We are very pleased to be working with Social Anthropology here at the University of Edinburgh to welcome Professor Michael Hathaway, who will be visiting 26-29th of October. Join us on Wednesday the 26th of October 12-1pm (GOI_2.13) for a talk about his new book What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make (Princeton). Michael is Professor of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, where he is also the Director of the David Lam Centre for Asian Studies (www.michaeljhathaway.net).
This talk introduces the second book in an academic trilogy that began with Anna L. Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World. In this talk, Michael J. Hathaway draws from his recent book. He delves into the worlds of fungi, showing us how they literally enabled our green planet and carry out active forms of liveliness in the everyday, acting as “world-makers.” Moving from fungi as an enigmatic kingdom that transformed the ancient Earth to the realm of the fascinating matsutake mushroom on the Tibetan Plateau, Hathaway reveals the ways these mushrooms are creating their own multispecies encounters, with and without humans. This book challenges a legacy of human exceptionalism and human supremacy that is dominant in Western thinking and offers ways to notice the creative liveliness of all organisms, from mammals to mushrooms.
