for those who love diversity perhaps a project of capital-and-state unmapping is required

Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species
for Donna Haraway

Anna Tsing

Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

Human nature is an interspecies relationship. In this essay, Haraway’s concept of companion 
species takes us beyond familiar companions to the rich ecological diversity without which humans cannot 
survive. Following fungi, we forage in the last ten thousand years of human disturbance history with feminist 
multispecies company. Cereals domesticate humans. Plantations give us the subspecies we call race. The 
home cordons off inter- and intra-species love. But mushroom collecting brings us somewhere else—to the 
unruly edges and seams of imperial space, where we cannot ignore the interspecies interdependencies that 
give us life on earth. There are big stories to tell here, and they should not be left to the human triumphalists 
who control the field. This essay opens a door to multispecies landscapes as protagonists for histories of the 
world.

http://environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol1/EH1.9.pdf