## Metadata - Author: [[Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing]] - Full Title: The Mushroom at the End of the World - Category: #books ## Highlights - Plants live on land because fungi made soil by digesting rocks. ([Location 461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00WAM15DC&location=461)) - Polyphony is music in which autonomous melodies intertwine. In Western music, the madrigal and the fugue are examples of polyphony. These forms seem archaic and strange to many modern listeners because they were superseded by music in which a unified rhythm and melody holds the composition together. In the classical music that displaced baroque, unity was the goal; this was “progress” in just the meaning I have been discussing: a unified coordination of time. ([Location 487](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00WAM15DC&location=487)) - Since the time of the plantation, commercial agriculture has aimed to segregate a single crop and work toward its simultaneous ripening for a coordinated harvest. But other kinds of farming have multiple rhythms. In the shifting cultivation I studied in Indonesian Borneo, many crops grew together in the same field, and they had quite different schedules. Rice, bananas, taro, sweet potatoes, sugarcane, palms, and fruit trees mingled; farmers needed to attend to the varied schedules of maturation of each of these crops. These rhythms were their relation to human harvests; if we add other relations, for example, to pollinators or other plants, rhythms multiply. The polyphonic assemblage is the gathering of these rhythms, as they result from world-making projects, human and not human. ([Location 495](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00WAM15DC&location=495)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - But what is survival? In popular American fantasies, survival is all about saving oneself by fighting off others. The “survival” featured in U.S. television shows or alien-planet stories is a synonym for conquest and expansion. I will not use the term that way. Please open yourself to another usage. This book argues that staying alive—for every species—requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. Without collaborations, we all die. ([Location 526](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00WAM15DC&location=526)) - Self-contained individuals are not transformed by encounter. Maximizing their interests, they use encounters—but remain unchanged in them. Noticing is unnecessary to track these unchanging individuals. A “standard” individual can stand in for all as a unit of analysis. It becomes possible to organize knowledge through logic alone. Without the possibility of transformative encounters, mathematics can replace natural history and ethnography. ([Location 541](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00WAM15DC&location=541)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Arts of noticing are considered archaic because they are unable to “scale up” in this way. The ability to make one’s research framework apply to greater scales, without changing the research questions, has become a hallmark of modern knowledge. ([Location 667](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00WAM15DC&location=667)) - matsutake grows only in deeply disturbed forests. Matsutake and red pine are partners in central Japan, and both grow only where people have caused significant deforestation. All over the world, indeed, matsutake are associated with the most disturbed kinds of forests: places where glaciers, volcanoes, sand dunes—or human actions—have done away with other trees and even organic soil. ([Location 862](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00WAM15DC&location=862))