In many ways, the story is familiar. As an array of enmeshed planetary crises—environmental, financial, biological, social—converge in the contemporary moment, classic categories and referents of social theory become unmoored and destabilized. A range of new specters haunt both the Anthropocene and would-be analyses of it. Recent years have seen a riot of new theories and novel methodologies to simultaneously disentangle and complicate the boundaries of the human, of capital, and of ecology. Ranging from the intriguing to the quixotic, this genre of critique unsettles our categories of analysis, producing a vertiginous set of tools for thinking about life and a world in crisis. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's remarkable ethnography, The Mushroom at the End of the World, sits squarely within this genre. Yet, unlike many studies, which often privilege novelty at the expense of grounded analysis, Tsing's book is an ethnographically rich, lexically innovative, and methodologically suggestive exploration of life in capitalist ruins.

The Mushroom at the End of the World takes matsutake mushrooms as both subject and organizing frame. Matsutakes are the most valuable mushroom in the world, commanding enormously high prices, especially in Japan. As commodities, the mushrooms have a transnational life, harvested in locations around the world and transported to market through a complex web of buyers and sellers. Yet, they defy the logic of simple commodities. They are not harvested or produced through industrial agriculture, they are scavenged—often by pickers who consciously choose to work outside of capitalist wage-labor relations. In Japan, they are regularly purchased not for direct consumption, but as gifts that play crucial roles in the social politics of everything from employment and promotion to marriage brokering. They thus have a peculiar quality of not starting and ending their lives as commodities, but rather of falling into and out of the commodity form.

Matsutakes thrive in what Tsing calls “blasted landscapes,” such as the terrain of the Pacific Northwest where pine trees—with which matsutakes have a peculiar symbiotic relationship—spring up in the wake of the devastation of clear-cutting. Their pickers, especially the ones that Tsing devotes the most attention to in the Pacific Northwest, epitomize capitalist precarity. Comprised, at least in part, of networks of displaced ethnic groups from Cold War conflicts in Southeast Asia, they live on the unruly edges of capitalism where they also reconstitute community. By tracing these relations and politics, Tsing offers a radically new and invigorating take on the classic frameworks of commodity-chain analysis, pushing us to rethink commonsense notions of commodity, labor, ecology, and area.

Tsing, however, is out to do more than unthink commodity chains and forms. The Mushroom at the End of the World is also a pressing intervention in discussions of more-than-human nature. Matsutakes flourish in landscapes that are rife with human activities, but that are not solely dominated by them. As Tsing suggests, “Watching landscapes in formation shows humans joining other living beings in shaping worlds” (p. 152). She argues that a multi-species approach to examining landscapes helps us to rethink history and ecology as disturbance—changes in environment produced by various shocks to an ecosystem that are at once destructive and productive of new forms of life and new ways of world-making. Thinking with and through mushrooms provides a way to see landscapes as more than either untouched nature or the simple outcomes of human intervention. They are, instead, places that have emerged through complex multi-species dialogue.

Tsing's book is, fundamentally, an ethnographic experiment. As such, it has both strengths and weaknesses. Tsing writes in brief chapters that allow her to trace multiple connected threads across time and space. These chapters offer evocative and often compelling windows onto matsutake worlds. Yet, they also prompt Tsing to constantly reinvent a vocabulary for life in the Anthropocene. In comparison to her earlier work, which offered extended engagements with concepts such as marginality, The Mushroom at the End of the World can feel conceptually top-heavy. It skips quickly through terms like translation, disturbance, landscape, salvage, species, and more rather than offering a sustained examination of any one. Tsing adds visual complexity to her analysis, populating the book with photographs and sketches of fungal life. Yet, Tsing's strategy of leaving readers to “wander through them” (p. xi) has its limits. Though striking, the images are more enigmatic than revealing.

These limitations might be thought of less as shortcomings than as the necessary outcomes of Tsing's ambitious project of rethinking the world from the standpoint of a mushroom. This book and the analysis within it ultimately defy easy categorization. The Mushroom at the End of the World is a provocation as much as it is an ethnography—a window onto possible other worlds and possible other imaginations of them. In Tsing's terms, it disturbs simplistic understanding of the human and, in doing so, reveals rich possibilities for an ethnography of the contemporary.