The Mushroom at the End of the World (philosophia review)

criado em: 14:22 17-01-2023

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• palavras-chave: #mentesmiceliais #mestredeculturacontemporanea #literatura #filosofia #insumos #anglo
• notas:
• Anna L Tsing
• Livro Mushrooms at the end of the world
• Merlin Sheldrake

• book review Progress in human geography

  The Mushroom at the End of the World is a book by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing that explores the entanglement of nature and culture through the story of the matsutake mushroom. Tsing incorporates a range of academic disciplines, including anthropology, critical theory, economics, history, and biology, to create a new ontology that challenges dichotomous concepts of nature and culture. The book also functions as a model of critical inquiry into the dominant figure of the human subject, and the Nature/Culture divide within capitalist times. Tsing tells the story of the matsutake mushroom through the lens of salvage capitalism, the process of capitalist accumulation that takes advantage of the value produced without capitalist control. She also critiques the demands for scalability in science, and argues for a method based on the art of noticing, which captures the messiness of the matsutake forest and the collaborations required to salvage life within ruin. The book is a complex and maze-like exploration of the intricate relations between Nature and Culture, and offers an experiment in subversive science as well as a model of (re)thinking and (re)doing politics.

In "The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins," Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing presents an entanglement-based ontology as a model of critical inquiry into the dominant figure of the "human" subject and the Nature/Culture divide within capitalist times. Through the story of the matsutake mushroom, Tsing traces the intricate relations between Nature and Culture and offers an experiment in subversive science, a model of (re)thinking and (re)doing politics, that repositions human and nonhuman subjectivity and poses fundamental questions about how we might do science and politics together. Tsing's project is complex, weaving a tapestry of interconnecting patches of "disturbance-based ecologies" that manage "to live despite capitalism." She starts with a playful curiosity and the process of the "arts of noticing" to understand the world differently, turning the notion of progress, scalability, and accumulation on its head and suggesting that precarity, the insecurity and vulnerability that define global capitalist economies, can also become the condition for radical change.