Main entry:

Hathaway, Michael J., author.

Title & Author:

What a mushroom lives for : matsutake and the worlds they make / Michael J. Hathaway ; with a foreword by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing.

Publication:

Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [2022]
©2022.

Description:

xxii, 270 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 235-255) and index.
Introduction -- Fungal planet: the little-known story of how fungi helped foster terrestrial life -- Everyday fungal world-making -- Umwelt: the sensorial experience and interpretation of the lively world -- Matsutake's journeys -- The Yi and the matsutake -- Tibetan entanglements with plants, animals, and fungi -- Final thoughts on understanding fungi and others as world-makers.
Dust jacket.

Summary:

"How the prized matsutake mushroom is remaking human communities in China -- and providing new ways to understand human and more-than-human worlds. What a Mushroom Lives For pushes today's mushroom renaissance in compelling new directions. For centuries, Western science has promoted a human- and animal-centric framework of what counts as action, agency, movement, and behavior. But, as Michael Hathaway shows, the world-making capacities of mushrooms radically challenge this orthodoxy by revealing the lively dynamism of all forms of life. The book tells the fascinating story of one particularly prized species, the matsutake, and the astonishing ways it is silently yet powerfully shaping worlds, from the Tibetan plateau to the mushrooms' final destination in Japan. Many Tibetan and Yi people have dedicated their lives to picking and selling this mushroom -- a delicacy that drives a multibillion-dollar global trade network and that still grows only in the wild, despite scientists' intensive efforts to cultivate it in urban labs. But this is far from a simple story of humans exploiting passive, edible commodity. Rather, the book reveals the complex, symbiotic ways that mushrooms, plants, humans, and other animals interact. It explores how the world looks to the mushrooms, as well as to the people who have grown rich harvesting them. A surprise-filled journey into science and human culture, this exciting and provocative book shows how fungi shape our planet and our lives in strange, diverse, and often unimaginable ways." -- Jacket flap.

ISBN:

9780691225883 hardcover
0691225885 hardcover
electronic book
9780691225890

Subject:

Tricholoma matsutake.
Tricholoma matsutake Ecology.
Matsutake.
Matsutake Écologie.

Added entries:

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, writer of foreword.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 315374
Call No.: 315374
Copy: 1
Status: Available