What a Mushroom Lives for - by Michael J Hathaway

About the Book

"After spending time with Chinese and Japanese matsutake scientists in their labs and field stations, and as he became an ever-more skilled mushroom forager himself, Hathaway reconceived this book entirely. Rather than writing a book on the social worlds of Chinese mushroom hunters, he decided to key on how the mushroom's own behavior shapes the actions of humans and human communities--as well as the actions of other living beings--in ways that aren't often considered. The matsutake and other fungi aren't simply pawns of human economic projects. They seek out other species to carry out their own life projects--i.e., they make their own worlds. And in so doing they exert profound influence on all living things around them. Of course this is true not just of fungi. All living organisms, including plants and animals, constantly and actively interpret and engage with their surroundings"--

Book Synopsis

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 a 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.

Review Quotes

"Winner of the Labrecque-Lee Book Prize, Canadian Anthropology Society"

"Winner of the Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes, BC and Yukon Book Prizes"

"Nominee for the James Beard Media Award in Reference, History, and Scholarship"

"This book will be valuable to social scientists and ecologists, and essential to philosophers of human-fungi relationships."-- "Choice"

"Few readers, I suspect, have ever considered fungi to be sentient, but Michael Hathaway . . . argues that mushrooms (as well as plants and other organisms widely considered as passive automatons), though not exactly conscious, nevertheless 'engage their surroundings in a dynamic way.' . . . The takeaway, Hathaway advises, should at least be a renewed appreciation of the interconnectedness of all forms of life, flora, fauna, and 'funga, ' and a realization that the world is 'made and remade through relationships.'"---Laurence A. Marschall, Natural History

About the Author

Michael J. Hathaway is professor of anthropology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and the author of the award-winning Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China. He is a member of the Matsutake Worlds Research Group.