What mushrooms are good for
Sailen Routray
 |
| Photo credit - Wikimedia Commons |
Yes. Fungi are good to
think with. This is what I learnt by reading Michael Hathaway’s book What a Mushroom
Lives For. While I did not learn
what a mushroom lives for, not in any great detail, I did learn this.
Fungi are good to think
beyond the animal centricity of social sciences. Even when social sciences try to
escape anthropomorphism, the vision of life generally does not expand beyond
the animal kingdom. Fungi are an important part of human lifeworlds; thus, it is
important that an expanded social scientific worldview gives them their due.
Like humans, monkeys,
dogs and dolphins, fungi also learn. But what does learning mean for fungi? Terms
developed for understanding human actions, like ‘learning,’ if carelessly
extended to other species can anthropomorphize them, interpreting their actions
in exclusively human terms. On the other hand, if we make the case that no
other species other than humans can learn, explanations end up being
anthropocentric. This is not very useful in understanding other lifeforms, like
fungi, and the ways in which our own very human lives are entangled with them.
To illustrate: There
was a time when fungi did not know how to break down the woody material of
trees called “lignin”. Dead trees piled up for millions of years, and later
converted into coal and mineral oil through geological action. According to one
theory, the carbon age ended when fungi learnt how to digest lignin – one of
the more important ways fungi have shaped the world.
The lives of fungi and
plants have been entangled for a very long time. Fungi have been critical
actors in the territorial colonization of the earth by plants. Fungi helped
plants leave the oceans and colonize the continents. They also helped plants,
by creating symbiotic relationships with them, create the atmosphere and the soil
as we know these now. By disintegrating and decomposing rocks, creating soil,
and helping plants grow, they have been crucial players in making continents
inhabitable and green. Through symbiotic relationships with plants and trees,
and by making vital minerals available to them, fungi have been central in the
creation of many ecosystems such as forests. By working as super decomposers,
they also help break down the woody mass of trees into recyclable biomaterial.
Thus, like other
lifeforms such as humans, fungi also shape the world. Hathaway uses the concept,
‘world making’ to walk the razor’s edge between anthropocentrism and anthropomorphizing.
Nowhere is the usefulness of this concept more evident than in understanding
fungi as agents. Yes. Fungi are good to think with about agency. When humans
try to understand organisms like fungi, whose actions (movement and eating
other living beings) may be invisible to us, we do not necessarily see them as
active agents shaping the world. In this context, Hathaway deploys the concept
of ‘world making’ to understand the way fungi, as agentic beings, live their
lives and make the world.
Instead of looking at
the action of a single, individual fungus, Hathaway sees the work of fungi as
modes of ‘collective agency’ that made (and still make) the world as we know it
now. Thus, ‘fungi are also good to think with’ about how we understand natural
processes like evolution. If we think beyond animal centricity - with its focus
on individuals and discrete species, that thrive or perish, in a ‘struggle for
survival’ – and focus on fungi, we can grasp how close, mutually sustaining
relationships and thus cooperation (e.g., between fungi and plants), have been
integral parts of the process.
Hathaway unpacks these
questions and debates within the context of a specific species of mushroom,
matsutake, that are an important part of the culinary culture of Japan. The
demand for these mushrooms is now being met primarily through imports, especially
from the Yunnan Province of China. Matsutake mushrooms have resisted being
cultivated by humans. Hence, they must be picked where they bloom in the wild. Hathaway
explores how starting in the 1980s, the matsutake have shaped and transformed
two different communities in the province, the Yi and the Tibetans.
Yi are an ethnic
minority group, a majority of whom live in the Yunnan province, especially in
its mountainous areas. Yi have used the newly gathered wealth from the matsutake harvests (no
matter how modest by national or international standards) to finance assertions
of cultural autonomy involving usage of Yi language, holding Yi music and dance
festivals, and running restaurants serving Yi cuisine.
Tibetan communities
inhabit the highlands of the province, that are, in fact, the lowlands of the
Tibetan universe. A lifeworld built with barley and yaks, as central beings
over millennia, has now changed with the matsutake as the driver. Tibetans are
building neo-traditional houses and buying trucks with the matsutake money,
thus reclaiming their heritage as traders in the trans-Himalayan region of
Southern China.
The fact that the matsutake
degenerate fast, and the Japanese desire them fresh, has determined a large
number of the changes in the lifeworlds of these communities, which includes
the building of roads and other communication channels in the region. Thus,
fungi are good to think with, about the changing dynamics of human lifeworlds
as well.
When we (along with
Hathaway) think with fungi, we also meet scientists like Jakob Johann Freiherr
von Uexküll, who help us understand how all kinds of organisms (and not just animals)
experience and create worlds, and scholars such as Mendel Skulski, Paul Stamets
and Willoughby Arevalo, who bring a much-needed focus on fungi.
If you want to know
more about how critical fungi are to life, what matsutake mushrooms can tell us
about changing social dynamics of human communities, and how to think
creatively about some intractable and difficult questions in the human sciences
surrounding agency and action, then you could, perhaps, do nothing better than
read What a Mushroom Lives For.
Details about the book: Hathaway, M. J. 2022. What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 270 pp. ISBN 978-0691225883.
Note: This book review was first published in the year 2023 in the journal Environment and Society 14(1).
