Coulda been great: it's an experiment that failed, or, maybe, never needed to be taken in the first place.
At its most fundamental, Tsing's book is an ethnography of those people involved in the trade of the matsutake mushroom. Valued in Japan, the mushroom has become scarce there; now there are attempts to bring it back to the archipelago at the same time it is being harvested in Finland, Russia, and the Pacific Northwest--where much of the book is centered--and where the work is done by an unexpected coterie of whiter American military vets and various refugees from South American countries.
For my money, the pure ethnographic parts are often the best part of the book. She anatomizes the social structure of Oregon collecting communities; she identifies what motivates the collectors--freedom, though this word means different things to different groups, largely dependent upon their culture's historical interaction with the Vietnam War. She looks at the Japanese importers, and how they sort the incoming mushrooms not only according to grade and place of origin, but also how they will fit into the complex gift-giving culture of their society. And she looks at the intermediaries, who anonymize the mushrooms, turning them from fetish to alienated project, before they are returned, again, to a gift economy.
Capitalism's presence haunts the narrative--and it, along with the subtitle, is what initially attracted me to the book, Tsing's narrative didn't offer me what I wanted, exactly, but it had its pleasures.
I was looking for a more considered, deeper, look at the various inherent fractures in world capitalism, and people and things that prosper there. I'm thinking of coyotes and ravens and people who parasitize on capitalism without becoming a part of it. Tsing stays focused on the mushroom; and her people are never outside of capitalism. They form a part of what she calls pericapitalism--but is still part of the system.
The book itself is fragmented, and divided into--for an academic book--short chapters that do not follow narratively. To review it, I'll reconstruct some of the story in a more logical sequence.
She argues that in the wake of World War II, Japan modernized by innovating in supply chains: the islands did not have enough resources, and so the Japanese learned how t extract resources from other countries via intermediaries, which, happily, left them free from any criticism: they had plausible deniability. This system allowed them to catch up to the US during the post-War period, and put a scare in the world's largest economy.
Until the U.S. learned the trick in the 1990s, and began creating its own supply chains, outsourcing work to other countries and other companies, washing its hand of having to deal with labor at all or create an educated labor force. This leads to extreme economic inequality in the States as well as precariousness: the "good job" that the Baby Boomers knew are increasingly rare. Meanwhile, the Japanese, having strip-mined their own country and much of Southeast Asia, settled into an extended depression followed by stagnation. In light of these events, Americans rewrote their own history, not as a borrowing of Japanese techniques but as the obvious evolution of capitalism.
The mushroom intersects in this story in two ways. First, it was initially the product of peasant forests in Japan: it requires a certain amount of disturbance, the harvesting of broadleaf trees that allow the growth of pines, with which it is symbiotic. But the Japanese stopped harvesting their own forests. Meanwhile, there were other patches across the world where previously industrialized forests were being given up, allowing for the growth of mushrooms. Oregon was one of those places. Tsing notes that environmentalists were blamed for the decline of the timber industry, but really it was the company's exporting the jobs. Now, the recuperating forests lead to mushrooms. (The story is slightly different in Finland.)
The pickers who work these patchy areas are exemplars of pericapitalism, making their way in a newly precarious world. Capitalism, Tsing notes, is always scanning the globe for new resources to exploit--to alienate from its place int he world and from the workers that help to create it: the neat and tidy structure that is capitalism has messy roots, just as the strong, tall pines grow from a network of roots and interdependent fungi.
All this is fine, good, interesting--fascinating, even--and could have been laid out in a standard monograph very well. Tsing wants to experiment. And I cannot blame her for that. Experimentation is good, especially in academic writing. And that accounts for one of the stars here.
But all the razzle-dazzzle bouncing back and forth amounts to . . . not much.
But worse still is her writing is not up to the burden she is placing on the structure. One imagines what a David Foster Wallace or Terry Tempest Williams could do with the same material, and this book just seems too pedantic, too academic, despite the structural changes. Princeton also does a nice job with the images, and Tsing adds--in the manner of her friend and colleague Donna Haraway--oblique captions, but the book is still not as beautiful as those put out by the University of Chicago Press. (Compare The Last Dinosaur Book, more than a decade older, and still light years ahead in design and structure.)
Tsing is working to make her prose supple, but it reads like an academic trying too hard. The metaphoric language piles up into an irresolvable jumble. From page 109: "Shouldn't [matsutake] offer only the view from a frog in a well? On the contrary: the modest success of the Oregon-to-Japan matsutake commodity chain is the tip of an iceberg, and following the iceberg to its underwater girth brings up forgotten stories that still grip the planet." From frogs in the well to stories gripping the planet view chains, icebergs, and the forgotten. Its hard to get a sense of ehat is meant here, even if all the words make sense.
There is also the horrible tendency of the book to keep interpreting itself. This tic is less easy to demonstrate through quotations, but Tsing recurs repeatedly to questioning what she herself means by a particular term as an excuse to go off on a tangent that is supposed to explain what comes next. For a book that is experimental and fragmented, this one is very afraid that the reader will not get the points.
All of which is a pity, because the points are good, worthy, and interesting. Tsing is very smart, and has done an amazing amount of research across a wide range of fields. For the reader willing to rebuild her narrative into something straightforward, it is enlightening. But it can be off-putting, show-offy for the sake of being on display.
A lot of this same material was covered, also in a somewhat unconventional structure, many years ago, in Evan Eisenberg's much neglected "Ecology of Eden." His "Earth Jazz" is very reminiscent of what Tsing writes.