Tsing Beyond Economic

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 landscapesand
so do real foragers, such as Southeast Asian refugees picking wild mushrooms in the US
Pacic 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 prot. Supply chain values are created through diversityand 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 eld-
work experience to address a strange new conguration 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 prot 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 rather
unusualbut therefore all the more strikingsupply chain: the global commodity
chain of matsutake, an aromatic wild mushroom much appreciated in Japan.
Despite strenuous efforts, matsutake have never been successfully cultivated. Japans
domestic production has been in sharp decline since the 1970s, and matsutake are
now harvested from forests across the northern hemisphere, especially around the
Pacic 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
difcult 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, 347368 doi:10.1111/j.1757-6547.2009.00041.x
2009 Australian Anthropological Society 347
commercial, gustatory, scientic, and resource-management relations in Japan, China,
and North America.
2
My own most intensive eldwork has taken place in central Oregon, in the US
Pacic 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 them
to 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, its sometimes hard to believe Im not in rural Southeast
Asia. Even more striking, squatting over a rice and game-meat lunch in the middle
of the forest, I think Im in the uplands, something like the Meratus Mountains of
Kalimantan, where I did my rst eldwork (Tsing 1994). Actually, however, Im in
the remnants of US industrial pine forest, managed for timber, chips, and biofuel.
Worse yet, its likely to be snowing. This essay attempts to shed some light on these
unsettling juxtapositions.
Wild mushroom collecting in the US Pacic Northwest exemplies 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 rms across the globe; and with corporate franchises,
which develop exible copies. Instead, supply chains link dissimilar enterprises,
often in far-ung 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 everywhereand 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 Americawhere 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 thatbrandswith no producing capacity. Nike athletic
shoes are one much-discussed case. In the 1990s, Nikes vice president for Asia-
Pacic explained: We dont know the rst 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 benetsor miners killed in accidents. Manufacturing compa-
nies outsource most of their components. Governments, armiesand universities as
wellare 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 prot 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 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 exemplies 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 dened not by scandal but by their refusal of globally uniform state
and corporate standards, that is, their ability to produce a prot 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 nding 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 nd 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 specicity
and the cultural practices that produce this specicity. This essay calls upon the
anthropological community to take up the challenge of studying emergent links
across 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 translationrather than the
rationalisationof value. I argue that this kind of linking across difference exempli-
es 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 eld-
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 difculties 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
White
pickers 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 unite
humans and mushrooms in an ecology of the senses.
From the rst, 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 rmly in place; friction
involves both grip and slip. Whereas earlier theories of globalisation had us imagine
a liquid uidity 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 dont look for mushrooms, you read
the ground, explained one white picker. A Lao harvester called it searching. A
Hmong picker showed how to turn ones eyes across the ground. I wouldnt notice
a tiger if it was ten yards away, he said. Your eyes are windshield wipers, offered a
white harvester. Matsutake participate in stimulating this restless-yet-focused gaze
through their unpredictable presence on the landscape. Natures whim, explained a
buyer (Fig. 2).
9
Matsutake, like humans, are exible 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
Kyotos civilised erosion and Oregons wild country.
Throughout Japan, matsutakes favourite host is red pine, Pinus densiora. 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, its 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 being
subject 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 worldwhere very different condi-
tions of labour and ecology prevail.
To take you to any such elsewhere, I rst 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
reected in the literature on supply chains. In one inuential framework, US eco-
nomic sociologists classied supply chains into two kinds: buyer-driven chains,
offering things like jeans and shoes, and producer-driven chains, offering things
like cars and computers (Geref 1994).
16
Driving refers to the power to control
chain specics; 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, tradersrepresenting
the marketdo 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 uselesslets get rid of the middleman, they sayJapanese have had much
more appreciation for trade as a site for the making of value. Furthermore, where
American chain drivers are known for their dreams of modernising standardisation,
the Japanese traders I met in my research have, as Ill 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 rst-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 cabbages
from 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 oat free from production as dream-like
fullments 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 classied by prefecture; foreign produce may only be classied
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 dont have
quite 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 negotiation
of 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. Prot 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 childrens 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 own
multiple 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 uctuating market conditions becomes the traders key skill in making a
prot.
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 Lue
Vang.
A. Tsing
West. Harvesters wont 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 Japanese
way 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 nd their fortunes. Another Lao picker rejoined: Buddha doesnt
nd 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 beneted, too,
from forest mismanagement. In the early twentieth century, timber interests and
national forest policy came together in calls for re exclusion; re 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 rs along with
the thick weedy stands of lodgepole pine left standing by re exclusion. Matsutake
has grown well with the lodgepole and the rs rejected by timbermen.
23
By the late
1990s, US Forest Service research showed that the mushrooms were worth as much
or 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 difcult and dangerous. Its 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 rst 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 time
in 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 benets, 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, which
offers 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-ghting 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
exible 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 dayand, 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 too
low, 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, protable. To date, no such effort has
been successful, in part because every exporter depends on a chain of independent
bulkers 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 buyersand
mushroomswork 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 objectication, 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 esh enemies Americans
knew only on lighted screens.
26
Now mushroom pickers, Hmong told me obses-
sively of the techniques of warhow to ght from a foxhole, how to throw back
grenadeseven as they explained that this history allows them to nd 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 imperial
war, such as the transnational ow 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 capitalbut 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 prot. Its 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 dening our understanding of what might be
possible on earth is reected in the fact that, when condence 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 dened 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 ght 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 difcult. Hardt and Negris 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 exible, 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 exible 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 despiteor perhaps because oftheir 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 exible local forms.
One of the most inuential frameworks that grew up to address this kind of
global standardisation has been the revival of Foucaults 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 nd 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 unied 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 dont 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 specics 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 ecologyand their links with each other. This is an opportunity
for the revitalisation of ethnography, not as servant to philosophy, but as a real
contribution 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
simplication of the landscape in which everything except the one desired species
is sacriced. 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 immersionsmell in Kyoto or traces in Oregoncan 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 mushroombut 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:
shouldnt we be taking better care of the forest? But the mushroom economynot
the organism, but the supply chainmight reply: why not live for the moment
and 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 imagineand, increasingly, inhabita 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 that
conference 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
beneted 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 inuential 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, rst offered to specimens from the eastern US, is currentlyand perhaps
erroneouslyused for western North American populations (David Aurora, personal
communication). The name Tricholoma caligatum is used for very different European
and 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 searchingrather 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 Benedicts book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Benedict
1946). Benedicts 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 rst 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
inuential in the 1990s. Since that time, Geref 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 ve
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 specic 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 inuential division between buyer- and producer-driven chains, which
stimulated my further reections 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 (Notication 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/le/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 r
(Abies magnica var. shastensis), lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta), and ponderosa pine
(Pinus ponderosa). Prime timber trees in this area are ponderosa pine. Nancy Lang-
stons (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 simplication of her
nuanced analysis.
24 Rebecca McLains (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 ofcers 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 scientic 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 Steens (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 Ongs Neoliberalism as Exception
(Ong 2006). For Ong, neoliberal governmentality works through its exceptions, forging
diverse niches of exclusion and inclusion. Ongs analysis informs my own.
A. Tsing
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