Matsutake Worlds

The matsutake mushroom continues to be a highly sought delicacy, especially in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cuisine. Matsutake Worlds explores this mushroom through the lens of multi-species encounters centered around the matsutake’s notorious elusiveness. The mushroom’s success, the contributors of this volume argue, cannot be accounted for by any one cultural, social, political, or economic process. Rather, the matsutake mushroom has flourished as the result of a number of different processes and dynamics, culminating in the culinary institution we know today.

Lieba Faier is an Associate Professor in Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her first book is Intimate Encounters: Filipina Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan (2009), and she has published in American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, and Environment and Planning A.

Michael J. Hathaway is an Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. His book, Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China (2013) won the Cecil B. Currey Book Prize for the best book on development studies.