Hi friend!
Thank you for opening my first newsletter. In this edition, I give you some thoughts on ruins, landscapes, attention and mushrooms.
Ruins, landscapes and mushrooms
I really appreciated reading Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015) while recovering from covid the other week.1
Tsing’s book is an ethnographic study of mushroom foraging and the economies, ecologies and communities that revolve around this activity. It sounds strange, and in one sense the mushroom functions as an excuse to discuss wide-ranging topics like industrialisation, life in late modernity, migration, freedom and relations inside and outside of capitalism. But it is not merely an excuse – the book is also really about mushrooms!
It is even more about the relations and symbiotic existence of fungi, trees, humans, landscapes and the human/non-human communities they form. Since the matsutake fungus only thrives in certain forests, and since trees in these forests rely on the matsutake for nutrients they form a sort of community. But the creation of these forests in turn relies on intervention, often by humans in the form of silviculture (the control of forest growth). In Japan in the form of traditional peasant forests with labour-intensive raking of the forest floor and weeding out of broadleaf trees. In Oregon the inadvertent result of (misguided) forest fire suppression.
This construction, or destruction, of forests with specific characteristics, is intertwined with the creation of surprising wealth in the form of the most sought-after and highly prized mushroom in the world.
I have lots of thoughts connected to the themes of the book, but two of the main ones are related to my continuous interest in my home province Bohuslän. (For those who read Swedish I recommend my text from a few years back in Glänta, “Den femte sillperioden”.)
Ruins
The first theme is the ruins mentioned in the title of Tsing’s book, and I have thought for a while about the current landscape as a sort of ruin and the future ruins of the current architecture and infrastructure.
Tsing’s landscapes of pine forests in Japan, Yunnan, Finland, and Oregon have different trajectories of cultivation, neglect, and industrial development. They now function as places for what she calls salvage, the gathering of mushrooms that are then turned into capitalists goods through different intermediaries. Every landscape where humans have lived or acted are shaped by earlier, and now abandoned, modes of living and interacting with nature. These are the prerequisites for the matsutake mushroom to thrive.
In the case of Bohuslän, the main earlier activity around which the whole coastal landscape is shaped has been fishing, especially the recurring herring periods. The qualities of picturesque fishing villages which are now backdrops for summer houses and vacations are a sort of ruin of these earlier dominant modes of economy.
But this also means that the future ruins of the landscape will be the remnants of the current driving force and dominant mode of development/exploitation, namely the real estate boom. Sooner or later the massive housing boom driven by cheap loans and a rich middle class who wants to vacation on the coast will subside and the human landscape will shift.
It might be that these now mostly empty summer houses will be inhabited year-round, and then we will have a new form of life in the ruins of the vacation lifestyle. Quite beautiful perhaps. Or the landscape will lose its summer inhabitants combined with a decline in population in general, and the houses will be empty year-round.
A third possibility, or rather inevitability, is that all the houses close to shore will sooner or later be eaten by the rising sea. If times are good some houses might be moved or dismantled, the rest will wash away and become shipwrecks, or rather housewrecks, stranded on the bottom of shallow beaches.
Attention
The other theme that really resonated with me in Tsing’s book was the repeated reflections on method, where attention was a recurring term. Her engagement with her study objects (the foragers, the mushrooms, the trade, histories of migration, and translations between spheres) is based on being attentive – in conversations, observation, on the forest floor while searching for the elusive mushrooms.
While reading I thought a lot about one of my favourite books, Bruno Latour’s The Making of Law –An Ethnography of the Conseil d’Etat. Latour’s study is an ethnography of one of France’s highest courts and describes in fascinating detail the language, movements, and artefacts inside the the Palais-Royal.
Latour’s book is more limited in scope, but what it also does really well is to keep the attention on details of different configurations (assemblages) of human and non-human actors, while still being both aware and engaged with the researcher as an active part of the situations being studied. In Tsing’s case e.g. when she describes her own foraging after mushrooms with her study objects, in Latour’s similarly when he includes himself in the description while he tracks the actions of the judges, staff, files and rooms in the court house.
I have been inspired by this perspective, although I have not yet fully fleshed it out in a major study. In a forthcoming chapter on the opening ceremony of the Swedish Riksdag, I wrote somewhat cryptically that the study consisted of “an ethnographic analysis from a legal constitutional perspective”. What I meant was that my attention in the study of the ritual was guided by my perspective, which includes my training as a jurist, my knowledge of constitutional law, my vocation as a legal academic, etc. It is obvious that someone else studying the exact same thing, would not actually study the same thing, since what we would see would be different.
Attention is usually an immediate thing, the ability to concentrate on what is in front of us, what we hear, what we smell and taste. But maybe, in a drowning world, we must train ourselves in a longer form of attention. Attention that can grasp a landscape on geological, or at least climatological timescales.
Mushrooms
Finally, I of course also got very curious about the mysterious and (under the right salvage-capitalist-market conditions) very expensive mushroom, Tricholoma matsutake (goliatmusseron in Swedish). It almost exclusively grows in nutrient-poor pine forests. In Sweden, it has mainly been found in northern forests, but when pine grows directly on crystalline basement (urberg) it can be found elsewhere. And we have lots of crystalline basement in Bohuslän!
In fact, matsutake has already been found in Bohuslän. Let’s see if I go foraging this fall on some dry pine mountains at home.
Thank you for reading!
Tormod
I found the book via Adam Tooze, who also published a sort of clip book on his reading while I was finishing it.