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).