Damek.

I could hardly identify with this more…

…let us listen to what Matsutake research group has to say:

“Why do ethnography? One reason is to spurn spectacular capitalism, which fills our screens with glamorous happy thin elites playing with their globally-standard expensive toys. The world – in its materiality and its diversity – is worth more than that, as ethnography can remind us. But anthropology too is full of glamour stars, all in rush to ‘brand’ their ideas and market their way to top. What might it take to build a slower, richer scholarship, in which we might connect with the living sensual textures of our still diverse world? Might strong collaboration help?” (ibid: 206).

I let everyone judge for themselves. But let me add one more quotation:

“Mushrooms remind us: We are all collaborators. Just because matsutake is not cultivated does not mean it does not collaborate with humans and other beings. Rather matsutake urges us: Strain to find lines of connection. Just as matsutake forms relations with host trees in its essential becoming, strong collaboration makes us remember that all becoming is relational. Taking non-humans – not just fungi but also trees, animals and climate – as collaborators stimulates surprise and wonder. Non-human forms of recognition are not our forms. Thus they open up the framework through which we appreciate relationality” (ibid: 211-2).

I’ve been thinking of this a bit in my own life. You never get to an “end” in life, you’re constantly in a process of becoming, which is its own end, and this is only done in relation to others. To think your “self” is set and independent of all is to miss an important piece of yourself. In a way, better to lose oneself to the process of doing and being.

I’ve been thinking of this in relation to anthropology, too – the way all identity is defined against society, one way or another. And the fluidity of culture, and the way researchers change what they study, and are changed themselves. Echoes of quantum physics.