Tsing, Anna. “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 1 (November 2012): 141–54.
Human nature is an interspecies relationship. Tsing follows Haraway’s concept of companion species beyond familiar companions to the rich ecological diversity without which humans cannot survive. She punctually examines the function of fungi through the last ten thousand years of human disturbance history with feminist multispecies company. Cereals domesticated humans. Plantations gave them the subspecies they call race. But it is mushroom collecting that leads to the unruly edges and seams of imperial space, where the interspecies interdependencies that make life on earth possible cannot be ignored. A door is opened to multispecies landscapes as protagonists for histories of the world. — Adapted from the author’s abstract.
© Anna Tsing 2012. Environmental Humanities is available online only and is published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).