astronomy

The Mushroom at the End of the World

The Mushroom at the End of the World is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand The Mushroom at the End of the World rather than just read about it. In short: The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins is a 2015 book by the Chinese American anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The book describes and analyzes the globalized commodity chains of matsutake mushrooms.

Key takeaways

The Mushroom at the End of the World belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect The Mushroom at the End of the World to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of The Mushroom at the End of the World from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins is a 2015 book by the Chinese American anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The book describes and analyzes the globalized commodity chains of matsutake mushrooms.

Content The Mushroom at the End of the World uses the matsutake as a focal point for exploring what Tsing describes as the end of capitalist progress as ecological degradation and economic precarity proliferate in the 21st century. The matsutake is considered a delicacy and thrives in human-disturbed forests, foraged by humans in locales as diverse as Oregon, Yunnan, and Lapland. In the book, Tsing follows foragers as they search for matsutakes, the traders who buy and sell them, and the Japanese consumers who especially prize them, largely as gifts.

Tsing highlights both the resilience of the matsutake, which humans have found cannot be cultivated, and the entanglements between and co-dependency of various species — or multi-species "assemblages" — in not only surviving precarious and disturbed environments, but in creating new environments. On such assemblages, Tsing writes:…one could say that pines, matsutake, and humans all cultivate each other unintentionally. They make each other’s world-making projects possible. This idiom has allowed me to consider how landscapes more generally are products of unintentional design, that is, the overlapping world-making activities of many agents, human and not human. The design is clear in the landscape’s ecosystem. But none of the agents have planned this effect. Humans join others in making land-scapes of unintentional design. As sites for more-than-human dramas, landscapes are radical tools for decentering human hubris. Landscapes are not backdrops for historical action: they are themselves active. Watching landscapes in formation shows humans joining other living beings in shaping worlds.The author draws on these themes not only to critique capitalism, but also to refute the notion of the utility of a single, "unitary critique" of capitalism, arguing instead for the importance of diverse and contingent responses. Tsing writes that "[t]o understand capitalism (and not just its alternatives)… we can’t stay inside the logics of capitalists; we need an ethnographic eye to see the economic diversity through which accumulation is possible."

Awards and recognition The Mushroom at the End of the World has won numerous awards including the 2016 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology and the 2016 Gregory Bateson Book Prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology. The book was also named a Kirkus Reviews and Times Higher Education best book of 2015.

Criticism Natalia Cecire and Sam Solomon offer a mixed assessment of Tsing's Mushroom at the End of the World, praising it as a careful account of fungi in relation to capitalism, but questioning the wider discourse of "mycoaesthetics" in which it participates. Cecire and Solomon argue that in recent years the fantasy of a "fungal fix" has drawn on the abundance, resilience, and networked character of fungi in ways that conceal the fundamentally exploitative and ecologically devastating nature of capitalism.

Reviews Bell, Joshua A. (2017). "The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing". Anthropological Quarterly. 90 (1): 277–282. doi:10.1353/anq.2017.0011. ISSN 1534-1518. S2CID 151793991. Cons, Jason (2016). "The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins". The Journal of Asian Studies. 75 (3): 798–800. doi:10.1017/s0021911816000656. ISSN 0021-9118. Helmreich, Stefan (2016). "The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins". American Ethnologist. 43 (3): 570–572. doi:10.1111/amet.12356. ISSN 0094-0496. Kim, Eleana J. (2017). "The Arts of Noticing: The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins". Current Anthropology. 58 (1): 138–140. doi:10.1086/690139. ISSN 0011-3204. S2CID 152220986. Padwe, Jonathan (2018). "The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins". The Journal of Peasant Studies. 46 (2): 433–437. doi:10.1080/03066150.2018.1492777. ISSN 0306-6150. S2CID 158146861. Pham, Yamoi (2016). "The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins". East Asian Science, Technology and Society. 11 (4): 613–616. doi:10.1215/18752160-3667933. ISSN 1875-2160. Sullivan, Sian (2018). "On possibilities for salvaged polyphonic ecologies in a ruined world" (PDF). Dialogues in Human Geography. 8 (1): 69–72. doi:10.1177/2043820617738835. ISSN 2043-8206. S2CID 145037994.

References

External links Princeton University Press website "Anna L. Tsing - What We Can Learn From a Mushroom". YouTube. Brainwash Festival. December 10, 2021.

Further reading Lorimer, Jamie (2017). "The Anthropo-scene: A guide for the perplexed". Social Studies of Science. 47 (1): 117–142. doi:10.1177/0306312716671039. ISSN 0306-3127. PMID 28195027. S2CID 11289335. Haraway, Donna; Ishikawa, Noboru; Gilbert, Scott F.; Olwig, Kenneth; Tsing, Anna; Bubandt, Nils (2015). "Anthropologists Are Talking – About the Anthropocene". Ethnos. 81 (3): 535–564. doi:10.1080/00141844.2015.1105838. S2CID 146289365. Haraway, Donna (2015). "Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin". Environmental Humanities. 6 (1): 159–165. doi:10.1215/22011919-3615934. ISSN 2201-1919. Orr, Yancey; Lansing, J. Stephen; Dove, Michael R. (2015). "Environmental Anthropology: Systemic Perspectives". Annual Review of Anthropology. 44 (1): 153–168. doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-014159. ISSN 0084-6570.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with The Mushroom at the End of the World

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what The Mushroom at the End of the World claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to The Mushroom at the End of the World before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about The Mushroom at the End of the World ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of The Mushroom at the End of the World

In research: The Mushroom at the End of the World appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses The Mushroom at the End of the World in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: The Mushroom at the End of the World is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2015 non-fiction books, Agriculture books, Anthropology books, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for The Mushroom at the End of the World outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study The Mushroom at the End of the World in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what The Mushroom at the End of the World means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain The Mushroom at the End of the World out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is The Mushroom at the End of the World in simple terms?

Why does The Mushroom at the End of the World matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study The Mushroom at the End of the World?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on The Mushroom at the End of the World.