01/15 The multifaceted mushroom

What fascinated me in this text is the representation of mushrooms as a Janus-faced entity: one the one hand, the mushroom reveals the putative truth of human condition as precarious, and on the other, presents itself as one example of salvation through unsuspected sustainability. When the author mentions “precarity” in the introduction when talking about human condition, I understood it first as “unpredictability. Unpredictability in the face of what one might come across in one’s ethnography as well as unpredictability in one’s human life course. Within that unpredictability however, mushrooms seem to paradoxically embody a certain line of balance that run through human life: they feed us, they are bestowed upon an aesthetic and cultural hue but they essentially precede us and will long outlive us.
This makes me reflect on the subject of anthropocentrism: mushrooms’ resilience in the face of human precarity and apparent capacity for (self-)destruction demonstrate the stability that the anthropocene and human hybris desperately appear to lack.
This isn’t all: the anthropomorphisation of matsukake mushrooms (“Mushrooms are like people. American mushrooms are white because their people are white…”) says more about its human consumers than them and embodies a critique of human tendencies by betraying the compulsive human need for taxonomy, categrorization and hierarchisation which ultimately are responsible for many of the woes that contribute to that feeling of human precarity.
Finally, this text reminded me of  the ethnographic text How Forests Think by E. Kohn who depicts the conferring of agency to non-human beings. And indeed maybe human condition is that of precarity. But that would make that of mushroom, resiliance.