The Mushroom at

the End of the World

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
living in ruins
Ananova
 Yet progress stories have
blinded us. To know the
world world without them,
this book sketches open-
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ended assemblages of
entangled ways of life, as
these coalesce in
coordination across many
kinds of temporal rhythms
(viii).
KnowledgeSeeker, “Blooming Mushroom Time lapse”
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Then I know that there are still pleasures amidst the

terrors of indeterminacy (1).
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To find a good mushroom, I need all my senses (241).

 Patterns of unintentional coordination develop in
assemblages. To notice such patterns means watching
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the interplay of temporal rhythms and scales in the

divergent life ways that gather. Surprisingly, this turns out
to be a method that might revitalize political economy
as well as environmental studies (23).
 We are contaminated by our encounters: they change
who we are as we make way for others […] Everyone
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carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option.

One value of keeping precarity in mind is that it makes us
remember that changing with circumstances is the
stuff of survival (27).
 The concept of assemblages—an open-ended
entanglement of ways of being—is more useful. In an
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assemblage, varied trajectories gain hold on each

other, but indeterminacy matters. To learn about an
assemblage, one unravels its knots (83).
 Whether or not other organisms “tell stories,” they
contribute to the overlapping tracks and traces that we
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grasp as history. History, then, is a record of many

trajectories of world making, human and non human
(168).
 Being in the forest this way might be considered
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dance: lines of life are pursued through senses,

movements, and orientations (241).
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Following the traces of animal lives, we entangle and

align our movements, searching with them (247).
 The mushrooms
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remind us of our
dependence on
more-than-human
(257).
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To live well with others, we need to use all our senses,

even if it means feeling around the duff (279).
 The Mushroom at
the End of the World
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing