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As she follows several groups of mushroom foragers across the Pacific Northwest, anthropologist Anna Tsing discovers a world of precarity that couples itself with the capitalist economy as an appendage, bringing into it the fruits of a labor process that, despite being pre-industrial, succeeds in creating value in a post-industrial society. Asian refugees, Native Americans and undocumented Latinos, the matsutake foragers, are a vanishing army of day laborers dependent on an industry based on randomness, exploitation, and intrusion, which rewards with money the marginal operations of pickers and poachers roaming second growth forests and restored ecosystems. Through the tools of a seasoned storyteller, anthropologist Anna Tsing tells this tale of end-and regrowth of nature, presenting before us the most viable literary alternative to a deserted, post-apocalyptic dystopia. Pablo Calvi compares in this essay the success of this anthropological, big picture approach to writing about nature with the individualistic, monadic take on long-form writing proposed by the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and its director Paul Engle.

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The Big Picture and the Small Scene: Anna Tsing’s Assemblages vs. Paul Engle’s Workshop, and the Nature In Between

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  • 发表日期：

    2025年

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  • Pablo Calvi

摘要

As she follows several groups of mushroom foragers across the Pacific Northwest, anthropologist Anna Tsing discovers a world of precarity that couples itself with the capitalist economy as an appendage, bringing into it the fruits of a labor process that, despite being pre-industrial, succeeds in creating value in a post-industrial society. Asian refugees, Native Americans and undocumented Latinos, the matsutake foragers, are a vanishing army of day laborers dependent on an industry based on randomness, exploitation, and intrusion, which rewards with money the marginal operations of pickers and poachers roaming second growth forests and restored ecosystems. Through the tools of a seasoned storyteller, anthropologist Anna Tsing tells this tale of end-and regrowth of nature, presenting before us the most viable literary alternative to a deserted, post-apocalyptic dystopia. Pablo Calvi compares in this essay the success of this anthropological, big picture approach to writing about nature with the individualistic, monadic take on long-form writing proposed by the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and its director Paul Engle.