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notesfromthefielddesk · 3 years ago

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Episode 7 - Tsing part 2

Episode link; https://open.spotify.com/episode/6pzJixj6sJpBufwtzzvYe6?si=a6ff2fe3534e4643

“I’m not proposing a return to the Stone Age. My intent is not reactionary, nor even conservative, but simply subversive. It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth. All I'm trying to do is figure out how to put a pig on the tracks.”

John

We are in the US, in the forests which hem the sides of the Cascade mountains. It’s here where those mushrooms I bought in Tokyo grew, or some of them at least. And where you’ll find their pickers. I headed to the forest services “big camp” for mushroom pickers but it was deserted, they must all be out foraging. So I've set up my desk on the edge of the camp looking into the forest. I must say it’s not how I imagined, the ground is dry and rocky, nothing is growing except thin sticks of Longpole pine. There are hardly any plants growing near the ground, not even grass and when I reached down to touch the earth, you know to connect with the forest, sharp pumice shards cut my fingers. I figured maybe it was best just to sit at my desk and wait it out until someone arrives. I sort of hoped I’d be able to sell my mushroom back to someone here, you know, recoup some of my money but looks like that won’t work out…

So let’s go over a little history shall we;

In the mid seventies Lao and Vietnamese communist soldiers captured Long Tieng in the Highlands of Laos. This had been the site of a CIA supported Hmong army which had been fighting the communists for fifteen years. In the wake of the capture thousands of Hmong fled on foot across the Mekong river into Thailand. In the mid to late 80s following pressure from the Thai government, the US increased its yearly resettlement quota to 8000 and attracted by the promise of American freedom or just tired of living in a refugee camp many took up the offer. However, many Hmong were disappointed. Far from the freedom they imagined they were crowded into tiny urban apartments.

In the early 90s some of these refugees returned to the forests attempting to recreate the freedom of their collective memories. At that time pickers had camped wherever they pleased but after complaints from white pickers the forest service built this camp-site. These campsites came to mimic the structure of those refugee camps in Thailand where many of the pickers had spent more than a decade before their arrival in the US.

Pickers segregated themselves into ethnic groups: On one end, Mien and Hmong; half a mile away, Lao and then beyond them Khmer; in an isolated hollow, way back, were a few white pickers.

Tsing comments that sitting in the camp “eating the food, listening to the music, and observing the material culture, I thought I was in the hills of south east asia, not the forest of Oregon.”

What they created here in the forest was a kind of hybrid only possible in the globalised world we’ve created. East Asian refugees, of a war supported by the CIA, recreating a Thai camp, in the mountain forests of Oregan to remind them of the highlands Laos, picking mushrooms for sale on the Japanese market.

There is a lot of excitement about globalism, and rightly so - in some ways. The world is smaller than it’s ever been and we can experience so much more than our ancestors could imagine. Look at this podcast, we’ve flown all over the world in a matter of weeks. But, Tsing points out that in the idealised form of Globalism, the ability to overcome boundaries and restrictions will benefit everyone equally.

The idea is this; If supply chains can make cheaper products, like we discussed last time, that means cheaper products for everyone! Right?

Well, we already kinda know the answer to that one right? As we’ve seen, there are downsides to supply chains and globalism which can lead to worse material conditions for people all along the chain. We talked about some of the people exploited by this system last episode, like enslaved people or sweat-shop workers. We touched on other versions of work exploitation too, like zero hours contracts. But what Tsing saw in the forests of Oregon was people who had fallen through the cracks of this system entirely.

The Hmong refugees are one example. But in a peculiar twist, another group who live alongside the Hmong in Oregon’s forests are Vietnam veterans. Returning from the war with PTSD and limited social safety nets several veterans retreated to the forest, where they could escape urban life and it’s multitude triggers. However, living alongside refugees from the same war does not mean that there is harmony in the forest. White pickers tend to keep their distance. In describing one such veteran Tsing writes that “Geoff had serves a long and difficult tour in Vietnam. Once, his group had jumped from a helicopter into an ambush. Many of the men were killed, and Geoff was shot through the neck but miraculously survived.” But the war still haunted Geoff. One day whilst picking he had been surprised by a group of Cambodian mushroom pickers, Geoff opened fire.

Another picker Tsing met was Lao-Su who worked in a Wal-Mart warehouse before moving to the forest and picking mushrooms. At Walmart he made 11.50 an hour. To get that rate he had to forgo medical benefits. So when he injured his back and could not afford medical costs he handed in his notice. Despite only being in season two months out of the year, he still earned more from mushrooms than he did at Walmart.

So huddled in the forest we have refugees, war veterans and people who have fallen out of wage work. Tsing says they are “haunted by labour.” But maybe it’s more accurate to say they are all haunted by globalism.

Okay - okay it’s getting a little complicated. I’m going to go for a little walk in the woods. That’s participant observation right? Maybe I'll find a mushroom, or a picker? Or Anna Tsing and she can explain what the fuck she means.

One cold October night in the late 1990s, three Hmong American matsutake pickers huddled in their tent. Shivering, they brought their gas cooking stove inside to provide a little warmth. They went to sleep with the stove on. It went out the next morning all three were dead, asphyxiated by the fumes. Their deaths left the camp ground vulnerable, haunted by their ghosts. Ghosts can paralyze you, taking away your ability to move or speak. The Hmong pickers moved away, and the others soon moved too.

The U.S. Forest service did not know about the ghosts. They wanted to rationalize the pickers camping area, to make it accessible to police and emergency services, and easier for the campground hosts to enforce rules and fees.

The forest Service’s idea about emergency access did not work out as imagined. A few years later, someone called emergency services on behalf of a critically wounded picker. Regulations aimed only at the mushroom camp required the ambulance to wait for police escort before entering. The ambulance waited for hours. When the police finally showed up, the man was dead. Emergency access had not been limited by terrain but by discrimination.

This man, too, left a dangerous ghost, and no one slept near his campsite except Oscar, a white man and one of the few local residents to seek out southeast asians, who did it once, drunk, on a dare. Oscar’s success in getting through the night led him to try picking mushrooms on a nearby mountain, sacred to local Native Americans and the home of their ghosts. But the Southeast Asians I knew stated away from the mountain. They knew about ghosts.

“Open ticket is haunted by many ghosts: Not only the “green” ghosts of pickers who died untimely deaths; not only the Native American communities removed by U.S. laws and armies; not only the stumps of great trees cut down by reckless loggers, never to be replaced; not only the haunting memories of war that will not seem to go away; but also the ghostly appearance of forms of power.

Matsutake picking is not the city, although haunted by it. Picking is not labour-or even “work.” One picker explained “work” means obeying your boss, doing what he tells you to do. In contrast, matsutake picking is “searching.” It is looking for your fortune, not doing your job.”

So I said, in the last episode, that Tsing saw a parallel between matsutake mushrooms and the people who picked them in the forests of Oregon. If you remember Matsutake tends to grow on the sites of capitalist ruin, like the site of a nuclear explosion or deforestation. They survive by creating fruitful relationships with their surroundings. Likewise, Matsutake pickers are victims of capitalist ruins whether it be war or just crappy jobs. But they have survived by creating a fruitful relationship with the forest and the mushrooms which grow there.

Part of this survival, as Tsing alludes to at the end of the extract we just heard, is the rejection of labour. Picking mushrooms is not work, mushrooms, in the hands of these pickers are not commodities, they are trophies. A demonstration of their skill and ability to navigate the forest. Tsing describes it as a performance which doesn’t aim to exorcise the ghosts but to navigate them with defiance and flair.

Okay - but here is a problem. Is that Freedom not reliant on capitalist systems to survive? These mushrooms end up in the capitalist system right? We can buy them in a market in Japan for a price set by market forces. Tsing calls this “salvage accumulation.” Basically, imagine you steal a truck full of DVD players like in Fast and Furious then you need to sell them. So you use a "fence", basically an intermediary, to sell them to umm lets call them Ballmart so I don’t get sued. (except it's not ball, it's wall with one less L)

Ballmart, slap a barcode on it and it becomes inventory. They're happy because they get cheap DVD players. And in turn expunge their history. "What? These DVD players?" Ballmart says. “We bought them from a third party who we outsource to for our DVD player purchases.” Hey look, it's those pesky supply chains again.

The stated aims of Dominic Toretto and co. is family, freedom and ice cold Coronas. They have rejected capitalist wage labour in favour of being Fast, Furious and Free.

But Ballmart has "translated" their freedom into capitalist logic using supply chains and barcodes. Ballmart profits within the system, Supply chains mean they can claim ignorance of the DVD player theft. Whilst Dom and co risk prison. SO are Dom and his crew REALLY outside capitalism? Are they really free? Or is the system just profiting off them and exploiting them?

I’m so sorry to the listeners who haven’t seen fast and furious that analogy is useless to you. This isn’t just a hypothetical. Tsing says that Ballmart, and similar companies do this all the time.

It happens here in Oregon too. Pickers sell their mushrooms in a kind of reverse auction process. On any given evening the price of matsutake may easily shift by $10 per pound or more. Over the years the price is even more volatile, between 2004 and 2008 prices shifted from between $2 per pound and 60. Because of these wild shifts, pickers and buyers use a system called “Open Ticket.” In this system a picker may return to the buyer for the difference between the original price paid and a higher price offered on the same night.

This creates just ridiculous scenes at sales. Here is Tsing describing it. Every buyer “surveys the buying field like a general on an old-fashioned battlefield, his phone, like a field radio, constantly at his ear. He sends out spies. He must react quickly. If he raises the price at the right time, his buyers will get the best mushrooms. Better yet, he might push a competitor to raise the price too high, forcing him to buy too many mushrooms, and if it goes really right, to shut down for a few days.There will be rude laughter for days, fuel for another round of calling each other liars - and yet no one goes out of business despite all these efforts. This is the performance of competition - not a necessity of business. The point is the drama.” Even just sorting the mushrooms here is a performance, an eye-catching, rapid fire dance of the arms with legs held still. The original TikTok dancers.

Then something weird happens. The mushrooms are sorted again. This is particularly odd because buyers in Oregon are master sorters. Sorting creates the prowess of buyers; it is an expression of their deep connection with the mushrooms. Stranger yet, the new sorters are casual labourers with no interest in mushrooms at all. These are workers in the classic sense of the term: alienated labour without interest in the product. It is precisely because they have no knowledge or interest in how the mushrooms got there that they are able to purify them as inventory. The freedom that brought those mushrooms into the warehouse is erased in this new assessment exercise. Now the mushrooms are only goods, sorted by maturity or size.

The same way, Ballmart erased Dominic Torreto’s sick heist with a barcode which transformed the DVD players from the fruits of an exciting car based crime. The freedom of pickers is reliant on globalism, on capitalism. So are they really free? Or are they just performing freedom? After all that performance, the mushrooms still just become a commodity and Japanese importers sort of just put up with this idiosyncratic behaviour, saying “if this is what brings in the goods, it should be encouraged.”

And this sort of defiance of but reliance on capitalism is also present in Matsutake themselves right? They flourish only because capitalist extraction destroys the landscape. They thrive in a “value” sense because of capitalistic structures.

Tsing says capitalism is often described as a giant bulldozer flattening the earth to its specifications. Yet much of the world economy takes place on the fringes of the economy, like with these mushroom pickers in a forest, or women in sweatshops, or gangs, or made by enslaved people. She says these people “work the edge.”

I don’t know what to think. It brings me back to Geertz and winking. To the mushroom pickers what they are doing isn’t labour, it’s not capital accumulation. But they do produce products that the market can make into commodities and generate capital. But, and we touched on this last week, when these mushrooms arrive in Japan they aren’t viewed as products in a straightforward way, they are gifts. You don’t buy matsutake to consume them, you buy them as a gift, as a symbol of affluence, to curry favour or to bribe. As it moves across this system the mushroom changes meaning. To the pickers it’s a mocking wink - they are thumbing their nose at labour, to importers it is just an eye closing, a product with no meaning, then to Japanese consumers, it’s a knowing wink with reference to culture and social standing.

Wait - I’ve been walking without paying attention the whole time I was talking. I don’t - um - it’s just trees. There are no landmarks. I mean obviously it’s a forest. Okay, stay calm. What do I know about survival? Umm find some water and follow it downstream...to the sea? That doesn’t seem right. Follow the north star? But it’s day time? Not sure what to uhhh. Okay, right, we will. I’m going to. Well, I will we’ll break format a bit and here is an extract from Tsing - um but I don’t know what one or like okay just yeah give me a minute…

“Getting by without progress requires a good deal of feeling around with your hands. Muddling through with others is always the middle of things; it does not properly conclude… The world has become a terrifying place. Theruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not-human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes. We can still catch the scent of the latent commons - and the elusive Autumn aroma.”

I’m lost in the woods and I don’t know how to conclude. I have some signal on my phone but who am I going to call. Susan? How would she help me? It’s cold, it’s getting dark and I'm confused.

[hold for silence]

(in the distance we hear crunching)

Still in the distance.

IJ: Hey idiot.

JJ: Oh holy shit, thank god it’s the following guy. Hey over here.

IJ: Yeah, I can see you.

JJ: How did you find me?

IJ: I have a tracker in both your microphones. How do you think I've been finding you every time?.

JJ: That’s creepy.

IJ: It’s my job. Well - not exactly my “job” but you know what I mean. It’s this way back to your desk.

JJ: What do you mean I thought you worked for a private security company?

IJ: ohh you actually believed what I told you in Papua New Guinea? You are very naive.

JJ: So you weren’t organising a coup?

IJ: No, I intern for your sister at Shell. She asked me to follow you around and make sure you didn’t get in trouble. Because, and I quote, “He’s useless.” (sarcastically) Can’t imagine why she thinks that.

JJ: So you aren’t paid?

IJ: Well, They pay for my travel and lunch.

(Awkward silence)

IJ: And, I mean it’s, good experience, I can’t complain. Well not “good experience”, I just follow you around but it looks good on my CV.

JJ: Oh - why didn’t you tell me?

IJ: Your sister didn’t want you to know.

JJ: So - why tell me now?

IJ: My internship ends this week and I'm going back to uni so - I guess it doesn’t matter anymore. Here is your desk. Main road is up there. Are you going to be alright on your own? I kinda wanna go sightseeing.

JJ: Umm yeah i’m fine.

IJ: Can I ask you one thing?

JJ: Sure about anthropology or like…

IJ: No - just is your name really Johnty Johnson Johnson?

JJ: Oh, right yeah, it is.

IJ: So Johnson is your middle name and surname?

JJ: Yes.

IJ: Why?

JJ: You know Armie Hammer? His granddad owns Arm and Hammer and so he named his son Armand Hammer, and he named his son Armie Hammer. Well my Granddad owns Johnson and Johnson, the pharmaceutical company, so my name is Johnty Johnson Johnson.

IJ: Holy shit! What is your dad called?

JJ: You don’t wanna know.

IJ: Okay, well good following you.

JJ: Yeah, good to be stalked I guess. Thanks for saving me. I suppose it’s a good conclusion. Tsing doesn’t know what the answer to any of this is. But she does seem convinced that even when we feel alone, lost and scared we can always rely on something or someone to help us, if we know how to look.

Theme

Thanks for listening to notes from the field. It was written by me, James McGrail

This episode references;

Tsing Anna - The Mushroom at the end of the world and

Tsing Anna - The Global Situation

The follower was played by James Sheehan.

All the sounds were all recorded in a forest in Hertfordshire.

Our music, as always, was “dark side of my students.” and Madam Wahalla beat.

Visit us on twitter instagram and soundcloud at notes from TFD for full links!

#vietnam #laos #anthropology #arts #culture #society #arts and entertainment #podcast #mushrooms

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