Nassima Abdelghafour
The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, published by Princeton University Press in 2015, is the latest book by anthropologist Anna Tsing. It is about a wild mushroom called matsutake, which has been appreciated as a delicacy and a fine gift for centuries in Japan because of its aromatic qualities. After World War II, as Japan industrialized, forests were felled and peasants stopped tending to the communal woodlands (called satoyama) in the traditional way. The landscapes where matsutake once thrived disappeared, and by the 1970s matsutake had become very hard to come by in Japan. The book follows the global supply chains that procure matsutake to the Japanese market…