tsing beyond economic

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Beyond economic and ecological

standardisation

Anna Tsing, for the Matusutake Worlds Research Group

Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz

Supply chain capitalism forages among the ruins of military and industrial landscapes—and

so do real foragers, such as Southeast Asian refugees picking wild mushrooms in the US

Pacific Northwest for commercial shipment to Japan. This essay explores how supply chain

dynamics thrive on deregulation and diversity, encouraging cultural and ecological variety

as a source of profit. Supply chain values are created through diversity—and sometimes,

disaster. I aim to provoke anthropologists to revive ethnography for the challenge of studying

supply chains, as these erupt like mushrooms after a rain in the cracks of economic and

ecological standardisation.

This essay, conceived originally as a talk, draws from the immediacy of recent field-

work experience to address a strange new configuration in the global economy.

Cultural and ecological diversity, I argue, have become new tools of capital accumu-

lation. I am not referring to the marketing of cultural essences, although that is a

related phenomenon. My argument centres on the organisation of production—

a more surprising site in which to track diversity. The standardisation of production

has been the hallmark of the industrial age. How has diversity crept in at this late

moment in so-called late capitalism? My answer, simply put, is: supply chains.

Supply chains, which link ostensibly independent enterprises, have become a new

model for successful global profit making. Supply chains thrive on economic and

ecological diversity, inserting new forms of incommensurability into a system

designed for a universal legibility created by standardisation.1

In this essay, I follow this problem ethnographically by discussing one ratherunusual—but therefore all the more striking—supply chain: the global commodity

chain of matsutake, an aromatic wild mushroom much appreciated in Japan.

Despite strenuous efforts, matsutake have never been successfully cultivated. Japan’s

domestic production has been in sharp decline since the 1970s, and matsutake are

now harvested from forests across the northern hemisphere, especially around the

Pacific Rim. The matsutake harvest has revived traditional architecture in Tibet,

supported village cooperatives in Oaxaca, added to military duties in North Korea,

and stimulated First Nations treaty negotiations in British Columbia. It would be

difficult to study all these sites, although they make an inviting set. My team of col-laborators, the Matsutake Worlds Research Group, focuses on matsutake-facilitated

The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2009) 20, 347–368 doi:10.1111/j.1757-6547.2009.00041.x

ª 2009 Australian Anthropological Society 347



commercial, gustatory, scientific, and resource-management relations in Japan, China,

and North America.2

My own most intensive fieldwork has taken place in central Oregon, in the US

Pacific Northwest, where several thousand Mien, Hmong, Lao, Cham, and Khmer

people camp out each fall to pick wild mushrooms to sell to buyers who ship themto Japan. My thoughts on cultural diversity were stimulated by the strangeness of

the Oregon scene, especially for someone who has lived and worked in Southeast

Asia. When I look around at the material culture, the food, the music, the arrange-

ment of village sociality, it’s sometimes hard to believe I’m not in rural Southeast

Asia. Even more striking, squatting over a rice and game-meat lunch in the middle

of the forest, I think I’m in the uplands, something like the Meratus Mountains of

Kalimantan, where I did my first fieldwork (Tsing 1994). Actually, however, I’m in

the remnants of US industrial pine forest, managed for timber, chips, and biofuel.

Worse yet, it’s likely to be snowing. This essay attempts to shed some light on theseunsettling juxtapositions.

Wild mushroom collecting in the US Pacific Northwest exemplifies an emerging

form of global capitalism, in which strings of independent enterprises are linked in

bringing a product to consumers. Such strings contrast both with giant corpora-

tions, which expand as single firms across the globe; and with corporate franchises,

which develop flexible copies. Instead, supply chains link dissimilar enterprises,

often in far-flung locales. I argue that ‘supply chain capitalism’ has become a new

model for the production of wealth on a global scale.3

Supply chains are everywhere—and touted as progress. Consider agricultural

products: fresh vegetables eaten in Europe are grown, washed, and packaged in

Africa (Dolan and Humphrey 2000). In the United States, vegetables are more likely

to be shipped from Latin America—where they are sometimes grown by ‘tradi-

tional’ indigenous farmers (Fischer and Benson 2006). Supermarket button mush-

rooms in California are subcontracted in China rather than grown in local

greenhouses!4 Consumer products are famously supply chain dominated. The brand

names we know are just that—brands—with no producing capacity. Nike athletic

shoes are one much-discussed case. In the 1990s, Nike’s vice president for Asia-

Pacific explained: ‘We don’t know the first thing about manufacturing. We are mar-

keters and designers’ (quoted in Koreniewicz 1994). Even in the industries we think of in relation to union struggles, such as coal mining, labour is increasingly supplied

by independent contractors.5 The mining company is no longer responsible for

miners’ wages and benefits—or miners killed in accidents. Manufacturing compa-

nies outsource most of their components. Governments, armies—and universities as

well—are contracting out their services. The variety that characterises supply chain

modalities depends on long and varied histories of economic organisation; subcon-

tracting and allied forms are very old. What is new is a futuristic economic vision

in which supply chains form the basis for achieving new levels of profit on a

global scale. Some boosters even see supply chains as ushering in an era of

economic wellbeing (e.g. Friedman 2005). Yet supply chain capitalism contradicts

A. Tsing

348 ª 2009 Australian Anthropological Society



every twentieth-century vision of progress. Instead of rationalising the economy and

modernising nature, supply chain capitalism takes advantage of and even stimulates

cultural and ecological heterogeneity.

Often the results are disastrous. In my previous research, I studied how a com-

bination of legal and illegal logging has been deforesting Indonesia (Tsing 2005).Both legal and illegal logging in Indonesia depend on supply chains, and the gaps

between small loggers and big traders partly explains why no one takes any respon-

sibility for the environment. We also might think of the sweatshops that characte-

rise the global garment industry; subcontracting and outsourcing are forms of

supply chain capitalism, and garment work exemplifies the potential there for the

brutal exploitation of labour (Ross 2004). Supply chains are used to cut costs, and

so, indeed, they can be associated with scandalous economies and ecologies. How-

ever, they are defined not by scandal but by their refusal of globally uniform state

and corporate standards, that is, their ability to produce a profit from global hetero-geneity. Supply chains capitalise on all kinds of nonstandard economic and ecologi-

cal niches, including those that are benign or even ameliorative. Still stunned by

forest destruction in Indonesia, I have picked a relatively benign supply chain as my

research object.

Supply chain capitalism has not displaced modernisation and development, with

their goals of state and corporate standardisation. Instead, supply chain heterogene-

ity and modernist homogenisations depend on each other as warp and woof, weav-

ing our future in their entangled relationship. Yet theorists of capitalism and its

relationship to the state have focused only on global standardisation. In part, per-

haps, this is because there have not been enough anthropologists among the theo-

rists. Or perhaps anthropologists have been too willing to take our marching orders

from philosophers, who follow disciplinary precedence in finding a single set of

principles to generate the global situation. When we want to study transforming

economies and changing states, we follow the tracks of Agamben, Foucault, or

Hardt and Negri; we cannot but find standardisation, even in the exception.6 By

contrast, I argue that supply chain capitalism calls out for ethnography. Its princi-

ples of niche heterogeneity require attention to economic and ecological specificity

and the cultural practices that produce this specificity. This essay calls upon the

anthropological community to take up the challenge of studying emergent linksacross cultural niches, such as those that characterise supply chain capitalism. In

this, we would make use of the classical skills of the discipline, while extending

them to rethink the relationship between capitalism and the state on a global scale.

To promote this perspective, I focus most of this essay on ethnography. I argue

that even a short segment of the matsutake supply chain can show us why the study

of global political economy requires attention to the lived experiences of particular

supply chain niches. The matsutake supply chain connects very different patches of

economy and ecology. In the next sections of this essay, I contrast economic and

ecological value-making involving matsutake in Kyoto Prefecture, in Japan, and

Oregon, in the United States, arguing that despite their presence in the same chain,

Beyond economic and ecological standardisation




they diverge sharply. The global supply chain, I go on to suggest, is made possible

by traders who self-consciously see their job as the translation—rather than the

rationalisation—of value. I argue that this kind of linking across difference exempli-

fies supply chain capitalism.

Matsutake are a cluster of related species of the genus Tricholoma, all of which

are characterised by a sweet, spicy aroma.7 The smell is what gives the mushroom

value in Japan. The mushroom has sometimes been known by the euphemism

‘autumn aroma’. The whole point of eating it is to appreciate the smell (Fig. 1).

Matsutake foragers in Japan lean close to the ground, searching for the elusive

mushrooms through smell. Other animals, such as deer and squirrels, also locate the

mushroom by smell. The mushroom itself is the fruiting body of the fungus, which

consists of a tangle of thread-like cells underground. Predation of the mushroom is

a good thing from the fungus’ point of view, since it spreads the spores. One might

argue that odour is the active response of the fungus, as it draws useful predators.

Smell draws humans and nonhumans together in an ecology of call and response.

This is what I thought when, schooled in Japan on these matters, I began field-

work in Oregon. It turns out, however, that white American pickers and buyers

either hate the smell or try to ignore it. This is not an American food; it tastes terri-

ble fried in butter. Whites who adventurously sample it often try to disguise the

Figure 1 A Tokyo chef smells the mushrooms.

A. Tsing




smell by pickling or smoking the mushroom. Far from foraging through smell, white

harvesters tell of their difficulties in differentiating matsutake from similar looking

mushrooms that have none of the smell. When asked to characterise the smell, white

pickers use adjectives such as ‘mouldy’ or compare the smell to smoke or turpentine;

the conversation quickly turns to the putrid smell of rotting mushrooms.8

Whitepickers and buyers erroneously imagine that Japanese value the mushroom, despite

its smell, as an aphrodisiac. Southeast Asian pickers, in contrast, imagine that Japa-

nese value the mushroom as a healing tonic. Matsutake is also not a traditional

Southeast Asian food, but, in contrast to whites, it has assumed an important place

in the cuisine of the diaspora. Southeast Asian pickers say that eating the mushroom

soothes the joints and strengthens the body for endurance. They know that visiting

Japanese buyers smell the mushrooms, and some guess that the smell itself might

have some healing value, as it does for Tiger Balm. Southeast Asians speaking English

characterise the smell as ‘good’ but do not elaborate. In Oregon, smell does not unitehumans and mushrooms in an ecology of the senses.

From the first, then, the value chain is joined in dis- and mis-articulation. In

earlier work, I have used the metaphor of ‘friction’ to speak of the irregularity of

globalisation (Tsing 2005). Friction reminds us that global connections adhere dif-

ferentially and tentatively even where they seem most firmly in place; friction

involves both grip and slip. Whereas earlier theories of globalisation had us imagine

a liquid fluidity in which all diversity would be erased, friction is a metaphor for

connection with difference. The making of value in the matsutake commodity chain

is an example of the importance of friction in supply chain capitalism.

Instead of smell, the sensual ecology in which humans participate in Oregon is a

restless scanning of the landscape for the traces of the mushrooms’ presence. Ore-

gon matsutake grow underground, manifesting themselves only as slight bumps or

cracks in the soil. The setting is the vast open spaces of US National Forest land

and, unlike the Kyoto situation, where landowners become familiar with their own

mushroom patches, Oregon harvesters have no exclusive access. Oregon foragers

hike long distances, scanning the ground. ‘You don’t look for mushrooms, you read

the ground’, explained one white picker. A Lao harvester called it ‘searching’. A

Hmong picker showed how to turn one’s eyes across the ground. ‘I wouldn’t notice

a tiger if it was ten yards away’, he said. ‘Your eyes are windshield wipers’, offered awhite harvester. Matsutake participate in stimulating this restless-yet-focused gaze

through their unpredictable presence on the landscape. ‘Nature’s whim’, explained a

buyer (Fig. 2).9

Matsutake, like humans, are flexible organisms, able to participate in very differ-

ent sensual ecologies. Like humans, too, they are able to adjust to different liveli-

hoods. Fungi are like animals in their dependence on external food sources.

Matsutake get their food from a symbiotic relationship with host trees, mainly coni-

fers. The thread-like cells of the fungus wrap themselves around tree roots, stimulat-

ing root growth and taking sugars from the tree. Meanwhile, they secrete enzymes

that release nutrients from the soil, aiding the trees’ growth.10 You could say that





matsutake are farmers of trees, cultivating to eat from their crop. Matsutake special-

ise in growing trees in poor, mineral soils: sand, eroded hillsides, volcanic pumice.

But there are many ways to produce such conditions. Consider the contrast between

Kyoto’s civilised erosion and Oregon’s wild country.

Throughout Japan, matsutake’s favourite host is red pine, Pinus densiflora. Red

pine is an invasive weed of open, eroded places and, simultaneously, an object of

aesthetic value. Red pine is a sign of civilisation as both weed and icon. Late succes-

sional forest in central Japan is made up of broadleaf trees and non-pine conifers.

Early in Japanese history, these trees were cut down wherever iron forging and tim-ber construction opened a centre of civilisation. Later, dense farming populations

used the hardwoods for fuel. Even the leaves were raked off the ground for fuel,

fertiliser, and fodder, leaving hard, bare soil. On this bare soil, red pine grew, and

with it matsutake.11 The beauty of a red pine forest is its park-like openness and

bare understory. Japanese matsutake connoisseurs told me that, in an ideal matsu-

take forest, a woman can walk in high-heeled shoes with an open parasol. In this

image, too, is the civilised gentility of matsutake, as a symbol of Japanese culture

and aesthetic purity. As one Kyoto matsutake grocer quipped, hearing that I was an

anthropologist: ‘Ah, it’s just like Ruth Benedict. What will you call your book,

‘Matsutake and the…’?’12

Figure 2 ‘Searching’ under ponderosa pine. Photograph by Hjorleifur Jonsson.

A. Tsing




Japanese consumers do not segregate the mushroom from this history of pro-

duction, but instead imbue it, as an object, with the imagined force of Japanese

aesthetics. As creatures of civilisation, matsutake grow mainly on satoyama, ‘village

forests’. Although most Kyoto Prefecture village forest is privately owned, it comes

under the jurisdiction of the village in several important ways, including beingsubject to an auction for the right to harvest matsutake. A village-wide party

before the season is the forum for household heads to bid for the harvest. Since a

part of the revenue goes to the village, householders vie to bring up the price,

using alcohol and boasts to urge others to raise their bids.13 Haruo Saito, who

studied the auctions, argues that matsutake revenue is key to revitalising village

life in depressed rural Japan (Saito and Mitsumota 2008). Matsutake-love among

middle-class urban people is also entangled with the revitalisation of village tradi-

tion. To appreciate matsutake evokes what Marilyn Ivy has called ‘the vanishing’,

that is, that receding essence of Japanese culture seen as embedded in rural sensi-bilities (Ivy 1995).

Matsutake production in Japan has indeed been vanishing. The problem is the

disappearance of red pine forests. A nematode from North America has been sick-

ening red pine.14 So has pollution. Most importantly, however, with the advent of

fossil fuels, people have stopped cutting down the broadleaf trees. Red pine has

been crowded out by broadleaf succession. Hills once covered by matsutake are

now too densely forested for red pine.15

This decline has stimulated a movement to ‘revitalise matsutake mountains’.

One Kyoto group, the Matsutake Crusaders, assembles volunteers to remove the

broadleaf trees. And the root mass. And, amazingly, the top soil. ‘Erosion is good’,

explained one matsutake forester. The hope of matsutake revitalisation groups is to

rebuild red pine forests, from the bottom up. Still, matsutake production from

Japan is only a tiny fraction of the current market. Most matsutake consumed in

Japan today are imported from elsewhere in the world—where very different condi-

tions of labour and ecology prevail.

To take you to any such elsewhere, I first have to pass through the supply

chain. Japan is famous for importing natural resources and for the power of the

trading companies that control this process. Yet the Japanese experience is not well

reflected in the literature on supply chains. In one influential framework, US eco-nomic sociologists classified supply chains into two kinds: buyer-driven chains,

offering things like jeans and shoes, and producer-driven chains, offering things

like cars and computers (Gereffi 1994).16 Driving refers to the power to control

chain specifics; a buyer-driven chain would be one in which designers and market-

ers, such as Nike athletic shoes, give orders to suppliers who make the shoes. These

two kinds of driving are important in US business culture, but if we consider

Japan, we might add trader-driven chains. Trading companies have played a central

role in the development of the modern Japanese economy (Yoshihara 1982). In

contrast to the European and European-diaspora tradition, traders—representing

the market—do not set themselves in opposition to the state and public interest as





if they were different sides of an ideological divide between freedom and regula-

tion. This means that traders at every level can represent themselves as upholders

of tradition and order as well as innovation. And where Americans imagine traders

as useless—‘let’s get rid of the middleman’, they say—Japanese have had much

more appreciation for trade as a site for the making of value. Furthermore, whereAmerican chain drivers are known for their dreams of modernising standardisation,

the Japanese traders I met in my research have, as I’ll explain, a folk theory of

translation.

Matsutake importers, auctioneers, and wholesalers in Japan say they make value

by making a good match between suppliers and consumers.17 One vegetable whole-

saler explained this in vivid imagery: if he wants to offer cabbage, he goes to visit

the farmer, and takes a first-hand look at the kinds of methods the farmer uses to

enrich the soil. He even studies the faces of the farming family: if they look happy,

they might be doing a good job. Then he can assess the quality of the cabbagesfrom that supplier and match the cabbages with a consumer looking for that kind

of quality. In this system, the fetishism of the commodity encapsulates a story about

conditions of production; in contrast, at least in the US, we are more familiar with

a commodity fetishism in which objects float free from production as dream-like

fulfilments of consumers’ desires.

Japanese produce traders make a basic distinction between produce from Japan

and produce imported from abroad; this distinction, in fact, is inscribed in law.

Japanese produce is classified by prefecture; foreign produce may only be classified

by country of origin, without regional differentiation.18 This system forces traders

to deal with country-wide stereotypes in assessing the quality of foreign produce.

On-site produce inspections are still in order in foreign countries, but local agents,

with their own values, perform them. Importers explained their job as accommodat-

ing what they called the ‘psychology’ of foreigners. Produce, indeed, is seen as

imbued with the psychology of its producers. One importer offered me a vivid

racial version: matsutake, he explained, have the same characteristics as their people.

Chinese matsutake are ‘black’, he said, because the Chinese people are black.

American matsutake are ‘white’ because the American people are white. Japanese

matsutake are the perfect mild tan, just like the people.19

With race, we are already coming back to odour. Foreign matsutake don’t havequite the right smell. One wholesaler explained that only Japanese matsutake have a

special sweetness. Chinese matsutake, perhaps because of their long shipment times,

are just too bland. North American matsutake are variously described as too strong,

not strong enough, or even as having a ‘bad smell’. Whereas Japanese matsutake

have a ‘translucent’ (tomeina) aroma, explained one grocer, the smell of foreign

matsutake is ‘muddy’ (dorokusai).20

The question of fragrance is both sensually concrete and more broadly meta-

phorical. In Recentering Globalization, Iwabuchi (2002) argues that Japanese traders

are sensitive to metaphors of national fragrance; thus, late twentieth-century Japa-

nese traders, he says, sold consumer goods to Asians still smarting from Japanese

A. Tsing




imperialism by stripping goods of the metaphorical fragrance of Japan. In the

matsutake business, the traders’ job is the converse: to translate foreign matsutake

into the fragrance system of Japan. The smell of foreign matsutake indexes the lay-

ered process of building transnational supply chains.

At one level, this process is entirely economistic, since it is about the negotiationof price and the exchange of money. However, as every matsutake trader explained

to me, price setting along the supply chain is a matter of risky speculation. Traders

are constantly trying to assess the shifting national reputations of their mushrooms.

Prices change sharply every night and even within the same night. Profit margins

are low and depend on correctly assessing the situation both upstream and down-

stream on the chain. Speed is essential; every extra hour decreases the value of the

product. Traders have their ears glued to their phones, listening for good matches,

unexpected opportunities, and ‘special orders’. To judge the correct price, traders

listen obsessively to market chatter. Their job is to restate this chatter in their calcu-lation of price. This is a process self-consciously compared to translation. But trans-

lation is treacherous; the translator always changes the meaning. New words usher

in an unfamiliar calculus of value; with repeated translation, the original context of

value formation is easily lost. One might compare the work of matsutake traders to

the American children’s game called ‘telephone’, in which one child whispers a

phrase to the next child who whispers to the next child, producing a garbled mes-

sage at the end of the line. Traders specialise in receiving garbled messages and

making the best they can of the opportunities they hear. Traders at every level

described their work as ‘dangerous’. In the matsutake season, they said, they never

sleep. The translation of fragrance through the medium of money requires full alert-

ness (Fig. 3a, b).

All trading has some of these characteristics but, according to matsutake traders,

matsutake is the most ‘dangerous’ and demanding sector. Cultivated vegetables have

a certain amount of predictability. Once a particular farmer or farmers’ association

is brought into the trading system, the trader can expect a regular product. By con-

trast, matsutake production depends on many unpredictable factors including the

weather and the current condition of the forest. The labour force is eccentric and

specialised, without the discipline of farm labourers. Furthermore, traders must

negotiate directly with thousands of independent foragers, as well as their ownmultiple levels of shifting and independent buyers, bulkers, exporters, importers,

auctioneers, wholesalers, and grocers, rather than beginning with farm owners and

bosses. Because matsutake is a luxury, not a staple good, prices rise and tumble

constantly, and all trading is speculation. Weather changes in Japan, elite weddings,

elections: each of these makes all the difference. In this context, the translation of

constantly fluctuating market conditions becomes the trader’s key skill in making a

profit.

Furthermore, every source area is a special case. Importers employ specialised

personnel to deal with the cultural and ‘psychological’ challenges of each matsutake

source area.21 Oregon, according to Japanese importers, has the spirit of the Wild





(a)

(b)

Figure 3 (a) On the telephone in Vancouver and at the buying tent. (b) Photograph by LueVang.

A. Tsing




West. Harvesters won’t pick, they said, unless they are incited by the excitement of

what the Japanese call an ‘auction’ (seri), that is, a competitive buying system. Oregon

specialists in Japan accommodate this requirement by facilitating rapidly shifting

prices, which rise to meet or outrun competition, even if this will quickly lead to col-

lapse. On the Oregon side of things, rapid price shifts are naturalised as the Japaneseway of doing business. But this brings me back, at last, to the Oregon forests.

Oregon is wild country, not a centre of civilisation. As one Lao picker put it,

‘Buddha is not here’. This is a place of disorder, where thousands of independent

pickers come to find their fortunes. Another Lao picker rejoined: ‘Buddha doesn’t

find mushrooms’.22 Mushrooms inhabit the wild, mismanaged forest: the ruins of

industrial forestry. The Oregon landscape stands in stark contrast to the production

scene in Japan.

When Mount Mazama erupted 7700 years ago, it deposited a thick layer of

pumice over the east side of the Cascade Mountains. Not much organic material

makes its way into those soils. Matsutake grows its crop of conifers on these wild

lands, now part of the US National Forest system. Matsutake has benefited, too,

from forest mismanagement. In the early twentieth century, timber interests and

national forest policy came together in calls for fire exclusion; fire exclusion allowed

weed trees to grow thick and deadwood to cover the ground. After WWII, the area

was extensively logged. Prime timber pines were removed, leaving firs along with

the thick weedy stands of lodgepole pine left standing by fire exclusion. Matsutake

has grown well with the lodgepole and the firs rejected by timbermen.23 By the late

1990s, US Forest Service research showed that the mushrooms were worth as muchor more than the trees (Alexander et al. 2002). Yet the mushroom resists Forest

Service management. The Forest Service yearns for rationalisation and standardisa-

tion; the mushrooms refuse. And while the Forest Service is used to commercial

partners, it has no idea how to handle hundreds, and sometimes thousands of inde-

pendent pickers, most of whom speak little or no English, camping in the forest. 24

A second contrast in the conditions of value production is that the cutting edge

of neoliberalism, not romantic nostalgia, shapes labour practices. Oregon matsutake

picking can be considered to be a form of popular neoliberalism, the entrepreneur-

ship of the poor. The only investment it takes is camping equipment, a vehicle,food, and gas. The work is difficult and dangerous. It’s easy to get lost in the forest,

where one can die of hypothermia. Ethnic tensions are high, and everyone carries

loaded guns. The returns are uncertain. But even disabled, resistant, and trauma-

tised people can do it.

Matsutake pickers have not been a labour force known for hierarchy, predict-

ability, or discipline. The first commercial pickers in central Oregon, in the 1980s,

were white Vietnam veterans, rural ‘traditionalists’, and out-of-work loggers. These

were men who rejected earlier histories of wage labour to live in the woods. They

carried a sense of independence and a dislike for the discipline of wages and the

mindless conformity many associated with urban life.





Southeast Asians arrived in the forests at the end of that decade and have dom-

inated the scene ever since. They are refugees from imperial and civil wars in

Southeast Asia, former soldiers and petty traders, and mobile mountain minorities.

Many do not know much English; some have little or no experience with wage

labour. Furthermore, they arrived in the United States in the 1980s during a timein which public services were being dismantled in response to criticism of the ‘wel-

fare state’. Neoliberalism was new and bright; welfare was limited to eighteen

months; everyone was asked to stand on his or her own two feet, and get rich any

way they knew how. What still is called ‘standard’ employment, that is, steady wage

labour with benefits, was not an option for most. Word of the possibilities of mak-

ing money by picking mushrooms in the woods spread from one refugee cluster to

another and, within a few years, Southeast Asians had entirely transformed the

picking scene.

Rural Southeast Asians have been particularly attracted to this livelihood, whichoffers some reminders of life in Southeast Asia. Khmer come to heal themselves of

the wounds of war. Lao come to escape upstart bosses. Hmong come to relive their

jungle-fighting days. Mien come to re-establish village sociality. ‘This is a good place

to live and a good place to die’, said one elderly Mien woman, who spoke of the

flexible warmth of village ties in the mushroom camp, and its contrast to being shut

in a city apartment minding grandchildren. But Lao men told me, with an ambiva-

lent pleasure, ‘Here everyone is greedy, thinking only for themselves’. These ‘global

yokels’ (Carruthers 2007) revitalise Southeast Asian talents for US challenges. In

denying them the twentieth-century dream of standard employment, US neoliberal-

ism has encouraged them to make a living by their wits and by using ethnically

marked skills and categories, including those developed in brutal wars.

Supply chains make good use of refugee labour, and often in much worse con-

ditions than this. Capital has found a use for such colourful, and disempowered,

labour niches. It is the gift of the mushroom that this Oregon scene also offers

vitality and healing.

A third distinctive feature of value-making in Oregon forests is the nature of the

trade. Oregon pickers and buyers, puzzled about the intrinsic value of the mush-

room, construct a world in which the so-called ‘game’ of buying takes on autono-

mous rules. The buyers, rewarded by their downstream business contacts for crafty pricing strategies, conjure a world in which competition itself generates value. They

thus reinforce the niche-like nature of the Oregon matsutake economy, shoring it

up against economic standardisation.

Mushrooms are picked during the day and bought and sold at night by inde-

pendent buyers who set up tents and scales by the sides of main roads. Buyers sell

to bulkers who sell to exporters who sell to Japanese importers. Everyone remem-

bers 1993, when the price of mushrooms, for perhaps an hour, returned more than

US$500 per pound to the pickers. Since then, prices have steadily dropped, but it is

still possible for a picker to earn US$1000 on a banner day—and, of course, nothing

at all on another day. Price differences among buyers are important to the pickers,

A. Tsing




and they take their time, choosing among buyers. From dusk until the buying closes

down, buyers struggle and ‘race’ with their competition, changing the prices and

grading conditions constantly, aiming with an unrealistic zeal to close their rivals

down. This is an all-cash business, and lots of money changes hands. So do

rumours, threats, and innuendos, all part of the ‘game’. If a buyer sets prices toolow, no pickers will sell to him. If he raises his price too high, other buyers rush to

dump their mushrooms on him. On a good night, ten thousand pounds of matsu-

take comes out of one wide spot on the highway, destined for coastal airports that

can airship to Japan early the next morning.

North American matsutake exporters would like to muscle out their competition

and set more predictable business standards. They compare the matsutake business

unfavourably to their other export sectors, such as seafood or vegetables, calling it

risky and too consuming although, with luck, profitable. To date, no such effort has

been successful, in part because every exporter depends on a chain of independentbulkers and buyers. Bulkers and buyers have their own games, and these resist the

uniformity of corporate standards. Similarly, the Forest Service works hard to regulate

mushroom ecology but, so far, with little progress.25 Pickers and buyers—and

mushrooms—work inside, outside, and around the rules, refusing management

plans.

Given the specialised and unpredictable nature of mushroom trade, labour, and

ecology, how does it link into global capitalism? Let me return to the restless, wide-

focused gaze of pickers scanning the landscape for traces. Matsutake pickers look for

signs of what has come and gone, reading them for possibilities of gain. The expan-

sive range of this gaze contrasts with the more constrained habits of subsistence

mushroom foraging, in which pickers return to familiar patches every year. In com-

mercial foraging, one must venture farther, scanning new territory; no quantity is

ever enough. This is the gaze of US popular neoliberalism. It is a nervous condi-

tion, seeking opportunity even amidst excrement, ruins, things and places left

behind. Michael Taussig (1992) has famously argued that we need to look to sensual

experience to see how capitalism holds us, shaping our subjectivities and desires.

This is particularly clear at this end of US supply chain entrepreneurship. The

entrepreneurship of the poor is a restless scavenging, resistant to standardisation

(Fig. 4).Standardisation is a form of objectification, in which subjective and sensuous

experience is imagined as irrelevant to economics and ecology. In modernisation-

and-development talk, subjective and sensuous experience is relegated to the past,

to the era of ‘culture’ before the creation of a universal modern ‘economy’. But in

Oregon matsutake forests, the past, in all its subjective messiness, jumps up to

advise and formulate the search for gain. Supply chain capitalism confuses progres-

sive chronology, mixing supposedly archaic foraging with globalisation, and pre-

industrial mercantilism with post-industrial neoliberal creeds. Southeast Asian

mushroom pickers use the legacies of the past, including trauma, to guide their for-

aging. The Hmong pickers I spoke to, for example, are deeply enmeshed still in





what in the US is called ‘the CIA secret war’ in Laos of the 1960s and 1970s.

Hmong were cannon fodder for the American cause; they guided American planes

from the ground, rescued American pilots, and met in the flesh enemies Americans

knew only on lighted screens.26 Now mushroom pickers, Hmong told me obses-

sively of the techniques of war—how to fight from a foxhole, how to throw back

grenades—even as they explained that this history allows them to find their way in

the Oregon woods. Here is culture in the service of economy, but it is hardly an

Figure 4 Elk scat and old diggings, signs of matsutake. Photograph by Hjorleifur Jonsson.

A. Tsing




economy of globally consistent standards. It brings me out of the Oregon woods to

the big questions of our times, including still-continuing imperial war.

What has happened to the modernising projects of capitalism and the state?

Consider, for a moment, the hints we are given by the indirect effects of imperialwar, such as the transnational flow of refugees, former soldiers, and other displaced,

disadvantaged, and traumatised people. These people are hardly the ideal subjects of

monopoly capitalism. They have come to serve capital—but capital of a particular

sort, organised in supply chains. Supply chain capitalism thrives on pockets of dis-

advantage and difference: these are the source of profit. It’s not just refugees. Work-

ers are useful to supply chains precisely because they are not the model citizens of

modernisation and development. Some are incarcerated; some are homebound by

the organisation of gender; some are ethnic entrepreneurs; some are merely citizens

of disadvantaged nations. Every one is an exception, whether more privileged, as

successful entrepreneurs, or less privileged, as sweatshop workers. In either case,

supply chain capitalism forces us to reconsider where we begin in thinking about

the global situation.

The period after World War II serves as a baseline for many of our discussions

about the global political economy. This was a period of US ascendance, and it may

be useful to see the global generalisation during this period of the successes of the

US 1930s New Deal. New Deal proponents argued that national populism was best

served by an alliance of big corporations and state management. Together they

would build systems of standardisation that enlarged the scale of production and

bureaucracy alike; standardisation created ‘standards’ of living that appealed to pop-ulist sentiments as well as bureaucrats and business managers.27 The modernisation

and development programs of the mid to late twentieth century spread this for-

mula, in which technical prowess, bureaucratic planning, and corporate expansion

grew hand in hand.28 Nature was to be rationalised by state resource bureaucracies

and giant corporations for, as the US Forest Service puts it, ‘the greatest good of

the greatest number of people’.29 This greatest good could be achieved by econo-

mies of scale, made possible by the standardisation of both labour and human-

managed ecology. The programs of this period taught us to think of cultural and

ecological diversity as irrelevant to the international economy, which could grow best within universal formulae for the maximisation of wealth and wellbeing. Such

universals could only spread if state and capital pulled together, like oxen yoked to

the plough, carving the furrow of progress into a global future.

The importance of this period in defining our understanding of what might be

possible on earth is reflected in the fact that, when confidence in this system started

to unravel, pundits and scholars alike could only speak of ‘posts’: postmodern, post-

industrial, post-development. When new directions began to be defined in positive

terms, discussions still took for granted many of the frameworks of the post-WWII

era, particularly the assumption that the state and capital would plough our way

forward, yoked together, carving new furrows of standardisation. It is in this spirit





that many of our recent frameworks for thinking about transforming economies

and changing states were forged.

Consider two such frameworks: the knowledge economy and the franchise econ-

omy. In the 1990s, the computer industry kicked up excitement about the transfor-

mations virtuality and the Internet were supposed to make across the globe. One of the most interesting, if indirect, responses was the inspiring set of manifestos by

Marxist scholars Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (2000) and Multitude

(Hardt and Negri 2005). Hardt and Negri argued that ‘immaterial labour’ was

replacing the production of real goods as the force that makes the future. Immate-

rial labour is the fruit of the knowledge economy; for Hardt and Negri, it brings

workers in knowledge and effect (e.g. computer operators, artists, academics and

indigenous elders) into the utopian hope they call ‘the common’. This motley crew

of knowledge operators will somehow fight back against Empire, that is, the global

standardisation of governmentality jointly pursued by capital and the state.But how shall we agree on ‘the common’? If globalisation homogenises the sub-

jectivities of all knowledge workers, we can formulate a common strategy through

our similar experiences of the workplace. However, if the workplace continues to be

rent by divisions of culture, nationality, and status, the forming of a common agenda

will be very difficult. Hardt and Negri’s analysis requires global standardisation. Only

then can knowledge-work create common agendas. By contrast, I have tried to show

how supply chain capitalism builds division into workplace experiences. In a world

structured by supply chains, the assumption of standardisation gets in the way of

concrete and respectful political work. Supply chain capitalism requires a practice of

resistance that shows consideration of differences among workers.

Furthermore, the varied relations of supply chain workers to both capital and

the state suggest that we need a theory in which capital and the state may some-

times have differing management agendas. Supply chain capitalism makes use of

contingencies and exceptions in state programs of standardisation, as these produce

potential economic niches (e.g. refugees, minorities and women). Conversely, the

state-sponsored promotion of popular neoliberalism depends on contingencies and

exceptions in corporate programs of standardisation that allow livelihood alterna-

tives for the marginalised to substitute for public services. Theories of empire will

need to address the revitalisation of diversity as well as global standardisation.Global standardisation, through the yoked forces of capital and the state, has also

been an assumption for analysts who offer a flexible, franchise model. Franchise

models allow us to think about the globe through images tied to the concrete experi-

ences of real global franchises, such as McDonalds, the US fast foods eatery. About ten

years ago, The Economist playfully proposed the ‘BigMac Index’ to compare the price

of the raw materials required to assemble a hamburger in different countries (Econo-

mist.com 2007). The BigMac Index shows us the flexible possibilities of global

standardisation: the same hamburger requires different purchasing power in each

country. In this spirit, anthropologist James Watson and his collaborators (Watson

1997) suggested that McDonalds franchises were subtly different across Asia,

A. Tsing




responding to their customer bases despite—or perhaps because of—their commit-

ments to the corporate standard. This became a popular model of globalisation among

anthropologists: global standardisation, which depends on coordination between

the management agendas of capital and the state, can still take flexible local forms.

One of the most influential frameworks that grew up to address this kind of global standardisation has been the revival of Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’

to address ‘neoliberal’ citizenship and subjectivity (e.g. Berry et al. 1996a). Analyses

of neoliberal governmentality show us the proliferation of management expertise

through which subjects learn to rule themselves. As with franchises, the political

rationality of neoliberal governmentality allows individuals to find their own way as

long as they imagine their conduct as generated by the political calculus of author-

ity. ‘Individuals are to be governed through their freedom’, Nikolas Rose explains

(1996: 41). Neither the state nor capital is ‘in charge’ of a unified plan of expansion,

but successful formations of each are united by their ability to articulate this emer-gent political rationality.30

While this framework seems quite useful in many ways, it can have a deadening

effect on the ethnographic imagination. The anthropology of governmentality too

often knows the answers in advance: at best, the ethnography documents a local

form, but we don’t need it to understand the bigger picture. Students using this

tool to explore the global situation begin with grand theories and illustrate them

with ethnographic anecdotes. By contrast, I am arguing for an approach in which

we suspend judgment of the shape of the relationships among management agendas,

whether of capital or the state, until we investigate their specifics ethnographically.

This approach recommends itself methodologically.

Furthermore, supply chain capitalism demands an ethnographic approach,

because supply chains refuse the modernisation-and-development project of stan-

dardisation. This is not because they have developed a ‘postmodern’, techno-regime

of nature (Escobar 1999). Instead, it is because they search for niches of diversity

within the cracks and ruins of state and corporate management.

In this emerging world of subcontracting and allied forms, models of global

standardisation are not good enough. We also need thick description of niches of

trade, labour, and ecology—and their links with each other. This is an opportunity

for the revitalisation of ethnography, not as servant to philosophy, but as a realcontribution to our understanding of the world.

So how does the mushroom respond to all this? I have argued, on the one

hand, that supply chain capitalism makes use of ecological diversity. The eccentric

patches of matsutake ecology are appreciated, not obliterated, by the trade. Unlike

industrial wood-products management, it does not demand a standardisation and

simplification of the landscape in which everything except the one desired species

is sacrificed. This seems really good. Indeed, anything might be better than indus-

trial land management. On the other hand, the trade takes no responsibility for

ongoing ecological vitality. Foraging involves pickers in the sensual features of the

landscape, created, in part, by the mushroom itself; here, matsutake is an active





player. Sensual immersion—smell in Kyoto or traces in Oregon—can encourage

pickers to take care of the mushroom, minding its habitat. However, the competi-

tive pricing games and transnational telephone talk among traders are profoundly

and essentially irresponsible, as far as the mushroom is concerned. Pricing conver-

sations convert mushroom habitat into an aura that sells the mushroom—but by disentangling it from its material needs. Matsutake landscapes are re-imagined as a

symbolic feature of the value of the product. In translation the materiality of land-

scape is transformed, becoming the materiality of money. That is the point of the

trade. In contrast to both industrial wood-products production and wilderness

protection, the mushroom economy takes no responsibility for managing forest

ecology. It just takes what happens to be there. The mushroom can hardly

approve; it wants its trees and its mineral soils. My modernist sensibilities object:

shouldn’t we be taking better care of the forest? But the mushroom economy—not

the organism, but the supply chain—might reply: why not live for the momentand throw away all our plans? Who needs standards when the prizes are so close

to hand? This is the challenge we are offered by supply chain capitalism, which

forces us to imagine—and, increasingly, inhabit—a world beyond economic and

ecological standardisation.

NOTES

1 This essay was prepared as a keynote presentation for the Australian Anthropological

Society annual meetings in Canberra in October to November 2007. The theme of thatconference was ‘Transforming Economies and Changing States’. Alan Rumsey did the

hard work of making my visit to Australia possible, and I am grateful. This essay has

benefited from the insights of Gail Hershatter and Hjorleifur Jonsson, as well as many

participants at the AAS meetings. The Matsutake Worlds Research Group are my valued

collaborators in both the research and the analysis.

2 See Matsutake Worlds Research Group 2009. The Matsutake Worlds Research Group

consists of Tim Choy, Lieba Faier, Michael Hathaway, Miyako Inoue, Shiho Satsuka,

and myself. In Oregon I have collaborated with Hjorleifur Jonsson and University of

California, Santa Cruz, undergraduates Lue Vang and David Pheng.

3 I discuss supply chain capitalism more abstractly in Tsing (2009).4 Several small commercial mushroom growers discussed this issue with me in 2006.

5 See http://www.westvirginiaminepower.com/clients.htm, accessed 18 November 2007.

6 For work by these authors that has been influential among anthropologists studying the

global political economy, see Agamben 1998; Foucault 1991; Hardt and Negri 2000.

7 The most important Eurasian species is Tricholoma matsutake. The original European

name, Tricholoma nauseosum, suggests some of the disagreement about aroma discussed

below. The most important North American species is Tricholoma magnivelera. This spe-

cies name, first offered to specimens from the eastern US, is currently—and perhaps

erroneously—used for western North American populations (David Aurora, personal

communication). The name Tricholoma caligatum is used for very different Europeanand American populations; only the former are part of the commercial matsutake trade.

A. Tsing




8 David Aurora, author of a well-respected book on identifying North American mush-

rooms, describes the smell as a ‘provocative compromise between ‘red hots’ [a spicy cin-

namon candy] and dirty socks’ (Aurora 1986: 191). White buyers in Oregon sometimes

quoted Aurora on this question.

9 I have collapsed separate aesthetics involved in searching for mushrooms in this para-

graph because I found them to share one common theme: the necessity of scanning the

landscape. White pickers ‘read’ the landscape, comparing it to a book; in contrast,

Hmong differentiate the point-focused attention necessary for reading with the wide-

focused scanning involved in foraging. White pickers compare the excitement of the

search to looking for gold; Hmong pickers compare its masculine sociality to deer

hunting. Khmer pickers stress the gender-neutral and health-enhancing aspects of hiking,

while Mien pickers focus on meeting friends and relatives, across gender and generation,

in a reconstituted village sociality. Many pickers, across ethnicities, contrast the forced

regularities and status games of ‘work’, and the open-ended search involved in mush-

room picking, as different categories of livelihood. It is within this kind of contrast that

Lao pickers referred to foraging as ‘searching’—rather than ‘working’.

10 See LeFevre (2002) for a discussion of matsutake physiology and ecology.

11 This history is drawn from discussions with Dr. Makoto Ogawa (see also Ogawa 1978).

See also Totman (1998).

12 He was referring to Ruth Benedict’s book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Benedict

1946). Benedict’s work is much read and admired in Japan, setting popular standards

for what has continued to count as ‘anthropology’.

13 I am grateful for a discussion with anthropologist Megumi Doshita about these ethno-

graphic details.

14 The culprit is pinewood nematode (Bursaphelenchus xylophilis), which first appeared in

Japan at the beginning of the twentieth century and has gradually infected pines across

the nation. See Togashi and Shigesada (2006).

15 These facts are widely discussed and agreed upon by matsutake lovers, scientists,

and resource managers in Japan. A number of the older people I spoke with recalled

hills where they once gathered matsutake but where pines are now rare or missing

completely.

16 This division was developed for a ‘global commodity chain’ framework that was most

influential in the 1990s. Since that time, Gereffi has turned to what he calls ‘global value

chains’ (GVC). This framework is self-consciously intended to bring business experts into

a discussion that was previously dominated by sociologists. GVC promoters also argue

that this new framework can account for new and more sophisticated developments in

commodity chain organisation. In one account, for example, they divide chains into five

organisational categories: markets, modular value chains, relational value chains, captive

value chains, and hierarchy (http://www.globalvaluechains.org/concepts.html, accessed 24

January 2008). This work is smart and sophisticated, but to my knowledge it does not

address my specific concerns here: the Japanese history of chain development; the use of

chains in making cultural difference work for capitalism. Therefore, I have referred to the

earlier, and still influential division between buyer- and producer-driven chains, which

stimulated my further reflections about Japanese economic history.

17 I owe this insight to Shiho Satsuka. Dr. Satsuka and I interviewed wholesalers and

auctioneers at the Ota and Tsukiji markets in Tokyo in June 2006.





18 The ‘Quality Labelling Standard for Perishable Foods’ issued by the Ministry of Agricul-

ture, Forestry, and Fisheries (Notification No. 514, revised 14 September 2004) states:

‘Agricultural products. A domestic product shall indicate the name of a prefecture, and

an imported product shall indicate the country of origin.’ http://www.maff.go.jp/soshiki/

syokuhin/hinshitu/e_label/file/Labeling/QLS_perishable_food.pdf. Accessed 24 January

2008.

19 The importer was speaking English to me. Leiba Faier helped with the interview.

20 I owe this distinction, and the Japanese terms, to Miyako Inoue. Dr. Inoue, Dr. Satsuka,

Dr. Faier, and I interviewed intermediate wholesalers together in Tokyo.

21 I owe this insight to Shiho Satsuka. Dr. Satsuka and I interviewed importers in Osaka in

July 2006.

22 Hjorleifur Jonsson translated interviews with Lao pickers, including these. My insights

on Lao and Mien pickers were developed in discussion with Dr. Jonsson.

23 Matsutake grow under many kinds of conifers in this area, including Shasta red fir

( Abies magnifica var. shastensis), lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta), and ponderosa pine

(Pinus ponderosa). Prime timber trees in this area are ponderosa pine. Nancy Lang-

ston’s (1996) account of the Blue Mountains offers an insightful reading of US

Forest Service management practices in eastern Oregon, many of which were also

found in the eastern Cascades. My term ‘mismanagement’ is a simplification of her

nuanced analysis.

24 Rebecca McLain’s (2000) insightful dissertation on mushroom picking in another part of

Oregon tells the story of tensions between independently minded pickers and the

bureaucratic state, as represented particularly by the US Forest Service.

25 Pickers are required to attend an instructional program when they purchase their per-

mits from the Forest Service. More than a few pickers believe strongly in Forest Service

recommendations (e.g. to avoid ‘raking’ the soil), but some regulations are followed

mainly in the breach.

26 Jane Hamilton-Merritt (1993) offers a blow-by-blow anti-communist version of this

story. Her account is a tangled mixture of probably factual intimate details and her own

ideological and intuitive leaps into the minds of officers and soldiers, but it is worth

reading to get a sense of how many diasporic Hmong continue to represent the struggle.

McCoy (1972) offers an extremely different, less Hmong-centred account of the mobili-

sation of hill peoples in Laos.

27 Foucault, thinking from Europe, points to a much longer history of ‘governmentality’,

in which scientific expertise and the management of standardised categories facilitated

governance within and beyond the state (e.g. Foucault 1991). The New Deal and its

aftermath are useful benchmarks, however, in the development of state and corporate

technologies of governmentality.

28 For classic critiques of this era of development, see Sachs (1992); Escobar (1995); Scott

(1998).

29 Harold Steen’s (1976) history of the US Forest Service traces the rise of this sentiment.

30 Berry, Osborne, and Rose are conscious that their project omits questions of nation,

race, sexuality, colonialism, and the like (1996b: 15). One thoughtful attempt to put

global heterogeneity back into the picture is Aihwa Ong’s Neoliberalism as Exception

(Ong 2006). For Ong, neoliberal governmentality works through its exceptions, forging

diverse niches of exclusion and inclusion. Ong’s analysis informs my own.

A. Tsing




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tsing beyond economic

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