The Mushroom at the End of the World

On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

by Anna Tsing

Last tended to November 20, 2020

Anna Tsing follows a community of Matsutake mushroom pickers in Oregon's Cascade Mountains. Most of the pickers are Mien or Hmong, immigrants from Laos and Thailand.

"What were Mien tribesmen, Japanese gourmet mushrooms, and I doing in a ruined Oregon industrial forest?" "To my faulty common sense, we all seemed miraculously out of time and out of place---like some- thing that might jump out of a fairy tale." (14)