The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (19 page)

But there is one set of relations that is never included with matsutake gifts in Japan: the relations of foraging and buying in other countries. Neither middlemen nor consumers concern themselves with the relations through which their matsutake are procured. Foreign matsutake are ranked according to a set of Japanese preferences that have nothing to do with the conditions under which the mushrooms grew and were foraged and marketed. When they arrive at an import warehouse, they have no connections to pickers and buyers, much less ecological lifeworlds. For a moment, they are fully capitalist commodities. But how did they get that way? Herein lies another tale of value translation.

Let me take you one last time, then, to the buying scene in Open Ticket, to attend to the puzzle of alienation and its alternatives in value creation. I’ve been arguing that, despite the diverse histories and agendas of participants, what holds them together is the spirit they call freedom. Various versions of freedom are exchanged in the buying, each augmenting the others. Pickers bring the trophies of their political freedom and their freedom in the woods to exchange with advocates of market freedom—and thus, to gain more freedom to go back to the woods again. Might freedom, as much as mushrooms and money, be what makes value in the exchange? In the Melanesian kula ring mentioned earlier, participants bring ordinary stuff such as pigs and yams to exchange alongside kula valuables; these side trades gain value through their association with the fame-making exchange of necklaces and armbands. Similarly, in Open Ticket, mushrooms and money are as much tokens and trophies of an exchange of freedom as valuables in themselves. They gain value through their connections to freedom. They are
not isolated objects to own but person-making attributes. It is in this light that—despite the fact that there are no explicit “gifts” here—if I had to judge this economy in a gift-versus-commodity contrast, I would place it on the side of gifts. Personal value and object value are made together in exchanges of freedom: Freedom as personal value is made through money and the search for mushrooms, just as the value of money and mushrooms is assessed by participants through the freedom gained by buyers and searchers. Money and mushrooms have more than use value or capitalist exchange value; they are parts of the freedom that pickers, buyers, and field agents treasure.

Half a night later, however, the mushrooms and the money that surrounds them are something completely different. By the time the mushrooms are packed into crates with ice gel and are sitting on the tarmac for shipment to Japan, it would be hard to find a trace of the distinctive economy of freedom that produced them as trophies. What happened? Back in Open Ticket around 11 p.m., trucks take crated mushrooms to the warehouses of bulkers in Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver, British Columbia. There something strange happens: The mushrooms are sorted again. This is particularly odd because buyers in Open Ticket are master sorters. Sorting creates the prowess of buyers; it is an expression of their deep connection with the mushrooms. Stranger yet, the new sorters are casual laborers with no interest in mushrooms at all. They are part-time, on-call workers without benefits: people who want a little extra income but have no full-time jobs. In Oregon, I saw back-to-the-land hippies sorting under neon lights in the wee hours of the morning. In Vancouver, it was immigrant Hong Kong housewives. These are workers in the classic sense of the term: alienated labor without interest in the product. And yet they are translators, North American style. It is precisely because they have no knowledge or interest in how the mushrooms got there that they are able to purify them as inventory. The freedom that brought those mushrooms into the warehouse is erased in this new assessment exercise. Now the mushrooms are only goods, sorted by maturity and size.

Why sort again? The warehouse sorting is orchestrated by bulkers: small businessmen willing to position themselves between exporters guided by Japanese economic conventions and buyers committed to a local American gift-and-trophy economy of war and freedom. They
work through field agents who join the fray among the buyers. Between the field agents and the exporters, then, they must transform the mushrooms into an acceptable export commodity. They need to recognize what they are shipping and represent it to the exporters. Re-sorting helps them
know
the mushrooms.

One detail illustrates. It is illegal to pick, buy, and export very small matsutake, known in Oregon as “babies.” The reason is that the Japanese market is not interested, although U.S. authorities say conservation guides the regulation.
⁷
Matsutake foragers pick them anyway, and buyers claim that the pickers
make
them buy small mushrooms.
⁸
Babies are removed in the warehouse extra sort. Because the mushrooms are small, I doubt if this makes much weight difference. U.S. authorities never check export crates for babies. But discarding babies helps bring the mushrooms into commodity standards. No longer entangled in the exchange of freedom between pickers and buyers, the mushrooms become commodities of a particular size and grade.
⁹
They are ready for use or commercial exchange.

Matsutake is then a capitalist commodity that begins and ends its life as a gift. It spends only a few hours as a fully alienated commodity: the time when it waits as inventory in shipping crates on the tarmac and travels in the belly of a plane. But these are hours that count. Relations between exporters and importers, which dominate and structure the supply chain, are cemented within the possibility of these hours. As inventory, matsutake allow calculations that channel profits to exporters and importers, making the work of organizing the commodity chain worthwhile from their perspective. This is salvage accumulation: the creation of capitalist value from noncapitalist value regimes.

10

Salvage Rhythms: Business in Disturbance

A
COLLEAGUE WHO STUDIES PEOPLE AND FORESTS IN
Borneo told me the following story: The community he worked with lived in and around a great forest. A timber company came and cut down the forest. When the trees were gone, the company left, leaving a pile of disintegrating machines. The residents could no longer make a living either from the forest or from the company. They took apart the machines and sold the metal as scrap.
¹

The story, for me, encapsulates the ambivalence of salvage: On the one hand, I am full of admiration for the people who figured out how to survive despite the destruction of their forest. On the other hand, I can’t help but worry when the scrap metal will run out, and whether there will be enough other stuff in the ruins to make continuing survival possible. And while not all of us enact such a literal figuration of living in ruins, we mostly do have to work within our disorientation and distress to negotiate life in human-damaged environments. We follow salvage rhythms, whether of the market for scrap or of the entangled histories of foraging for matsutake mushrooms. By “rhythms,” I mean forms of temporal coordination. Without the singular, forward
pulse of progress, the unregularized coordination of salvage is what we have.

During most of the twentieth century, many people—perhaps particularly Americans—thought that business carried forward the pulse of progress. Business was always getting bigger. It seemed to be increasing the world’s wealth. It was effectively reshaping the world according to its goals and needs, so that people could be empowered by money and things for use and commercial exchange. All it seemed people had to do—even ordinary people without investment capital—was to tie their own rhythms to the forward pulse of business, and they too would move forward. This worked through scalability; people and nature could join progress by becoming units in its algorithm of expansion. Advancement, ever expanding, would move through them in tandem.

All of that now seems increasingly strange. Yet experts in the business world seem to be unable to do without this apparatus for making knowledge. The economic system is presented to us as a set of abstractions requiring assumptions about participants (investors, workers, raw materials) that take us right into twentieth-century notions of scalability and expansion as progress. Seduced by the elegance of these abstractions, few think it important to take a closer look at the world the economic system supposedly organizes. Ethnographers and journalists give us reports of survival, flourishing, and distress, here and there. Yet there is a rift between what experts tell us about economic growth, on the one hand, and stories about life and livelihood, on the other. This is not helpful. It is time to reimbue our understanding of the economy with arts of noticing.

Thinking through salvage rhythms changes our vision. Industrial work no longer charts the future. Livelihoods are various, cobbled together, and often temporary. People come to them for diverse reasons, and only rarely because they offer the stable wages-and-benefits packages of twentieth-century dreams. I have suggested we watch patches of livelihood come into being as assemblages. Participants come with varied agendas, which do their small part in guiding world-making projects. For Open Ticket mushroom hunters, these include surviving war trauma and negotiating a working relationship with U.S. citizenship. Such projects mobilize commercial foraging, drawing pickers into the forest to follow “mushroom fever.” Despite differences across these proj
ects, boundary objects have formed—and particularly a commitment to what the pickers call freedom. Through such imagined common ground, commercial picking gains coherence as a scene—and a gathering becomes a happening. Multidirectional histories become possible through its emergent qualities. Without top-down discipline or synchronization, and without expectations of progress, livelihood patches help constitute the global political economy.

In collecting goods and people from around the world, capitalism itself has the characteristics of an assemblage. However, it seems to me that capitalism
also
has characteristics of a machine, a contraption limited to the sum of its parts. This machine is not a total institution, which we spend our lives inside; instead, it translates across living arrangements, turning worlds into assets. But not just any translation can be accepted into capitalism. The gathering it sponsors is not open-ended. An army of technicians and managers stand by to remove offending parts—and they have the power of courts and guns. This does not mean that the machine has a static form. As I argued in tracing the history of Japanese-U.S. trade relations, new forms of capitalist translation come into being all the time. Indeterminate encounters matter in shaping capitalism. Yet it is not a wild profusion. Some commitments are sustained, through force.

Two have been particularly important for my thinking in this book. First, alienation is that form of disentanglement that allows the making of capitalist assets. Capitalist commodities are removed from their lifeworlds to serve as counters in the making of further investments. Infinite needs are one result; there is no limit on how many assets investors want. Thus, too, alienation makes possible accumulation—the amassing of investment capital, and this is the second of my concerns. Accumulation is important because it converts ownership into power. Those with capital can overturn communities and ecologies. Meanwhile, because capitalism is a system of commensuration, capitalist value forms flourish even across great circuits of difference. Money becomes investment capital, which can produce more money. Capitalism is a translation machine for producing capital from all kinds of livelihoods, human and not human.
²

My ability to think with patches and translations draws from a robust body of scholarship on such issues, particularly that emerging from
feminist anthropology. Feminist scholars have shown that class formation is also cultural formation: the origin of my patches.
³
They also pioneered the study of transactions across heterogeneous landscapes: my translations.
⁴
If I have added to the conversation, it is in drawing attention to livelihoods that are simultaneously inside and outside of capitalism. Rather than focus our attention only on the capitalist imaginary, with its disciplined workers and savvy managers, I have tried to show precarious living in scenes that both use and refuse capitalist governance. Such assemblages tell us of what’s left, despite capitalist damage.

Before they arrive in the hands of consumers, most commodities journey in and out of capitalist formations. Think about your cell phone. Deep in its circuitry, you find coltan dug by African miners, some of them children, who scramble into dark holes without thought of wages or benefits. No companies send them; they are doing this dangerous work because of civil war, displacement, and loss of other livelihoods, owing to environmental degradation. Their work is hardly what experts imagine as capitalist labor; yet their products enter your phone, a capitalist commodity.
⁵
Salvage accumulation, with its apparatus of translation, converts the ores they dig into assets legible to capitalist business. And what of my computer? After its short useful life (as I surely must replace it with a newer model), perhaps I will donate it to a charitable organization. What happens to such computers? It seems they are burned for potential components, and children indeed, following salvage rhythms, get to pick them apart for copper and other metals.
⁶
Commodities often finish their lives in salvage operations for the making of other commodities, to be recouped again for capitalism through salvage accumulation. If we want our theories of the “economic system” to have anything to do with livelihood practices, we had better take note of such salvage rhythms.