, benefits, predictability, security. Those jobs are now increasingly rare. Most people depend on much more irregular livelihoods. This is one of the central ironies of our time: almost everyone depends on capitalism, but very few have what used to be called a regular job.
Tsing’s intervention here also feels like a critique of a certain classic left politics organized around the fight against precarity as if the solution were simply the restoration of old forms of stability. To live with precarity requires more than denouncing those who put us here, even if denunciation remains necessary and useful. It also requires noticing the strange world that has emerged, and stretching our imagination enough to grasp its contours. This is where mushrooms enter. Matsutake’s willingness to emerge in blasted landscapes allows Tsing to explore ruin as the condition of our collective home.
Matsutake are wild mushrooms that live in human-disturbed forests. Like rats, raccoons, or cockroaches, they can tolerate some of the environmental messes humans have made. But unlike pests, matsutake are highly valued, above all in Japan, where their prices can make them one of the most expensive mushrooms in the world. More importantly, matsutake do not just survive in damaged landscapes; through their mutualistic relations with trees, they help forests grow in daunting places. To follow matsutake is therefore to follow possibilities of coexistence within environmental disturbance. This is not an excuse for further devastation. It is, rather, an attempt to learn from one form of collaborative survival.
This is also where Tsing becomes especially interesting politically. Matsutake illuminate the cracks in the global political economy. For the past thirty years they have circulated as a global commodity, foraged in forests across the northern hemisphere and shipped fresh to Japan. Many of the people who forage them are displaced or disenfranchised cultural minorities. In the U.S. Pacific Northwest, for example, commercial matsutake foragers include many refugees from Laos and Cambodia. Because matsutake command high prices, they can make a substantial contribution to livelihoods, and sometimes even encourage forms of cultural revitalization. This is important because it complicates an easy moralism about commodities. Global commodities are not necessarily only destructive; as in Tsing’s talks when she mentions technologies like Zoom, commodity infrastructures can also enable forms of connection, survival, and coordination that matter.
And yet matsutake commerce clearly does not realize the old development dream. Most of the foragers Tsing speaks with have stories of displacement, loss, and violence. Commercial foraging is simply a better-than-usual way of getting by for people with few other options. It is not stable employment. Mushroom foragers work for themselves; no company hires them. There are no wages, no benefits, no guarantees. Pickers sell only what they find. In some years there are no mushrooms, and they are left only with their expenses. Matsutake foraging is thus exemplary of precarious livelihood: a way of surviving without security.
The book tracks these precarious livelihoods alongside precarious environments, and in doing so it develops one of its most powerful concepts: patchiness. Everywhere Tsing looks, she finds mosaics of open-ended assemblages, entangled ways of life that unfold through different temporal rhythms and spatial arcs. Her claim is that only by taking precarity as an earthwide condition can we begin to notice this properly. As long as authoritative analysis remains attached to assumptions of growth, it cannot see the heterogeneity of time and space that ordinary participants and observers often recognize immediately. The point of the book, then, is not only to describe mushrooms, but to reopen the sociological imagination through them.
This also becomes a critique of Marxism, or at least of those strands of Marxist analysis that internalized progress too deeply. Tsing argues that twentieth-century students of capitalism often learned, following Marx, to see only one dominant current at a time, and therefore missed the many heterogeneous, contingent, and non-planned processes on which accumulation depends. Her question is crucial: what would capitalism look like if we stopped assuming progress? It would not appear as a unified historical machine moving forward in one direction. It would look patchy. Wealth would appear as something concentrated through the appropriation of value produced in unplanned zones, in contingent encounters, in landscapes and social worlds that do not fit the model of orderly capitalist production.
Japan offers one striking example. After postwar development, many people became concerned about the decline of peasant woodlands that had long been the source of seasonal beauty, from spring blossoms to autumn leaves. Beginning in the 1970s, volunteer groups mobilized to restore these woodlands. Wanting the restoration to matter beyond passive aesthetics, they looked for forms of livelihood that restored woodlands might sustain. The high price of matsutake made the mushroom an ideal product of woodland restoration. Here again, the relation between economy, ecology, and value does not fit neatly within the old binary of destruction versus preservation.
All of this unfolds within what geologists have begun to call the Anthropocene, the epoch in which human disturbance has become a geological force. In this context, Tsing asks a devastating question: what if precarity is not an exception, but the condition of our time? What if precarity, indeterminacy, and what we usually dismiss as trivial are actually at the center of the systematicity we seek?
One way she answers that question is through the concept of polyphony. Other writers use the term “assemblage” differently, but for Tsing the image of polyphony helps explain what she means. Polyphony is music in which autonomous melodies intertwine. In the madrigal or the fugue, several lines move at once, creating moments of harmony and dissonance without being absorbed into one unified melody. This contrasts sharply with modern musical forms organized around a single rhythm or beat, a single perspective. Learning to hear polyphony means learning to notice simultaneous but different trajectories. This is exactly the kind of attention required to understand assemblages: multiple temporal rhythms and spatial pathways unfolding together without becoming one.
For readers less inclined toward music, agriculture offers another analogy. Plantation agriculture seeks to isolate a single crop and synchronize its ripening for a coordinated harvest. But other kinds of farming are polyphonic. In shifting cultivation, many crops grow together, each with its own timetable. Rice, bananas, taro, sweet potatoes, sugarcane, palms, and fruit trees all coexist, demanding attention to multiple schedules of maturation. Once one adds pollinators, soils, other plants, and nonhuman agents, the rhythms multiply further. The polyphonic assemblage is this gathering of divergent rhythms. It is world-making, human and nonhuman at once.
Tsing even extends this idea into the political economy of supply chains. A small Chinese garment factory, for instance, may serve multiple supply lines at once, switching constantly between local boutique brands, knock-off international brands, and generic production for later branding. Each line demands different standards, materials, and forms of labor. Coordination is never singular. And when one moves from factories into the forests where wild products are foraged, these rhythms become even less predictable. The value chain is not a smooth line but a tangle of rhythms.
This is why the polyphonic assemblage opens a largely unexplored territory for modern political economy. Factory labor may have served as the exemplar of coordinated progress time, but supply chains are full of interruptions, irregularities, and heterogeneous forms of labor and value. It becomes difficult, as Tsing admits, even to know how to think about justice without progress. And that difficulty is one of the book’s deepest provocations.
At the center of this lies her critique of scalability. A theory of nonscalability, she suggests, might begin by studying the work required to produce scalability and the messes it leaves behind. One key historical model here is the colonial plantation. In the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sugar plantations of Brazil, Portuguese planters stumbled upon a formula for expansion: eliminate local people and plants, prepare empty and supposedly unclaimed land, and import isolated labor and crops. This model of self-contained, interchangeable project elements became foundational for later industrialization and modernization. It shaped the dreams we came to call progress.
Sugarcane plantations, as Sidney Mintz argued, became a model for factories. Plantation-style alienation was built into industrial modernity. Scalability came to organize capitalist modernization by imagining more and more of the world as something that could be standardized, expanded, and made exchangeable. Eventually, everything on earth, and beyond, came to be imagined as scalable and commensurable. This is the utilitarian logic that would harden into modern economics.
Matsutake forests stand as a sharp contrast. Unlike sugarcane clones, matsutake make it obvious that they cannot live apart from transformative relations with other species. Matsutake are the fruiting bodies of an underground fungus associated with the roots of certain forest trees. The fungus receives carbohydrates from those trees, while also foraging nutrients for them. This mutualism allows host trees to live in poor soils. Each sustains the other. Because of this dense interdependence, humans have never succeeded in cultivating matsutake. Japanese research institutions have spent millions of yen trying, but without success. Matsutake resist the plantation. They require the dynamic multispecies diversity of the forest, what Tsing calls its contaminating relationality.
The same applies to labor. Matsutake foragers are nothing like disciplined, interchangeable plantation workers. In the U.S. Pacific Northwest, foragers flock to the forest through what people call mushroom fever. They are independent, mobile, and not formally employed. No scalable corporation emerges cleanly from the forest. In the eastern Cascades, Forest Service researchers found in the 1990s that the annual commercial value of mushrooms was at least as high as that of timber. Matsutake had generated a nonscalable forest economy in the ruins of scalable industrial forestry.
This is one of the reasons Tsing insists on ethnography as a way to understand capitalism. Most critics of capitalism emphasize the unity and homogeneity of the capitalist system. Some argue there is no outside left. Others, like Gibson-Graham, remind us that noncapitalist forms exist everywhere, not just in archaic backwaters, though they tend to frame these as alternatives to capitalism. Tsing’s move is different. She looks for the noncapitalist elements on which capitalism itself depends.
Her example is simple and brilliant: women may learn to sew at home, outside the factory, but that skill is later pulled into industrial production for the benefit of owners. She calls this salvage accumulation: capitalist wealth-making that depends on appropriating value produced elsewhere, under different logics. To understand capitalism, then, we cannot stay inside capitalist categories alone. We need an ethnographic eye capable of seeing the economic diversity through which accumulation becomes possible.
This is why mushroom collecting becomes such a revealing scene after progress. The Oregon-to-Japan matsutake commodity chain shows capitalism achieved through economic diversity. Matsutake are foraged and sold in what Tsing calls pericapitalist performances, and only later do they become capitalist inventory as they move toward Japan. This translation is central to many global supply chains.
On the North American side of the chain, independent foragers pick mushrooms in national forests. They sell them to independent buyers, who sell them to field agents working for bulkers, who in turn sell to other bulkers or exporters, who finally ship them to importers in Japan. The chain is full of middlemen. Why so many? The answer, Tsing suggests, lies in concrete histories of movement, displacement, trust, rivalry, and localized opportunity rather than in some neat abstract market logic.
This perspective also opens onto questions of decolonizing critical political economy and rethinking progress. One figure in the book, Tom, a white field agent who had once worked for a large timber company, tells Tsing how he simply left one day: put his equipment in a locker, walked out, moved his family into the woods, and decided to live from what the land would give him. He gathered cones for seed companies, trapped beaver for skins, picked mushrooms to sell, and eventually moved into the buying trade. His politics are reactionary; he tells Tsing that liberals ruined American society and that men no longer know how to be men. Yet his rejection of standard employment is revealing. He rejects precisely what liberal and social-democratic imaginaries alike often take as the normative horizon of work.
Other stories complicate matters further. Lao-Su, for example, works in a Wal-Mart warehouse in California when he is not picking matsutake, earning $11.50 an hour but without medical benefits. After injuring his back on the job, he was put on leave. Yet he says he earns more money from matsutake picking than from Wal-Mart, even though the mushroom season lasts only two months. And beyond money, picking offers something else: every year he and his wife join the vibrant Mien community in Open Ticket. They treat it almost like a vacation, and on weekends their children and grandchildren join them in the forest. This note immediately made me think of films about caravans and itinerant forms of collective life: precarious, certainly, but also social, seasonal, and meaningful in ways wage labor often is not.
The buying scene at Open Ticket is one of the most fascinating in the book. Late in the afternoon, white field agents sit around joking, accusing one another of lying, calling each other vultures or Wile E. Coyote. They agree to open at a certain price, say $10 a pound, but almost no one sticks to it. The moment the tents open, competition erupts. Field agents call buyers to offer $12 or $15. It is a vivid market scene. Yet when Tsing once described this to an economist, he declared excitedly that this was capitalism in its purest form, free from distortions and inequalities. Tsing’s response is devastating: is it even capitalism? There is money everywhere, but no capital. Money changes hands and slips away. Accumulation only happens farther downstream, in Vancouver, Tokyo, and Kobe, where exporters and importers use the trade to build firms. Open Ticket mushrooms enter capital streams, but they are not procured within what clearly looks like a capitalist formation.
Another beautiful scene concerns Japanese American matsutake enthusiasts. The elders Tsing describes are second-generation immigrants who speak little Japanese and are as likely to go out for cheap Chinese food as to cook traditional Japanese dishes. They are proud of their Japanese heritage, as shown by their devotion to matsutake, but that pride is lived in self-consciously American ways. Even the matsutake dishes they prepare are cosmopolitan hybrids that violate every strict Japanese culinary principle. Identity, like economy, appears here as assemblage rather than purity.
This all feeds into Tsing’s discussion of alienation, or sometimes the lack of it. In capitalist logics of commodification, things are torn from their lifeworlds to become objects of exchange. Tsing uses alienation not only for humans but for nonhumans as well. What is surprising about matsutake in Oregon is that, in the relation between foragers and mushrooms, alienation does not fully happen. The mushrooms are torn from the fungal body, yes, but instead of immediately becoming alienated commodities they become trophies of the hunt. Foragers beam with pride, recounting the pleasures and dangers of the search. The mushrooms become extensions of the foragers, almost as if they had been eaten. So the real question becomes: how do trophies of freedom become capitalist commodities?
To answer that, Tsing turns to anthropology and the theory of the gift. The classic example is Malinowski’s description of the kula ring in Melanesia, where necklaces and armbands circulate not because they are useful or serve as general exchange media, but because they make relations and reputations. Their value lies in the social bonds they enact. Thinking with kula makes capitalist alienation look strange rather than natural. Under capitalism, not only workers but also things are alienated from the social worlds that produce them. They become stand-alone objects, exchangeable without reference to the networks from which they arise.
In gift regimes, by contrast, things and persons are formed together. Things become extensions of persons; persons become known through the things they give. Value is not only use value or exchange value. It can also be relational value, reputational value, social value. Tsing does not simply divide the world into gift economies and commodity economies. That dichotomy breaks down in practice. But she uses it as a tool for noticing difference, especially for seeing how capitalism draws from noncapitalist value systems.
This is why matsutake matter so much. Their value does not derive only from use and market exchange. It is also produced in acts of giving. Matsutake, Tsing argues, begin and end their lives as gifts. They spend only a few hours as fully alienated commodities: while they sit as inventory in crates on the tarmac and travel in the belly of a plane. But those are decisive hours. In those hours, exporters and importers can calculate, profit, and stabilize business relations. This is salvage accumulation: capitalist value created from noncapitalist value regimes.
Rather than focus only on the capitalist imaginary, disciplined workers and strategic managers, Tsing asks us to look at precarious living in scenes that both use and refuse capitalist governance. These assemblages tell us what remains despite capitalist damage.
From here the book opens onto a broader politics of progress and alienation in the Anthropocene. The business of progress depended on conquering an infinitely rich nature through alienation and scalability. But if nature has turned out to be finite, even fragile, it is no surprise that entrepreneurs scramble to extract what they can before it runs out, while conservationists desperately try to save fragments. Tsing wants another politics, one centered on more-than-human entanglements.
This is where fungi become philosophically indispensable. Many people think fungi are plants, but they are actually closer to animals. They do not make food from sunlight. Like animals, they must find things to eat. Yet fungal eating is often generous because it makes worlds for others. Through extracellular digestion, fungi excrete acids outside their bodies, breaking food down into nutrients that both they and others can use. Fungi helped make soil by digesting rock. They digest wood, preventing dead trees from piling forever in forests. They build worlds.
And more broadly, many organisms only develop through interactions with other species. Tsing mentions the Hawaiian bob-tailed squid, whose light organ never develops unless it encounters a particular bacterium in seawater. Female parasitic wasps cannot produce eggs without Wolbachia bacteria. Large Blue butterfly larvae cannot survive without ant colonies. Humans themselves cannot digest food without helpful bacteria acquired at birth. Ninety percent of the cells in a human body are bacterial. We too are assemblages.
One Japanese scientist even described matsutake as the result of “unintentional cultivation,” because human disturbance can make their appearance more likely even though humans remain incapable of cultivating them directly. Pines, matsutake, and humans, one might say, cultivate one another unintentionally.
The comparison between Japan and the U.S. Pacific Northwest drives this home. Both the interior pine forests of the Pacific Northwest and the sugi and hinoki forests of central Japan were once tied to industrial timber regimes connected to Japan’s development. Both later lost competitiveness. Both fell into neglect. Both became ruined industrial forests. And yet, for matsutake, ruin opened possibility. For some species, industrial ruin is disaster; for others, including matsutake, it can become a site of world-building.
Even science itself appears differently from this perspective. One might assume Japanese matsutake science would be the universal model inspiring the rest of the world. But, except perhaps in Korea, this is not the case. Scientists in matsutake-exporting countries invent their own local sciences. Science, then, appears not as a single universal method radiating outward, but as a series of postcolonial translations.
At the center of all this lies the concept of assemblage, indebted, as others have noted, to Deleuze and Guattari. Assemblage thinking means understanding phenomena as contingent upon and constituted through changing relations. A farm, for example, is not just land and buildings; it includes farmers, animals, crops, weeds, weather, tools, infrastructures, and the relations among them. The same is true of forests, supply chains, commodities, and livelihoods. Matsutake make this visible because they resist isolation. They force us to think relationally.
In the end, what makes Tsing’s book so compelling is that it asks us to think after the collapse of progress without falling into despair or nostalgia. It does not offer mushrooms as a romantic alternative to capitalism, nor as a simple metaphor. Mushrooms are good to think with because they reveal worlds already there: patchy, polyphonic, precarious, entangled. They show that life continues in ruins, that value is made across heterogeneous regimes, and that survival is collaborative long before it is sovereign.
What remains difficult, perhaps necessarily difficult, is justice. Tsing herself admits that she hardly knows how to think about justice without progress. That line stays with me. It may be the deepest challenge in the book. If the old developmental horizon can no longer guide critique, what kind of political imagination becomes possible? Maybe that is exactly why mushrooms matter. Not because they solve the problem, but because they train us to notice what dominant models ignore: indeterminacy, dependence, heterogeneity, and the possibility of life in damaged worlds.
