Free The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

The trick of cooking is in the bodily performance, which isn’t easy to explain. The same is true for mushroom picking, more dance than classification. It is a dance that partners here with many dancing lives.

    The mushroom pickers I have described are observers of others’ life performances as well as performers of their own forest dances. They do not care about all the creatures of the forest; indeed, they are quite selective. But the way they notice is to incorporate others’ life performances into their own. Intersecting life lines guide the performance, creating one mode of forest knowledge.

Discovering allies, Yunnan. An itinerant trader buying mushrooms at a rural market attracts a crowd .
    Part IV
    In the Middle of Things

I N O PEN T ICKET, PICKERS ARE GATHERING FOR A meeting with the Forest Service to discuss racial profiling in stopping cars and handing out fines. Two Forest Service employees have come and some twenty pickers, a tiny fraction of those in the woods for the season. The Khmer organizer grimaces in appraisal. “Cambodian people don’t come to meetings,” he quips privately, “since they think someone might get killed.” He is thinking of the Khmer Rouge regime, under which so many died. Our meeting, however, has other issues. It starts with lively repartee, but soon a forester drones on about regulations, and the meeting deteriorates into rules-explanation with only short questions to interrupt it. It’s hard to glimpse a revolution here. Still, it is unexpected that the Forest Service is meeting with pickers at all. And there is something new, at least to me. After each statement, we hear sequential translations in Khmer, Lao, Mien, and, after a quick scramble to find someone, Guatemalan Spanish. Each presents the ear with a jarringly different cadence, and each hangs in the air, haunting. Even simple questions or explanations of rules take a very long time. Inmy discomfort, I understand that we are learning to listen—even if we don’t yet know how to have a discussion.
    Meetings among pickers and with the Forest Service take place because of the legacy of Beverly Brown, a tireless organizer who decided to listen to the precarious workers of the northwest forest, including mushroom pickers. 1 Brown brought pickers together through a practice of translation that, rather than resolving difference, allowed difference to disturb too-easy resolution, encouraging creative listening. Listening was Brown’s starting point for political work. She had begun not with languages but with gaps across city and countryside. As she explains in a memoir recorded before her death, Brown grew up knowing that urban elites never listened to rural folks—and that she was determined to do something about this. 2 She began by listening to disenfranchised loggers and other rural whites. 3 But thus she was introduced to the commercial foragers who collect mushrooms, berries, and floral greens. These folks were more diverse than the loggers. Her work grew ever more ambitious as she set up scenes for listening across greater gulfs.
    Brown’s advocacy for political listening inspires me to think past a disturbance in our aspirations. Without progress, what is struggle? The disenfranchised had a common program to the extent that we could all share in progress. It was the determinacy of political categories such as class—their relentless forward motion—that brought us the confidence that struggle would move us somewhere better. Now what? Brown’s political listening addresses this. It suggests that any gathering contains many inchoate political futures and that political work consists of helping some of those come into being. Indeterminacy is not the end of history but rather that node in which many beginnings lie in wait. To listen politically is to detect the traces of not-yet-articulated common agendas.
    When we take this form of awareness out of formal meetings into everyday life, yet more challenges appear.