The mushroom, Anna Tsing argues, provides a rich metaphor for life in the anthropocene. For today’s show, we speak with Professor Tsing about her book The Mushroom at the End of the World, a study in capitalist destruction and collaborative survival through the lens of the highly-prized matsutake mushroom and its winding chain of commerce.

Anna Tsing is professor of anthropology at the University of California–Santa Cruz. From 2013 to 2018, she was a Niels Bohr Professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, where she codirected Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA). She is the author of In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (Princeton University Press, 1993), Friction: An Ethnography of Global Collection (Princeton University Press, 2004), and The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2017).

Anna Tsing will be in Madison for an upcoming event sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison:

A Conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing
Thursday, April 18, 7:30 PM
Varsity Hall, Union South (1308 West Dayton)
More information available here.