The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (18 page)

That legacy is clear in the matsutake supply chain, too small and too specialized to attract the intervention of American big business. Yet the chain stretches to North America, enrolling Americans as suppliers rather than as chain directors. Nike on its head! How were Americans convinced to take on such a lowly role? As I have explained, no one in Oregon thinks of him- or herself as an employee of a Japanese business. The pickers, buyers, and field agents are there for freedom. But freedom has come to mobilize the poor only through the freeing of American livelihoods from expectations of employment—a result of the transpacific dialogue between U.S. and Japanese capital.

In the matsutake commodity chain, then, we see the history I have been describing: Japanese traders, searching for local partners; American workers, released from the hope for regular jobs; translations across aspirations, allowing American freedom to assemble Japanese inventory. I have been arguing that the organization of the commodity chain allows us to notice this history, which otherwise might be obscured by
hype about U.S. global leadership. When humble commodities are allowed to illuminate big histories, the world economy is revealed as emerging within historical conjunctures: the indeterminacies of encounter.

If conjunctures make history, everything rests on moments of coordination—the translations that allow Japanese investors to profit from American foraging, just as pickers take advantage of Japanese wealth. How are mushrooms that are foraged for freedom transformed into inventory? I return to Open Ticket—and its commodity chain.

9

From Gifts to Commodities—and Back

I
T IS TIME TO RETURN TO THE PROBLEM OF ALIENATION
. In capitalist logics of commodification, things are torn from their lifeworlds to become objects of exchange. This is the process I am calling “alienation,” and I use the term as a potential attribute of nonhumans as well as humans. The surprising thing about the search for matsutake in Oregon is that it does not involve alienation in the relation between foragers and mushrooms. The mushrooms are indeed torn from their fungal bodies (although, as fruit, this is their goal). But instead of becoming alienated commodities, ready for conversions between money and capital, they become trophies of the hunt—even as they are sold. Foragers beam with pride while showing off their mushrooms; they can’t stop narrating the pleasures and dangers of the search. The mushrooms become part of the foragers, just as if they had eaten them. This means that somehow these trophies must be converted into commodities. If mushrooms are gathered as trophies of freedom, and become part of the pickers in that process, then how do they become capitalist commodities?

My approach to this question is guided by an anthropological legacy of attention to the special qualities of gifts as a form of social exchange. This attention was catalyzed by the exchange of necklaces and arm shells made by Melanesians east of New Guinea, described by Bronislaw Malinowski as the kula ring.
¹
For generations of social analysts, kula exchange has inspired thoughts about the varied ways value is created. The amazing thing about these ornaments is that they are not particularly useful, nor tokens of general exchange, nor interesting in themselves; they have value
only
because of their role in kula. As gifts, they make relations and reputations; that is their value. This kind of value upsets economic common sense—and that is why it’s good to think with.

Indeed, thinking through kula has made it possible to identify alienation as a puzzling and extraordinary feature of capitalism. Kula reminds us that things as well as people are alienated under capitalism. Just as in factories workers are alienated from the things they make, allowing those things to be sold without reference to their makers, so too, things are alienated from the people who make and exchange them. Things become stand-alone objects, to be used or exchanged; they bear no relation to the personal networks in which they are made and deployed.
²
And while this situation may seem ordinary to those of us inside capitalist worlds, studying kula makes it seem strange. In kula, things and persons are formed together in gifts through which things are extensions of persons and persons are extensions of things. Kula valuables are known through the personal relations they make; people of note, in turn, are known through their kula gifts. Things, then, do not just have value in use and commodity exchange; they may have value through the social relationships and reputations of which they are part.
³

The difference between value making in kula and capitalism seemed so striking that some analysts argued that we might divide the world into “gift economies” and “commodity economies,” each with a separate logic for making value.
⁴
Like most dichotomies, the contrast between gift and commodity suffers when it hits the ground; most situations juxtapose and confuse these ideal types—or stretch outside them. Yet, even in its oversimplifications, it is a useful tool because it urges us to look for difference. Rather than relax into economic common sense, we stay alert for contrasts across value regimes. To explore how capitalism draws from noncapitalist value systems—and how these fare within
capitalism—a tool for noticing difference is worth trying out. The gift-versus-commodity distinction can stand in for the absence or presence of alienation, the quality necessary to turn things into capitalist assets.

In considering the matsutake commodity chain, the attraction of this tool increases, too, in attending to the final destination of matsutake. Matsutake in Japan is almost always a gift. The lowest kinds of matsutake are sold at supermarkets and used as ingredients in food manufacturing, but the better kinds, through which the product is known, are quintessential gifts. Almost no one buys a fine matsutake just to eat. Matsutake build relationships, and as gifts they cannot be separated from these relationships. Matsutake become extensions of the person, the definitional feature of value in a gift economy.

Perhaps there have been times and places when the gift was direct from a picker to a consumer; when peasants gave their lords matsutake in medieval Japan, for example, the mushrooms had only to be foraged and presented to express the relation-making force of the gift. Most of the time today, however, gifts are salvaged from capitalist commodity chains. Givers buy them in high-end grocery stores or take the guests whom they want to honor to fancy restaurants to eat them; grocery stores and restaurants obtain them from a chain of wholesalers who in turn obtain them from importers or domestic agricultural cooperatives. How are gifts made from commodities? And might those commodities, in turn, have been made earlier along the chain from gifts? The rest of this chapter explores these puzzles, which take us into the heart of those translations necessary for bringing capitalism and its constitutive others together.

Let me begin in Japan with the arrival of matsutake from abroad. Surely those mushrooms, so carefully cooled, packed, and sorted, are a capitalist commodity. They are as close as we might get to alienated, stand-alone objects: labeled only by the country of the exporter, no one could have any idea under what conditions they were foraged or sold.
⁵
They have no connections to the people who earlier admired and exchanged them. They are inventory: assets from which importers build their firms. But almost immediately on arrival, they begin their transformation from commodities to gifts. This is the magic of translation, and dealers at every link on the Japanese end of the commodity chain are experts at it. It is worth following them.

Importers have incoming shipments of matsutake sent directly to government-licensed wholesalers, who are paid a commission to supervise further sales. Wholesalers guide imported matsutake down one of two paths: They are sold either by negotiation or by auction to intermediate wholesalers. In both cases, rather to my surprise, wholesalers do not see their job as merely the efficient transfer of goods down the commodity chain. They are active mediators; they see their job as matching the matsutake with the very best buyers for that batch. One man who managed matsutake at a wholesale house explained, “I never sleep during matsutake season.” Whenever a shipment comes in, he must assess it. When he has made a judgment about the quality and special characteristics of the lot, he calls the right buyers—the ones who could use just that kind of matsutake. He has already given the mushrooms relation-making powers: the powers of quality.

After several interviews in which we heard experiences of this kind, my collaborator Shiho Satsuka explained the role of wholesalers as “matchmakers.” Their job is to match goods with appropriate buyers, getting the best possible price through the match. One vegetable wholesaler spoke of how he goes to visit farmers to see the conditions under which they grow their crops; he wants to know just which buyers these crops will satisfy. Translation from commodity to gift is already happening in making the match. The wholesaler looks for relational qualities in his goods, which, in turn make them a natural match with particular buyers. From the first, then, the sale of matsutake is wrapped up with the making and maintaining of personal relationships. The mushrooms take on relational qualities; they are given the power to make personal ties.

Intermediate wholesalers who buy matsutake at auction are even more invested in making matches. Unlike wholesalers, who make a commission on sales, they make nothing if they do not find the right match. When they buy, they are often already thinking of a particular client. Their skill too is the assessment of quality, as this forges relationships. The exception here are agents who work with supermarkets, who are more concerned with quantity and reliability than quality. Supermarkets buy lower-value matsutake. But fine matsutake are the preserve of small retail businesses who buy from intermediate wholesalers, and their relations flavor the whole trade. The ability to properly assess the
mushrooms is the necessary ingredient of this flavor; it allows sellers to extend personal advice—not just a generic commodity—to buyers. The advice is the gift that comes with the mushroom, stretching it beyond use or exchange value.

The best matsutake are sold in specialty grocery stores and expensive restaurants, which pride themselves on knowing their clientele. One grocer explained that he knows his best clients well: He knows when a ceremony that could use matsutake, such as a wedding, is coming up. When he buys from the intermediate wholesaler, he too is already thinking about particular clients. He contacts these clients, maintaining a relationship, not just selling a product. There is a gift in the matsutake even before it leaves the commodity sphere.

Individuals who buy matsutake are almost always thinking about building relationships.
⁶
A colleague told me about riding with an anxious group to a celebration that was supposed to heal an old rift in an extended family. “Will they bring out the matsutake?” his friends kept asking. If the rift would be healed, there would be matsutake. (There was.) Thus, too, matsutake is an ideal gift to give to someone with whom one needs a long-term relationship. Suppliers give matsutake to the firms that give them business. One grocer commented that religious converts had begun to purchase matsutake for presentation to their spiritual leaders. Matsutake signals a serious commitment.

The grocer told me, too, that he thinks this is key to “Japanese” ways of life. “You can understand France without knowing about truffles,” he quipped, “but you can’t understand Japan without knowing matsutake.” He was referring to the relational quality of the mushroom. It wasn’t just the smell or the taste, but the ability of the mushroom to build personal ties that made it so powerful. This is where his work as a matchmaker comes in, too; he must make matsutake relational long before they are ready to be eaten.

It is the mushroom’s relational force, as well, that evokes its opposite: wild fantasies of stuffing oneself with matsutake, far beyond satiation. Several people told me mischievously of such fantasies, knowing they were impossible. It was not just the price of matsutake, but the frisson of breaking matsutake’s cardinal role: to build relationships. To stuff oneself with an endless pile would be so thoroughly and deliciously bad.

The value of matsutake then derives not just from use and commercial exchange; it is made in the act of giving. And this is possible because mediators all along the chain are already giving the quality of matsutake to their clients as a personal gift. Perhaps this personalization is reminiscent of other aristocratic goods, in other places. The gentleman wants a suit made to fit him, not one off the rack. But this parallel makes the conversion between commodity and gift even more telling. Across many sectors and cultures, mediators are poised to convert capitalist commodities into other value forms. Such middlemen are engaged in the acts of value translation through which capitalism comes to cohabit with other ways of making people and things.