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, despi
