The Mushroom at the End of the World

“They say the first living thing to emerge from the devastated landscape after the atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima in 1945 was the matsutake mushroom,” recounts the traders’ story, Anna Loewenhaupt Jing, an anthropologist and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In this book, Jing follows the path of a rare, precious mushroom and reimagines anthropological practice as a collaborative effort. In collaboration with colleagues, specialists from different fields, and informants who tell their own stories, Jing explores the chains of interaction between humans and nonhumans, finding possible forms of life in the uncertain here-and-now. She manages to describe a world beyond the division into Man and Nature, with attention to the diversity of economies, different temporal rhythms, and variable futures on the ruins of capitalism, in search of survival practices in a disintegrating world.