The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins Read Online Free Page A
Author: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
accumulation.
What is this “American psychology” then? There are too many people and histories in Open Ticket to plunge directly into the coherence through which we usually imagine “culture.” The concept of assemblage—an open-ended entanglement of ways of being—is more useful. In an assemblage, varied trajectories gain a hold on each other, but indeterminacy matters. To learn about an assemblage, one unravels its knots. Open Ticket’s performances of freedom require following histories that stretch far beyond Oregon but show how Open Ticket’s entanglements might have come into being. 7
Communal agendas, Oregon. Foraging with a rifle. Most pickers have terrible stories of surviving war. The freedom of the mushroom camps emerges out of varied histories of trauma and displacement .
6
War Stories
In France they have two kinds, freedom and communist. In the U.S. they just have one kind: freedom.
—Open Ticket Lao buyer, explaining why he came to the United States, not France
T HE FREEDOM ABOUT WHICH SO MANY PICKERS AND buyers speak has far-flung referents as well as local ones. In Open Ticket, most explain their commitments to freedom as stemming from terrifying and tragic experiences in the U.S.-Indochina War and the civil wars that followed. When pickers talk about what shaped their lives, including their mushroom picking, most talk about surviving war. They are willing to brave the considerable dangers of the matsutake forest because it extends their living survival of war, a form of haunted freedom that goes everywhere with them.
Yet engagements with war are culturally, nationally, and racially specific. The landscapes pickers construct vary with their legacies ofengagement with war. Some pickers wrap themselves in war stories without ever having lived through war. One wry Lao elder explained why even young Lao pickers wear camouflage: “These people weren’t soldiers; they’re just pretending to be soldiers.” When I asked about the dangers of being invisible to white deer hunters, a Hmong picker evoked a different imaginary: “We wear camouflage so we can hide if we see the hunters first.” If they saw him, hunters might hunt him, he implied. Pickers navigate the freedom of the forest through a maze of differences. Freedom as they described it is both an axis of commonality and a point from which communally specific agendas divide. Despite further differences within such agendas, a few portraits can suggest the varied ways the matsutake hunt is energized by freedom. This chapter extends my exploration of what pickers and buyers meant by freedom by turning to the stories they told about war.
Frontier romanticism runs high in the mountains and forests of the Pacific Northwest. It is common for whites to glorify Native Americans and identify with the settlers who tried to wipe them out. Self-sufficiency, rugged individualism, and the aesthetic force of white masculinity are points of pride. Many white mushroom pickers are advocates of U.S. conquest abroad, limited government, and white supremacy. Yet the rural northwest has also gathered hippies and iconoclasts. White veterans of the U.S.-Indochina War bring their war experiences into this rough and independent mix, adding a distinctive mixture of resentment and patriotism, trauma and threat. War memories are simultaneously disturbing and productive in forming this niche. War is damaging, they tell us, but it also makes men. Freedom can be found in war as well as against war.
Two white veterans suggest the range of how freedom is expressed. Alan felt lucky when an aggravated childhood injury caused him to be sent home from Indochina. For the next six months he served as a driver on an American base. One day he received orders to return to Vietnam. He drove his jeep back to the depot and walked out of the base, AWOL. He spent the next four years hiding in the Oregon mountains, where he gained a new goal: to live in the woods and never pay rent.
What is this “American psychology” then? There are too many people and histories in Open Ticket to plunge directly into the coherence through which we usually imagine “culture.” The concept of assemblage—an open-ended entanglement of ways of being—is more useful. In an assemblage, varied trajectories gain a hold on each other, but indeterminacy matters. To learn about an assemblage, one unravels its knots. Open Ticket’s performances of freedom require following histories that stretch far beyond Oregon but show how Open Ticket’s entanglements might have come into being. 7
Communal agendas, Oregon. Foraging with a rifle. Most pickers have terrible stories of surviving war. The freedom of the mushroom camps emerges out of varied histories of trauma and displacement .
6
War Stories
In France they have two kinds, freedom and communist. In the U.S. they just have one kind: freedom.
—Open Ticket Lao buyer, explaining why he came to the United States, not France
T HE FREEDOM ABOUT WHICH SO MANY PICKERS AND buyers speak has far-flung referents as well as local ones. In Open Ticket, most explain their commitments to freedom as stemming from terrifying and tragic experiences in the U.S.-Indochina War and the civil wars that followed. When pickers talk about what shaped their lives, including their mushroom picking, most talk about surviving war. They are willing to brave the considerable dangers of the matsutake forest because it extends their living survival of war, a form of haunted freedom that goes everywhere with them.
Yet engagements with war are culturally, nationally, and racially specific. The landscapes pickers construct vary with their legacies ofengagement with war. Some pickers wrap themselves in war stories without ever having lived through war. One wry Lao elder explained why even young Lao pickers wear camouflage: “These people weren’t soldiers; they’re just pretending to be soldiers.” When I asked about the dangers of being invisible to white deer hunters, a Hmong picker evoked a different imaginary: “We wear camouflage so we can hide if we see the hunters first.” If they saw him, hunters might hunt him, he implied. Pickers navigate the freedom of the forest through a maze of differences. Freedom as they described it is both an axis of commonality and a point from which communally specific agendas divide. Despite further differences within such agendas, a few portraits can suggest the varied ways the matsutake hunt is energized by freedom. This chapter extends my exploration of what pickers and buyers meant by freedom by turning to the stories they told about war.
Frontier romanticism runs high in the mountains and forests of the Pacific Northwest. It is common for whites to glorify Native Americans and identify with the settlers who tried to wipe them out. Self-sufficiency, rugged individualism, and the aesthetic force of white masculinity are points of pride. Many white mushroom pickers are advocates of U.S. conquest abroad, limited government, and white supremacy. Yet the rural northwest has also gathered hippies and iconoclasts. White veterans of the U.S.-Indochina War bring their war experiences into this rough and independent mix, adding a distinctive mixture of resentment and patriotism, trauma and threat. War memories are simultaneously disturbing and productive in forming this niche. War is damaging, they tell us, but it also makes men. Freedom can be found in war as well as against war.
Two white veterans suggest the range of how freedom is expressed. Alan felt lucky when an aggravated childhood injury caused him to be sent home from Indochina. For the next six months he served as a driver on an American base. One day he received orders to return to Vietnam. He drove his jeep back to the depot and walked out of the base, AWOL. He spent the next four years hiding in the Oregon mountains, where he gained a new goal: to live in the woods and never pay rent.
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