Skip to content
Account Login Winnipeg Toll-Free: 1-800-561-1833 SK Toll-Free: 1-877-506-7456 Contact & Locations

parsed(2022-04-26) - pubdate: 04/22
turn:
pub date: 1650949200
today: 1711688400, pubdate > today = false

nyp: 0;

What a Mushroom Lives For

Matsutake and the Worlds They Make

April 26, 2022 | Hardcover
ISBN: 9780691225883
$38.99
Reader Reward Price: $35.09 info
Out of stock. Available to order from publisher. We will confirm shipping time when order has been placed.
Checking Availibility...

Description

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.

About this 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.

ISBN: 9780691225883
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 296
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-04-26

Reviews

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

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

"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

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

If the product is in stock at the store nearest you, we suggest you call ahead to have it set aside for you, or you may place an order online and choose in-store pickup.