"The End of Matsutake: The Possibility of Life on the Ruins of Capitalism" Author: Luo Anqing [US] Publisher: East China Normal University Press

★Winner of the American Anthropological Association's Victor Turner Ethnographic Writing Award

★ Winner of the Gregory Bateson Award of the American Association for Cultural Anthropology

Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Books of the Year

Times Higher Education Book of the Year

【Editor's recommendation】

*Japanese gourmets, capitalist businessmen, Laotian jungle warriors, industrial foresters, Chinese shepherds, Finnish rural guides… How do you tell the story of the rare matsutake supply chain?

*Utopian imagination seems to be trapped in a one-way future. In a world full of uncertainty, how should human beings deal with themselves? Where should they go?

*The answer may lie in a unique mushroom that is entangled with human economic activities, racial history, natural ecology and apocalyptic survival strategies.

【Content Introduction】

In field research spanning Tokyo and Kyoto in Japan, Oregon in the United States, Yunnan in China, Lapland in Finland and other places, the author follows a little-known commodity supply chain, step by step presenting the "identity translation" of the rare matsutake mushroom: it quietly breaks out of the ground in abandoned industrial forests, is collected by Yao, Miao and Southeast Asian pickers who escape into the mountains in search of freedom, and then enters Japan through the fiercely bidding market for value-added tickets with accumulated layers of value, transforming into a gift with a strong symbol.

The condensed Matsutake mushrooms in such a unique cross-geographic and cross-cultural translation process also raise a more macro question: as we enter the "Anthropocene", what will a society that does not emphasize development and progress look like? Can humans maintain a peaceful coexistence with other species without any harmony or plunder?

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Rarely do you find a book that is both scholarly in the best sense of the word and has the fluidity of a well-crafted novel. The Last Matsutake is such an excellent work, cleverly crafted and a joy to read. —Marilyn Straherne (Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK)

If humanity must survive the ruins of capitalism, an era that some call the Anthropocene, we need an example of how unexpectedly economics, culture, ecology, and survival strategies can become intertwined. In this book, the author offers a beautiful example, using the extraordinary globalization of matsutake mushrooms. —Bruno Latour (French philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist)

This book uses matsutake as a lens to examine contemporary environmental history, global commodity production and supply, and science. With a prose style full of charm, sharp and thorough wisdom, and sustained creativity and originality, the author connects various disparate topics in a new and profound way, spanning an astonishing number of fields. This book is destined to become a classic. - Michael Dove (Professor of Social Ecology and Anthropology at Yale University, USA)

Scientists and artists know that the way to grasp a huge subject is often to observe the small aspects of the subject closely and reveal the whole picture. We can see the overall evolution from the shape of a bird's beak. Therefore, through a close observation of the fascinating mushroom Matsutake, the author explores how the ecological crisis occurred and why it continues. She criticizes overly crude simplification with a thorough analysis; and for the current human situation, she replaces panic reactions with thinking about the possibility of rational and human behavior. In a situation where an urgent and fierce encounter may overwhelm human reason, she provides the world with a real way of thinking. - Ursula K. Le Guin (American science fiction, feminism, and children's literature writer)

About the Author · · · · · ·