Poaching Shiho Satsuka and the Matsutake Worlds Research Group
by Natasha Myers, York University
Cite as: Myers, Natasha (2011) Poaching Mushrooms : Lessons from the Matsutake Worlds Research Group. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 99/100: 139-141 (Download article PDF)
It was just a couple of months ago in a Japanese restaurant in Toronto that I had the pleasure of savoring the woodland flavors of matsutake mushrooms over a fine meal with Shiho Satsuka. The mushrooms were served up two ways: thinly sliced and grilled, or “poached,” so to speak, in a steaming broth. My favorite was this second method. We waited as the mushrooms steeped in a tiny teapot. Shiho poured the tea into delicate little cups and the mushrooms’ aromatic cloud billowed forth. The richly scented tea carried memories of woodland walks in pine groves. I believe I swooned. This was my first foray into the worlds of the matsutake mushroom.
Shiho Satsuka is a member of the Matsutake Worlds Research Group. Her collaborators include Anna Tsing, Timothy Choy, Michael Hathaway, Leiba Faier, and Miyako Inoue. This research collective traces the rhizomatic relations that entangle this mushroom in intimate and unstable ecologies and economies. In Japan the fruiting body of this mushroom is fetishized as both a delicacy and a monetary form. As the matsutake harvest in Japan declines with a changing landscape of resource use, the global market in matsutake grows. These matsutake researchers show us how matsutake are caught between the interests of transnational markets and expert discourses of forest management; how its fibrous body is pulled between vernaculars of scientists and the local and highly secretive knowledge of foragers; and how its ecologies are subject both to intensive efforts aimed at protection and simultaneous efforts to expand zones for harvest.
The feature of this project that I want to “poach” for my own work is a mode of attention; specifically an attention to what these matsutake mushrooms teach their ethnographers. Indeed, the matsutake have entangled this collective of ethnographers in their rhizomatic net. Once caught together, they have learned how to experiment with ways of seeing collectively, and this has refigured and refined their modes of attention. Theirs becomes a collaborative ethnographic project that takes seriously its collaborations with matsutake.
I am moved by the multivocality of this collaboration. This collective generates writing that does not seek a homogenous form. The collective multiplies its voices and harmonizes its modes of attention and sites to find what Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) might call “matters of care.” And while some of its members write alone, this larger collaboration includes more intimate minglings. For example, Shiho Satsuka and Tim Choy collect up their ethnographic insights under the pseudonym “Mogu, Mogu.” In China this translates as “mushroom” twice over while in Japan the phrase registers the kind of satisfaction in the belly one feels when they say “yum, yum.”
So how does this collective as a whole learn how to see, feel, taste, and smell, together? Donna Haraway (1997) and Karen Barad (2007) both theorize the concept of “diffraction,” which is a technique used in research on the physics of light and the chemical structure of materials. Though it may seem to be worlds away, diffraction is a concept and a technique that can be extended to the Matsutake Worlds Research Group to think through the ways that they craft their interpretive practice. Theirs is a practice that I would call diffractive anthropology. As Haraway and Barad show us, a diffraction pattern is produced when light of a certain wavelength is passed through materials whose physical properties can scatter that light. These diffraction patterns can be used to generate models of the configuration of such materials. But this is challenging work because once it has been scattered by an object, this light is not so readily focused. Diffraction patterns do not generate mirror image reflections of their objects and no single diffraction pattern can tell the whole story of that material. Direct representation is impossible.
Ways of seeing, however, can be improvised and cobbled together. Each diffraction pattern does offer salient clues that can be gathered up to interpret an object; this is because each spot in a diffraction pattern carries traces of all the relations that constitute the structure of the material. What I have learned by tracking scientists who use X-ray diffraction techniques to generate probable models of complex molecules like proteins is that diffraction techniques require engaging multidimensional objects from many different angles and through many different modes of attention (see Myers 2008). Diffraction patterns must be multiplied, overlaid, stitched together, and interpreted through other patterns. What results are tentative descriptions of how complex phenomena hang together. There is no direct visualization of any object; all seeing is a practice of seeing with.
I see the Matsutake ethnographers engaging in a kind of diffractive practice that takes as its object the social, material, affective, and economic relations that constitute the distributed flesh of the matsutake mushroom. Their method requires that they multiply their ways of seeing and learn how to read each other’s diffraction patterns. In so doing, each member learns anew how to interpret relations in their field sites by trying on the light-beams of their collaborators’ theories, concepts, and perceptions. With a shared object they learn to teach each other how to see, feel, smell, track, and taste matsutake well. This intersubjective perception enriches their sensory dexterities so that they can learn to – in Latour’s (2004) sense of the term – “articulate” differences, and so hone their ethnographic practice. This is a project geared as much toward ethnographic training and retraining as it is toward primary research. Through this process they learn to thicken and amplify the relations that constitute the phenomena they care about.
The rhizomatic “beings and doings” of these mushrooms – to use Astrid Schrader’s (2010) terms – push ethnographers to expand the range of nonhuman life forms, forms of life, and livelihoods that must be tracked in any multispecies ethnography. I am currently embarking on a new project that tracks artists and scientists whose experimental forms of life turn tropically around plant life (Myers 2010). The Matsutake Worlds research group reminds me that I need to learn how to see, feel, and sense plant worlds with others. This project takes collaboration seriously. In addition to forming a Plant Studies Collaboratory with anthropologists, historians, and other scholars, I am embarking on collaborations with artists and scientists who experiment with plant sensoria. The Matsutake researchers also inspire me to follow through the tangled routes of plants’ subterranean microrhizal collaborations with fungi, and their active and intimate associations with other plants, and with insects, birds and plant-loving herbivores. Indeed this research collective reminds me that any collaboratory must entangle an entire ecology of inquiries so as to multiply modes of attention and “matters of care” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2010).
References
Barad, Karen (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Haraway, Donna J (1997) Modest _ Witness @ Second _ Millennium . FemaleMan _ Meets _OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge.
Latour, Bruno (2004) “How to Talk about the Body? The Normative Dimensions of Science Studies.” Body and Society 10(2):205-229.
Myers, Natasha (2008) “Molecular Embodiments and the Body-work of Modeling in Protein Crystallography.” Social Studies of Science 38(2):163-199.
Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria (2011) “Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things.” Social Studies of Science 41(1):85-106.
Schrader, Astrid (2010) “Responding to Pfiesteria Piscicida (the Fish Killer).” Social Studies of Science 40(2):275-306
