In the introduction, Tsing talks about a concept called “savage capitalism,” which is the process by which companies try to create capital and product out of their waste products. From the get-go, this rhetoric of savageness in the capitalist system shows Tsing’s distaste for modern economic practices.
In Chapter 1, Tsing delves into a specific case study of the matsutake mushroom market in Japan. Matsutake is an important ingredient in Japanese food, and its procurement is an example of sustainable trade. In this chapter, Tsing follows the pipeline of harvesting the mushrooms to importing them to Japanese markets. This chapter emphasizes that this trading system does not follow normal capitalist practices, which lends itself to being more sustainable.
The introduction of her methods provided a global scope of how she conducted her research in this essay. How she described the Matsuke trade provided a human insight into how community-building and meaning attached to trade items could improve equitability in economic systems to benefit workers equally instead of concentrating profits with the leadership team.
One question I would be interested in learning more about is, “How did the trade of the Matsuke mushroom isolate itself from traditional capitalist practices for so long?”