Elusiveness can itself be elusive. This article considers why matsutake draw over-the-top excitem... more Elusiveness can itself be elusive. This article considers why matsutake draw over-the-top excitement as an elusive commodity even in years of prolific harvests. In 2010 Japan, an unexpectedly copious domestic matsutake harvest prompted a precipitous drop in the mushroom’s price and made the mushroom readily accessible. The article traces the sources of consumer excitement that year, showing how matsutake commodity elusiveness is itself produced through contingent coordinations among trees, fungi, weather, pickers, mycology, popular media, and consumers. It suggests that, in 2010, media outlets and consumers resolved the contradictions of this elusiveness—celebrating matsutake’s elite status as an elusive commodity while enjoying its accessibility—by treating the bumper harvest as a euphoric anomaly.
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Relations of Cultural Production PART ONE Fig... more List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Relations of Cultural Production PART ONE Figures of Desires 1. Sites of Encounter 2. America and Other Stories of Filipina Migration to Japan 3. Japan in the Kiso Valley, the Kiso Valley in Japan PART TWO Terms of Relations 4. Kindred Subjects 5. The Pressures of Home 6. Runaway Stories Epilogue Appendix A Appendix B Notes Bibliography Index
Chapter 11 Strong Collaboration as a Method for Multi-sited Ethnography: On Mycorrhizal Relations... more Chapter 11 Strong Collaboration as a Method for Multi-sited Ethnography: On Mycorrhizal Relations Matsutake Worlds Research Group (Timothy Choy, Lieba Faier, Michael Hathaway, Miyako Inoue, Shiho Satsuka, and Anna Tsing) 1 Introduction: In which a Mushroom Leads the ...
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2013
Over the past few decades, remittances from overseas migrant labourers have come to play an impor... more Over the past few decades, remittances from overseas migrant labourers have come to play an important role in fuelling demand for new residential developments in countries like the Philippines. This paper draws attention to how financial flows enabling this urban development are tied to transnational migrants’ experiences abroad. Drawing on more than 2 years of ethnographic fieldwork in Japan and the Philippines, it considers how, why and to what ends some Filipina wives of Japanese men in rural Nagano, Japan, aspire to build houses in the Manila region, and it explores how these real estate investments are linked to the affective processes through which these women transnationally craft lives and selves. Approaching affect as a site of subject-making, this essay suggests these houses are best understood as ‘affective investments’ that are shaped not only by capitalist practices and state policies, but also by the discourses of hope, frustration, shame, fear, desire and longing through which these women make sense of their transnational lives. The paper thereby illustrates how affect and political economics can intertwine in migrants’ investment decisions and, thus, the transnational role affect can play in articulating hegemonic urban development plans.
This article draws attention to ‘everyday articulations of prostitution’: the diverse, performati... more This article draws attention to ‘everyday articulations of prostitution’: the diverse, performative ways that people reproduce and rework meanings of ‘prostitution’ as they mobilize the term in their day-to-day lives. The article offers an ethnographic illustration of this process by exploring why and to what ends a group of Filipina wives of rural Japanese men referred to the behavior of another Filipina woman in their community as ‘prostitution.’ It demonstrates that when mobilizing this term, these Filipina women were not categorizing sexual–economic relationships (like ‘prostitution’) in terms of payment systems, as other scholars have assumed. Rather, geographical and cultural factors, such as the stigma associated with these women's migration histories and their long-term residence as wives and mothers in the small rural communities where they had worked in bars, led Filipina women in Central Kiso to describe such relationships according to the sentiments motivating them, the ways one utilized gifts or money from a sexual partner, and whether or not one demonstrated appreciation of this financial support. The article maintains that attention to everyday articulations of prostitution such as these expands our understandings of the situated meanings people can invest in this term. It illustrates how culture and geography shape the ways discourses of prostitution are mobilized to stigmatize some intimate-economic behaviors and, thereby, legitimize others.
The author draws attention to the ways in which commodity chains take shape in the intersections ... more The author draws attention to the ways in which commodity chains take shape in the intersections between different natural–cultural ecologies. It is suggested that a focus on the diverse ways that people involved in commodity chains relate to these ecologies reveals not only the links but also the disarticulations through which commodity relations take shape. To develop this perspective, the author focuses on the trade in ‘matsutake,’ a variety of related species of wild mushrooms that are consumed primarily as a gourmet luxury item in Japan. Matsutake have never been successfully cultivated, and during the 1970s and 80s, as a growing market for luxuries in Japan coincided with a decline in domestic production, Japan began importing increasing amounts of them. The author first considers scientific discussions about the contingencies and uncertainties that relationships involving fungi, trees, people, nematodes, beetles, and weather create in different matsutake regions. Discussion t...
Elusiveness can itself be elusive. This article considers why matsutake draw over-the-top excitem... more Elusiveness can itself be elusive. This article considers why matsutake draw over-the-top excitement as an elusive commodity even in years of prolific harvests. In 2010 Japan, an unexpectedly copious domestic matsutake harvest prompted a precipitous drop in the mushroom’s price and made the mushroom readily accessible. The article traces the sources of consumer excitement that year, showing how matsutake commodity elusiveness is itself produced through contingent coordinations among trees, fungi, weather, pickers, mycology, popular media, and consumers. It suggests that, in 2010, media outlets and consumers resolved the contradictions of this elusiveness—celebrating matsutake’s elite status as an elusive commodity while enjoying its accessibility—by treating the bumper harvest as a euphoric anomaly.
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Relations of Cultural Production PART ONE Fig... more List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Relations of Cultural Production PART ONE Figures of Desires 1. Sites of Encounter 2. America and Other Stories of Filipina Migration to Japan 3. Japan in the Kiso Valley, the Kiso Valley in Japan PART TWO Terms of Relations 4. Kindred Subjects 5. The Pressures of Home 6. Runaway Stories Epilogue Appendix A Appendix B Notes Bibliography Index
Chapter 11 Strong Collaboration as a Method for Multi-sited Ethnography: On Mycorrhizal Relations... more Chapter 11 Strong Collaboration as a Method for Multi-sited Ethnography: On Mycorrhizal Relations Matsutake Worlds Research Group (Timothy Choy, Lieba Faier, Michael Hathaway, Miyako Inoue, Shiho Satsuka, and Anna Tsing) 1 Introduction: In which a Mushroom Leads the ...
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2013
Over the past few decades, remittances from overseas migrant labourers have come to play an impor... more Over the past few decades, remittances from overseas migrant labourers have come to play an important role in fuelling demand for new residential developments in countries like the Philippines. This paper draws attention to how financial flows enabling this urban development are tied to transnational migrants’ experiences abroad. Drawing on more than 2 years of ethnographic fieldwork in Japan and the Philippines, it considers how, why and to what ends some Filipina wives of Japanese men in rural Nagano, Japan, aspire to build houses in the Manila region, and it explores how these real estate investments are linked to the affective processes through which these women transnationally craft lives and selves. Approaching affect as a site of subject-making, this essay suggests these houses are best understood as ‘affective investments’ that are shaped not only by capitalist practices and state policies, but also by the discourses of hope, frustration, shame, fear, desire and longing through which these women make sense of their transnational lives. The paper thereby illustrates how affect and political economics can intertwine in migrants’ investment decisions and, thus, the transnational role affect can play in articulating hegemonic urban development plans.
This article draws attention to ‘everyday articulations of prostitution’: the diverse, performati... more This article draws attention to ‘everyday articulations of prostitution’: the diverse, performative ways that people reproduce and rework meanings of ‘prostitution’ as they mobilize the term in their day-to-day lives. The article offers an ethnographic illustration of this process by exploring why and to what ends a group of Filipina wives of rural Japanese men referred to the behavior of another Filipina woman in their community as ‘prostitution.’ It demonstrates that when mobilizing this term, these Filipina women were not categorizing sexual–economic relationships (like ‘prostitution’) in terms of payment systems, as other scholars have assumed. Rather, geographical and cultural factors, such as the stigma associated with these women's migration histories and their long-term residence as wives and mothers in the small rural communities where they had worked in bars, led Filipina women in Central Kiso to describe such relationships according to the sentiments motivating them, the ways one utilized gifts or money from a sexual partner, and whether or not one demonstrated appreciation of this financial support. The article maintains that attention to everyday articulations of prostitution such as these expands our understandings of the situated meanings people can invest in this term. It illustrates how culture and geography shape the ways discourses of prostitution are mobilized to stigmatize some intimate-economic behaviors and, thereby, legitimize others.
The author draws attention to the ways in which commodity chains take shape in the intersections ... more The author draws attention to the ways in which commodity chains take shape in the intersections between different natural–cultural ecologies. It is suggested that a focus on the diverse ways that people involved in commodity chains relate to these ecologies reveals not only the links but also the disarticulations through which commodity relations take shape. To develop this perspective, the author focuses on the trade in ‘matsutake,’ a variety of related species of wild mushrooms that are consumed primarily as a gourmet luxury item in Japan. Matsutake have never been successfully cultivated, and during the 1970s and 80s, as a growing market for luxuries in Japan coincided with a decline in domestic production, Japan began importing increasing amounts of them. The author first considers scientific discussions about the contingencies and uncertainties that relationships involving fungi, trees, people, nematodes, beetles, and weather create in different matsutake regions. Discussion t...
Uploads
Papers