Business

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5 Open Ticket, Oregon

In the middle of nowhere

— Official slogan of an aspiring matsutake town in Finland

One cold October nIght In the lAte 1990S, three Hmong American matsutake pickers huddled in their tent. Shivering, they brought their gas cooking stove inside to provide a little warmth. They went to sleep with the stove on. It went out. The next morning, all three were dead, asphyxiated by the fumes. Their deaths left the camp- ground vulnerable, haunted by their ghosts. Ghosts can paralyze you, taking away your ability to move or speak. The Hmong pickers moved away, and the others soon moved too.

The U.S. Forest Service did not know about the ghosts. They wanted to rationalize the pickers’ camping area, to make it accessible to police and emergency services, and easier for campground hosts to enforce rules and fees. In the early 1990s, Southeast Asian pickers had camped where they pleased, like everyone else who visits the national forests. But whites complained that Southeast Asians left too much litter. The Forest

Communal agendas, Oregon. A Mien pickers’

encampment. Here Mien recalled village life and

escaped the confinements of California cities.

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74 ChaPter 5

Service responded by shunting the pickers to a lonely access road. At the time of the deaths, the pickers were camped all along the road. But soon afterward, the Forest Service built a great grid, with numbered camping spaces, scattered portable toilets, and, after many complaints, a large tank of water at the (rather distant) campground entrance.

The campsites had no amenities, but the pickers— escaping from the ghosts— quickly made them their own. Mimicking the structure of the refugee camps in Thailand where many had spent more than a decade, they segregated themselves into ethnic groups: on one end, Mien and then those Hmong willing to stay; half a mile away, Lao and then Khmer; in an isolated hollow, way back, a few whites. The Southeast Asians built structures of slim pine poles and tarps and put their tents inside, some- times with the addition of wood stoves. As in rural Southeast Asia, pos- sessions were hung from the rafters, and an enclosure gave privacy for dip baths. In the center of the camp, a big tent sold hot bowls of pho. Eating the food, listening to the music, and observing the material culture, I thought I was in the hills of Southeast Asia, not the forests of Oregon.

The Forest Service’s idea about emergency access did not work out as it imagined. A few years later, someone called emergency services in be- half of a critically wounded picker. Regulations aimed only at the mush- room camp required the ambulance to wait for police escort before en- tering. The ambulance waited for hours. When the police finally showed up, the man was dead. Emergency access had not been limited by ter- rain but by discrimination.

This man, too, left a dangerous ghost, and no one slept near his campsite except Oscar, a white man and one of the few local residents to seek out Southeast Asians, who did it once, drunk, on a dare. Oscar’s success in getting through the night led him to try picking mushrooms on a nearby mountain, sacred to local Native Americans and the home of their ghosts. But the Southeast Asians I knew stayed away from that mountain. They knew about ghosts.

Oregon’s center of matsutake commerce in the first decade of the twenty- first century was a place not marked on any map, “in the middle of nowhere.” Everyone in the trade knew where it was, but it wasn’t a

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oPen tiCket, oregon 75

town or a recreation site; it was officially invisible. Buyers had estab- lished a cluster of tents along the highway, and every evening pickers, buyers, and field agents gathered there, turning it into a theater of lively suspense and action. Because the place is self- consciously off the map, I decided to make up a name to protect people’s privacy, and to add some characters from the up- and- coming matsutake trading spot down the road. My composite field site is “Open Ticket, Oregon.”

“Open ticket” is actually the name of a mushroom- buying practice. In the evening after returning from the woods, pickers sell their mush- rooms for the buyer’s price per pound, adjusted in relation to the mush- room’s size and maturity, its “grade.” Most wild mushrooms carry a sta- ble price. But the price of matsutake shoots up and down. Within the night, the price may easily shift by $10 per pound or more. Within the season, price shifts are much greater. Between 2004 and 2008, prices shifted between $2 and $60 per pound for the best mushrooms— and this range is nothing compared with earlier years. “Open ticket” means that a picker may return to the buyer for the difference between the orig- inal price paid and a higher price offered on the same night. Buyers— who earn a commission based on the poundage they buy— offer open ticket to entice pickers to sell early in the evening, rather than waiting to see if prices will rise. Open ticket is testimony to the unspoken power of pickers to negotiate buying conditions. It also illustrates the strategies of buyers, who continually try to put each other out of business. Open ticket is a practice of making and affirming freedom for both pickers and buyers. It seems an apt name for a site of freedom’s performance.

For what is exchanged every evening is not just mushrooms and money. Pickers, buyers, and field agents are engaged in dramatic enact- ments of freedom, as they separately understand it, and they exchange these, encouraging each other, along with their trophies: money and mushrooms. Sometimes, indeed, it seemed to me that the really impor- tant exchange was the freedom, with the mushroom- and- money tro- phies as extensions— proofs, as it were— of the performance. After all, it was the feeling of freedom, galvanizing “mushroom fever,” that ener- gized buyers to put on their best shows and pressed pickers to get up the next dawn to search for mushrooms again.

But what is this freedom about which pickers spoke? The more I asked about it, the more unfamiliar it became to me. This is not the

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76 ChaPter 5

freedom imagined by economists, who use that term to talk about the regularities of individual rational choice. Nor is it political liberalism. This mushroomers’ freedom is irregular and outside rationalization; it is performative, communally varied, and effervescent. It has something to do with the rowdy cosmopolitanism of the place; freedom emerges from open- ended cultural interplay, full of potential conflict and mis- understanding. I think it exists only in relation to ghosts. Freedom is the negotiation of ghosts on a haunted landscape; it does not exorcise the haunting but works to survive and negotiate it with flair.

Open Ticket is haunted by many ghosts: not only the “green” ghosts of pickers who died untimely deaths; not only the Native American communities removed by U.S. laws and armies; not only the stumps of great trees cut down by reckless loggers, never to be replaced; not only the haunting memories of war that will not seem to go away; but also the ghostly appearance of forms of power— held in abeyance— that enter the everyday work of picking and buying. Some kinds of power are there, but not there; this haunting is a place from which to begin to understand this multiply culturally layered enactment of freedom. Con- sider these absences that make Open Ticket what it is:

Open Ticket is far from the concentration of power; it is the opposite of a city. It is missing social order. As Seng, a Lao picker, put it, “Buddha is not here.” Pickers are selfish and greedy, he said; he was impatient to return to the temple where things were properly arranged. But, mean- while, Dara, a Khmer teenager, explained that this is the only place she can grow up away from the violence of gangs. Yet Thong is a (former?) Lao gang member; I think he is getting away from warrants for his arrest. Open Ticket is a hodgepodge of flights from the city. White Vietnam vets told me they wanted to be away from crowds, which sparked flashbacks from the war and uncontrollable panic attacks. Hmong and Mien told me they were disappointed in America, which had promised them free- dom but instead crowded them into tiny urban apartments; only in the mountains could they find the freedom they remembered from South- east Asia. Mien in particular hoped to reconstitute a remembered village life in the matsutake forest. Matsutake picking was a time to see dis- persed friends and to be away from the constraints of crowded families. Nai Tong, a Mien grandmother, explained that her daughter called her every day to beg her to come home to take care of the grandchildren. But

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oPen tiCket, oregon 77

she calmly repeated that she had at least to make up the money for her picking permit; she could not go back yet. The important bits were left unsaid in those calls: Escaping from apartment life, she had the freedom of the hills. The money was less important than the freedom.

Matsutake picking is not the city, although haunted by it. Picking is also not labor— or even “work.” Sai, a Lao picker, explained that “work” means obeying your boss, doing what he tells you to. In contrast, mat- sutake picking is “searching.” It is looking for your fortune, not doing your job. When a white campground owner, sympathetic to the pickers, talked to me about how the pickers deserved more because they work so hard, getting up at dawn and staying through sun and snow, some- thing nagged at me about her view. I had never heard a picker talk like that. No pickers I met imagined the money they gained from matsutake as a return on their labor. Even Nai Tong’s time babysitting was more akin to work than mushroom picking.

Tom, a white field agent who had spent years as a picker, was partic- ularly clear about rejecting labor. He had been an employee of a big tim- ber company, but one day he put his equipment in his locker, walked out the door, and never looked back. He moved his family into the woods and earned from what the land would give him. He has gathered cones for seed companies and trapped beaver for skins. He has picked all kinds of mushrooms— not to eat but to sell, and he has taken his skills into the buying scene. Tom tells me how liberals have ruined Amer- ican society; men no longer know how to be men. The best answer is to reject what liberals think of as “standard employment.”

Tom goes to great lengths to explain to me that the buyers he works with are not employees but independent businessmen. Even though he gives them large amounts of cash every day to buy mushrooms, they can sell to any field agent— and I know they do. It’s an all cash business, too, without contracts, so if a buyer decides to abscond with his cash, he says, there is nothing he can do about it. (Amazingly, buyers who ab- scond often come back to deal with another field agent.) But the scales he lends buyers for weighing mushrooms, he points out, are his; he could call the police about the scales. He tells the story of a recent buyer who absconded with several thousand dollars— but made the mistake of taking the scale. Tom drove down the road in the direction he be- lieved the buyer took, and, sure enough, there was the scale abandoned

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78 ChaPter 5

by the side of the road. The cash was gone of course; but that was the risk of independent business.

Pickers bring many kinds of cultural heritage to their rejection of labor. Mad Jim celebrates his Native American ancestors in matsutake picking. After many jobs, he said, he was working as a bartender on the coast. A Native woman walked in with a $100 bill; shocked, he asked where she got it. “Picking mushrooms,” she told him. Jim went out the next day. It wasn’t easy to learn: he crawled through the brush; he fol- lowed animals. Now he knows how to stalk the dunes for the mat- sutake buried deep in the sand. He knows where to look under tangled rhododendron roots in the mountains. He has never gone back to wage work.

Lao- Su works in a Wal- Mart warehouse in California when he is not picking matsutake, making $11.50 an hour. To get that pay rate, however, he had to agree to work without medical benefits. When he hurt his back on the job and was unable to lift merchandise, he was given a long leave to recover. While he hopes the company will take him back, he says he gets more money from matsutake picking than from Wal- Mart any- way, despite the fact that the mushroom season is only two months long. Besides, he and his wife look forward to joining the vibrant Mien community in Open Ticket every year. They consider it a vacation; on weekends, their children and grandchildren sometimes come up to join them in picking.

Matsutake picking is not “labor,” but it is haunted by labor. So, too, property: Matsutake pickers act as if the forest was an extensive com- mons. The land is not officially a commons. It is mainly national forest, with some adjacent private land, all fully protected by the state. But the pickers do their best to ignore questions of property. White pickers are particularly aggravated by federal property and do their best to thwart restrictions on using it. Southeast Asian pickers are generally warmer to government, expressing wishes that it would do more. Unlike white pickers, many of whom are proud of picking without a permit, most Southeast Asians register with the Forest Service for permission to pick. However, the fact that law enforcement tends to single out Asians for infractions even without evidence— as one Khmer buyer put it, “driving while being Asian”— makes it seem less worth the effort to stay within the law. Not many do.

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oPen tiCket, oregon 79

Vast lands without boundary markers makes staying in approved picking zones quite difficult, as I found from my own experience. Once, a sheriff staked out my car to catch me without a permit when I re- turned with mushrooms. Even as an avid reader of maps, I had been unable to tell whether this place was on or off limits.1 I was lucky; I was just at the border. But it wasn’t marked. Once, too, after I had pleaded with a Lao family for days to take me picking, they agreed, if I would drive. We chugged through forest on unmarked dirt roads for what seemed hours before they told me we had arrived at the place they wanted to pick. When I pulled over, they asked me why I wasn’t trying to hide the car. Only then did I realize that we were surely trespassing.

The fines are steep. During my fieldwork, the fine for picking in a national park was $2,000 on the first offense. But law enforcement is thin on the ground, and the roads and trails are many. The national for- est is crisscrossed with abandoned logging roads; these make it possible for pickers to travel across extensive forestland. Young men, too, are willing to hike many miles, looking for the most isolated mushroom patches— perhaps on forbidden lands, perhaps not. When the mush- rooms get to the buyers, no one asks.2

But what is “public property” if not an oxymoron? Certainly, the Forest Service has trouble with it in these times. Legislation requires that public forests be thinned for fire protection for a square mile around private inholdings; this requires a lot of public funds to save a few private assets.3 Meanwhile, private timber companies do that thin- ning, making further profits from public forests. And, while logging is allowed within Late Successional Reserves, pickers are forbidden— because no one has found funds for an environmental impact assess- ment. If pickers have trouble sorting out which kinds of lands are off- limits, they are not alone in their confusion. The difference between the two kinds of confusion is also instructive. The Forest Service is asked to uphold property, even if it means neglecting the public. The pickers do their best to hold property in abeyance as they pursue a commons haunted by the possibility of their own exclusion.

Freedom/haunting: two sides of the same experience. Conjuring a future full of pasts, a ghost- ridden freedom is both a way to move on and a way to remember. In its fever, picking escapes the separation of persons and things so dear to industrial production. The mushrooms

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80 ChaPter 5

are not yet alienated commodities; they are effects of the pickers’ free- dom. Yet this scene only exists because the two- sided experience has purchase in a strange sort of commerce. Buyers translate freedom tro- phies into trade through dramatic performances of “free market com- petition.” Thus market freedom enters freedom’s jumble, making the holding in abeyance of concentrated power, labor, property, and alien- ation seem strong and effective.

It’s time to get back to the buying in Open Ticket. It’s late afternoon, and some of the white field agents are sitting around joking. They accuse each other of lying and call each other “vultures” and “Wile E. Coyote.” They are right. They agree to open at the price of $10 a pound for num- ber one mushrooms, but almost no one does. The minute the tents open, the competition is on. The field agents call their buyers to offer opening prices— perhaps $12 or even $15 if they agreed on $10. It is up to the buyers to report back about what is happening in the buying tents. Pickers come in and ask about the prices. But the price is a secret— unless you are a regular seller, or, alternatively, you are already showing your mush- rooms. Other buyers send their friends, disguised as pickers, to find the price, so it is not something to tell just anyone. Then, when a buyer wants to raise prices, to beat the competition, he or she is supposed to call the field agent. If not, the buyer will have to pay the price difference from his or her commission— but this is a tactic many are willing to try. Soon enough, calls ricochet between pickers, buyers, and field agents. The prices are shifting. “It’s dangerous!” one field agent would tell me as he stalked around the buying area, watching the scene. He could not talk to me during the buying; it demanded his full attention. Barking commands into his cell phone, each tried to stay ahead— and to trip up the others. Meanwhile, field agents are on the phone to their bulking companies and exporters, learning how high they can go. It’s exciting and exacting work to put the others out of business as well as one can.

“Imagine the time before cell phones!” one field agent reminisced. Everyone lined up at the two public phone booths, trying to get through as the prices changed. Even now, every field agent surveys the buying field like a general on an old- fashioned battlefield, his phone, like a field

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oPen tiCket, oregon 81

radio, constantly at his ear. He sends out spies. He must react quickly. If he raises the price at the right time, his buyers will get the best mush- rooms. Better yet, he might push a competitor to raise the price too high, forcing him to buy too many mushrooms, and, if all goes really right, to close down for a few days. There are all kinds of tricks. If the price spikes, a buyer can get pickers to take his mushrooms to sell to other buyers: Better the money than the mushrooms. There will be rude laughter for days, fuel for another round of calling the others liars— and yet, no one goes out of business despite all these efforts.4 This is a performance of competition— not a necessity of business. The point is the drama.

Let’s say it’s dark now, and pickers are lined up to sell at a buying tent. They have picked this buyer not only because of his prices, but because they know he is a skilled sorter. Sorting is just as important as basic prices, because a buyer assigns a grade to each mushroom, and the price depends on the grade. And what an art sorting is! Sorting is an eye- catching, rapid- fire dance of the arms with the legs held still. White men make it look like juggling; Lao women— the other cham- pion buyers— make it look like Royal Lao dancing. A good sorter knows a lot about the mushrooms just from touching them. Matsutake with insect larvae will spoil the batch before it arrives in Japan; it is es- sential that the buyer refuse them. But only an inexperienced buyer cuts into the mushroom to look for larvae. Good buyers know from the feel. They can also smell the provenance of the mushroom: its host tree; the region it comes from; other plants, such as rhododendron, which affect the size and shape. Everyone enjoys watching a good buyer sort. It is a public performance full of prowess. Sometimes pickers pho- tograph the sorting. Sometimes they also photograph their best mush- rooms, or the money, especially when it is hundred dollar bills. These are trophies of the chase.

Buyers try to assemble “crews,” that is, loyal pickers, but pickers do not feel the obligation to continue selling to any buyer. So buyers court pickers, using ties of kinship, language, and ethnicity, or special bonuses. Buyers offer pickers food and coffee— or, sometimes, stronger beverages, such as alcoholic tonics laced with herbs and scorpions. Pickers sit around eating and drinking outside buyers’ tents; where they share com- mon war experiences with the buyers, the camaraderie may last until late at night. But such groups are evanescent; all it takes is a rumor of a

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82 ChaPter 5

high price or a special deal, and pickers are off to another tent, another circle. Yet the prices are not so different. Might performance be part of the point? Competition and independence mean freedom for all.

Sometimes pickers have been known to wait, sitting in their pickup trucks with their mushrooms, because they are dissatisfied with every- one’s prices. But they must sell before the evening is over; they cannot keep the mushrooms. Waiting too is part of the performance of free- dom: freedom to search wherever one pleases— holding propriety, labor, and property at arm’s length; freedom to bring one’s mushrooms to any buyer, and for the buyers, to any field agent; freedom to put the other buyers out of business; freedom to make a killing or lose it all.

Once I told an economist about this buying scene, and he was ex- cited, telling me this was the true and basic form of capitalism, without the pollution of powerful interests and inequalities. This was real capi- talism, he said, where the playing field was level, as it should be. But is Open Ticket’s picking and buying capitalism? The problem is that there isn’t any capital. There is a lot of money changing hands, but it slips away, never forming an investment. The only accumulation is happen- ing downstream, in Vancouver, Tokyo, and Kobe, where exporters and importers use the matsutake trade to build their firms. Open Ticket’s mushrooms join streams of capital there, but they are not procured in what seems to me a capitalist formation.

But there are clearly “market mechanisms”: or are there? The whole point of competitive markets, according to economists, is to lower prices, forcing suppliers to procure goods in more efficient ways. But Open Ticket’s buying competition has the explicit goal of raising prices. Everyone says so: pickers, buyers, bulkers. The purpose of playing with prices is to see if the price can be increased, so that everyone at Open Ticket benefits. Many seem to think that there is an ever- flowing spring of money in Japan, and the goal of competitive theater is to force open the pipes so that the money will flow to Open Ticket. Old timers all re- member 1993, when the price of matsutake in Open Ticket rose briefly to $600 a pound in the hands of pickers. All you had to do was find one fat button, and you had $300!5 Even after that high, they say, in the 1990s a single picker could make several thousand dollars in one day. How might access to that flow of money be opened again? Open Ticket buy- ers and bulkers stake their bets on competition to raise prices.

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oPen tiCket, oregon 83

It seems to me that there are two framing circumstances that allow this set of beliefs and practices to flourish. First, American businessmen have naturalized the expectation that the U.S. government will apply muscle in their behalf: As long as they perform “competition,” the gov- ernment will twist the arms of foreign business partners to make sure American companies get the prices and market share they want.6 Open Ticket matsutake trading is much too small and inconspicuous to get that kind of government attention. Still, it is within this national expec- tation that buyers and bulkers engage in competitive performances to get the Japanese to offer them the best prices. As long as they show themselves properly “American,” they expect to succeed.

Second, Japanese traders are willing to put up with such displays as signs of what the importer I mentioned called “American psychology.” Japanese traders expect to work in and around strange performances; if this is what brings in the goods, it should be encouraged. Later, export- ers and importers can translate the exotic products of American free- dom into Japanese inventory— and, through inventory, accumulation.

What is this “American psychology” then? There are too many peo- ple and histories in Open Ticket to plunge directly into the coherence through which we usually imagine “culture.” The concept of assem- blage— an open- ended entanglement of ways of being— is more useful. In an assemblage, varied trajectories gain a hold on each other, but in- determinacy matters. To learn about an assemblage, one unravels its knots. Open Ticket’s performances of freedom require following histo- ries that stretch far beyond Oregon but show how Open Ticket’s entan- glements might have come into being.7

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9 From Gifts to Commodities— and Back

It IS tIme to return to the Problem oF AlIenAtIon. In capitalist logics of commodification, things are torn from their life- worlds to become objects of exchange. This is the process I am calling “alienation,” and I use the term as a potential attribute of nonhumans as well as humans. The surprising thing about the search for matsutake in Oregon is that it does not involve alienation in the relation between for- agers and mushrooms. The mushrooms are indeed torn from their fun- gal bodies (although, as fruit, this is their goal). But instead of becoming alienated commodities, ready for conversions between money and capi- tal, they become trophies of the hunt— even as they are sold. Foragers beam with pride while showing off their mushrooms; they can’t stop nar- rating the pleasures and dangers of the search. The mushrooms become part of the foragers, just as if they had eaten them. This means that some- how these trophies must be converted into commodities. If mushrooms are gathered as trophies of freedom, and become part of the pickers in that process, then how do they become capitalist commodities?

Translating value, Oregon. A Hmong

husband films the cash result of that day’s

mushrooms in his wife’s hands. In the buying

tent, mushrooms, and the cash they bring,

are trophies of freedom. Only later sorting

disentangles them as capitalist commodities.

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122 ChaPter 9

My approach to this question is guided by an anthropological legacy of attention to the special qualities of gifts as a form of social exchange. This attention was catalyzed by the exchange of necklaces and arm shells made by Melanesians east of New Guinea, described by Bronislaw Ma- linowski as the kula ring.1 For generations of social analysts, kula ex- change has inspired thoughts about the varied ways value is created. The amazing thing about these ornaments is that they are not particularly useful, nor tokens of general exchange, nor interesting in themselves; they have value only because of their role in kula. As gifts, they make re- lations and reputations; that is their value. This kind of value upsets eco- nomic common sense— and that is why it’s good to think with.

Indeed, thinking through kula has made it possible to identify alien- ation as a puzzling and extraordinary feature of capitalism. Kula reminds us that things as well as people are alienated under capitalism. Just as in factories workers are alienated from the things they make, allowing those things to be sold without reference to their makers, so too, things are alienated from the people who make and exchange them. Things be- come stand- alone objects, to be used or exchanged; they bear no relation to the personal networks in which they are made and deployed.2 And while this situation may seem ordinary to those of us inside capitalist worlds, studying kula makes it seem strange. In kula, things and persons are formed together in gifts through which things are extensions of per- sons and persons are extensions of things. Kula valuables are known through the personal relations they make; people of note, in turn, are known through their kula gifts. Things, then, do not just have value in use and commodity exchange; they may have value through the social relationships and reputations of which they are part.3

The difference between value making in kula and capitalism seemed so striking that some analysts argued that we might divide the world into “gift economies” and “commodity economies,” each with a sepa- rate logic for making value.4 Like most dichotomies, the contrast be- tween gift and commodity suffers when it hits the ground; most situa- tions juxtapose and confuse these ideal types— or stretch outside them. Yet, even in its oversimplifications, it is a useful tool because it urges us to look for difference. Rather than relax into economic common sense, we stay alert for contrasts across value regimes. To explore how capital- ism draws from noncapitalist value systems— and how these fare within

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from gifts to Commodities—and baCk 123

capitalism— a tool for noticing difference is worth trying out. The gift- versus- commodity distinction can stand in for the absence or presence of alienation, the quality necessary to turn things into capitalist assets.

In considering the matsutake commodity chain, the attraction of this tool increases, too, in attending to the final destination of mat- sutake. Matsutake in Japan is almost always a gift. The lowest kinds of matsutake are sold at supermarkets and used as ingredients in food man- ufacturing, but the better kinds, through which the product is known, are quintessential gifts. Almost no one buys a fine matsutake just to eat. Matsutake build relationships, and as gifts they cannot be separated from these relationships. Matsutake become extensions of the person, the definitional feature of value in a gift economy.

Perhaps there have been times and places when the gift was direct from a picker to a consumer; when peasants gave their lords matsutake in medieval Japan, for example, the mushrooms had only to be foraged and presented to express the relation- making force of the gift. Most of the time today, however, gifts are salvaged from capitalist commodity chains. Givers buy them in high- end grocery stores or take the guests whom they want to honor to fancy restaurants to eat them; grocery stores and restaurants obtain them from a chain of wholesalers who in turn obtain them from importers or domestic agricultural cooperatives. How are gifts made from commodities? And might those commodities, in turn, have been made earlier along the chain from gifts? The rest of this chapter explores these puzzles, which take us into the heart of those translations necessary for bringing capitalism and its constitutive others together.

Let me begin in Japan with the arrival of matsutake from abroad. Surely those mushrooms, so carefully cooled, packed, and sorted, are a capitalist commodity. They are as close as we might get to alienated, stand- alone objects: labeled only by the country of the exporter, no one could have any idea under what conditions they were foraged or sold.5 They have no connections to the people who earlier admired and ex- changed them. They are inventory: assets from which importers build their firms. But almost immediately on arrival, they begin their trans- formation from commodities to gifts. This is the magic of translation, and dealers at every link on the Japanese end of the commodity chain are experts at it. It is worth following them.

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124 ChaPter 9

Importers have incoming shipments of matsutake sent directly to government- licensed wholesalers, who are paid a commission to super- vise further sales. Wholesalers guide imported matsutake down one of two paths: They are sold either by negotiation or by auction to interme- diate wholesalers. In both cases, rather to my surprise, wholesalers do not see their job as merely the efficient transfer of goods down the com- modity chain. They are active mediators; they see their job as matching the matsutake with the very best buyers for that batch. One man who managed matsutake at a wholesale house explained, “I never sleep during matsutake season.” Whenever a shipment comes in, he must as- sess it. When he has made a judgment about the quality and special characteristics of the lot, he calls the right buyers— the ones who could use just that kind of matsutake. He has already given the mushrooms relation- making powers: the powers of quality.

After several interviews in which we heard experiences of this kind, my collaborator Shiho Satsuka explained the role of wholesalers as “matchmakers.” Their job is to match goods with appropriate buyers, getting the best possible price through the match. One vegetable whole- saler spoke of how he goes to visit farmers to see the conditions under which they grow their crops; he wants to know just which buyers these crops will satisfy. Translation from commodity to gift is already happen- ing in making the match. The wholesaler looks for relational qualities in his goods, which, in turn make them a natural match with particular buyers. From the first, then, the sale of matsutake is wrapped up with the making and maintaining of personal relationships. The mushrooms take on relational qualities; they are given the power to make personal ties.

Intermediate wholesalers who buy matsutake at auction are even more invested in making matches. Unlike wholesalers, who make a commission on sales, they make nothing if they do not find the right match. When they buy, they are often already thinking of a particular client. Their skill too is the assessment of quality, as this forges relation- ships. The exception here are agents who work with supermarkets, who are more concerned with quantity and reliability than quality. Super- markets buy lower- value matsutake. But fine matsutake are the preserve of small retail businesses who buy from intermediate wholesalers, and their relations flavor the whole trade. The ability to properly assess the

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from gifts to Commodities—and baCk 125

mushrooms is the necessary ingredient of this flavor; it allows sellers to extend personal advice— not just a generic commodity— to buyers. The advice is the gift that comes with the mushroom, stretching it beyond use or exchange value.

The best matsutake are sold in specialty grocery stores and expensive restaurants, which pride themselves on knowing their clientele. One grocer explained that he knows his best clients well: He knows when a ceremony that could use matsutake, such as a wedding, is coming up. When he buys from the intermediate wholesaler, he too is already thinking about particular clients. He contacts these clients, maintain- ing a relationship, not just selling a product. There is a gift in the mat- sutake even before it leaves the commodity sphere.

Individuals who buy matsutake are almost always thinking about building relationships.6 A colleague told me about riding with an anx- ious group to a celebration that was supposed to heal an old rift in an extended family. “Will they bring out the matsutake?” his friends kept asking. If the rift would be healed, there would be matsutake. (There was.) Thus, too, matsutake is an ideal gift to give to someone with whom one needs a long- term relationship. Suppliers give matsutake to the firms that give them business. One grocer commented that religious converts had begun to purchase matsutake for presentation to their spiritual leaders. Matsutake signals a serious commitment.

The grocer told me, too, that he thinks this is key to “Japanese” ways of life. “You can understand France without knowing about truffles,” he quipped, “but you can’t understand Japan without knowing matsutake.” He was referring to the relational quality of the mushroom. It wasn’t just the smell or the taste, but the ability of the mushroom to build per- sonal ties that made it so powerful. This is where his work as a match- maker comes in, too; he must make matsutake relational long before they are ready to be eaten.

It is the mushroom’s relational force, as well, that evokes its opposite: wild fantasies of stuffing oneself with matsutake, far beyond satiation. Several people told me mischievously of such fantasies, knowing they were impossible. It was not just the price of matsutake, but the frisson of breaking matsutake’s cardinal role: to build relationships. To stuff one- self with an endless pile would be so thoroughly and deliciously bad.

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126 ChaPter 9

The value of matsutake then derives not just from use and commer- cial exchange; it is made in the act of giving. And this is possible be- cause mediators all along the chain are already giving the quality of matsutake to their clients as a personal gift. Perhaps this personaliza- tion is reminiscent of other aristocratic goods, in other places. The gen- tleman wants a suit made to fit him, not one off the rack. But this par- allel makes the conversion between commodity and gift even more telling. Across many sectors and cultures, mediators are poised to con- vert capitalist commodities into other value forms. Such middlemen are engaged in the acts of value translation through which capitalism comes to cohabit with other ways of making people and things.

But there is one set of relations that is never included with matsutake gifts in Japan: the relations of foraging and buying in other countries. Neither middlemen nor consumers concern themselves with the rela- tions through which their matsutake are procured. Foreign matsutake are ranked according to a set of Japanese preferences that have nothing to do with the conditions under which the mushrooms grew and were foraged and marketed. When they arrive at an import warehouse, they have no connections to pickers and buyers, much less ecological life- worlds. For a moment, they are fully capitalist commodities. But how did they get that way? Herein lies another tale of value translation.

Let me take you one last time, then, to the buying scene in Open Ticket, to attend to the puzzle of alienation and its alternatives in value creation. I’ve been arguing that, despite the diverse histories and agen- das of participants, what holds them together is the spirit they call free- dom. Various versions of freedom are exchanged in the buying, each augmenting the others. Pickers bring the trophies of their political free- dom and their freedom in the woods to exchange with advocates of market freedom— and thus, to gain more freedom to go back to the woods again. Might freedom, as much as mushrooms and money, be what makes value in the exchange? In the Melanesian kula ring men- tioned earlier, participants bring ordinary stuff such as pigs and yams to exchange alongside kula valuables; these side trades gain value through their association with the fame- making exchange of necklaces and arm- bands. Similarly, in Open Ticket, mushrooms and money are as much tokens and trophies of an exchange of freedom as valuables in them- selves. They gain value through their connections to freedom. They are

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from gifts to Commodities—and baCk 127

not isolated objects to own but person- making attributes. It is in this light that— despite the fact that there are no explicit “gifts” here— if I had to judge this economy in a gift- versus- commodity contrast, I would place it on the side of gifts. Personal value and object value are made to- gether in exchanges of freedom: Freedom as personal value is made through money and the search for mushrooms, just as the value of money and mushrooms is assessed by participants through the freedom gained by buyers and searchers. Money and mushrooms have more than use value or capitalist exchange value; they are parts of the freedom that pickers, buyers, and field agents treasure.

Half a night later, however, the mushrooms and the money that sur- rounds them are something completely different. By the time the mush- rooms are packed into crates with ice gel and are sitting on the tarmac for shipment to Japan, it would be hard to find a trace of the distinctive economy of freedom that produced them as trophies. What happened? Back in Open Ticket around 11 p.m., trucks take crated mushrooms to the warehouses of bulkers in Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver, Brit- ish Columbia. There something strange happens: The mushrooms are sorted again. This is particularly odd because buyers in Open Ticket are master sorters. Sorting creates the prowess of buyers; it is an expression of their deep connection with the mushrooms. Stranger yet, the new sorters are casual laborers with no interest in mushrooms at all. They are part- time, on- call workers without benefits: people who want a little extra income but have no full- time jobs. In Oregon, I saw back- to- the- land hippies sorting under neon lights in the wee hours of the morning. In Vancouver, it was immigrant Hong Kong housewives. These are workers in the classic sense of the term: alienated labor without interest in the product. And yet they are translators, North American style. It is precisely because they have no knowledge or interest in how the mush- rooms got there that they are able to purify them as inventory. The free- dom that brought those mushrooms into the warehouse is erased in this new assessment exercise. Now the mushrooms are only goods, sorted by maturity and size.

Why sort again? The warehouse sorting is orchestrated by bulkers: small businessmen willing to position themselves between exporters guided by Japanese economic conventions and buyers committed to a local American gift- and- trophy economy of war and freedom. They

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128 ChaPter 9

work through field agents who join the fray among the buyers. Between the field agents and the exporters, then, they must transform the mush- rooms into an acceptable export commodity. They need to recognize what they are shipping and represent it to the exporters. Re- sorting helps them know the mushrooms.

One detail illustrates. It is illegal to pick, buy, and export very small matsutake, known in Oregon as “babies.” The reason is that the Japa- nese market is not interested, although U.S. authorities say conserva- tion guides the regulation.7 Matsutake foragers pick them anyway, and buyers claim that the pickers make them buy small mushrooms.8 Babies are removed in the warehouse extra sort. Because the mushrooms are small, I doubt if this makes much weight difference. U.S. authorities never check export crates for babies. But discarding babies helps bring the mushrooms into commodity standards. No longer entangled in the exchange of freedom between pickers and buyers, the mushrooms be- come commodities of a particular size and grade.9 They are ready for use or commercial exchange.

Matsutake is then a capitalist commodity that begins and ends its life as a gift. It spends only a few hours as a fully alienated commodity: the time when it waits as inventory in shipping crates on the tarmac and travels in the belly of a plane. But these are hours that count. Relations between exporters and importers, which dominate and structure the supply chain, are cemented within the possibility of these hours. As in- ventory, matsutake allow calculations that channel profits to exporters and importers, making the work of organizing the commodity chain worthwhile from their perspective. This is salvage accumulation: the creation of capitalist value from noncapitalist value regimes.

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10 Salvage Rhythms: Business in Disturbance

A colleAgue who StudIeS PeoPle And ForeStS In Borneo told me the following story: The community he worked with lived in and around a great forest. A timber company came and cut down the forest. When the trees were gone, the company left, leaving a pile of disintegrating machines. The residents could no longer make a living either from the forest or from the company. They took apart the machines and sold the metal as scrap.1

The story, for me, encapsulates the ambivalence of salvage: On the one hand, I am full of admiration for the people who figured out how to survive despite the destruction of their forest. On the other hand, I can’t help but worry when the scrap metal will run out, and whether there will be enough other stuff in the ruins to make continuing sur- vival possible. And while not all of us enact such a literal figuration of living in ruins, we mostly do have to work within our disorientation and distress to negotiate life in human- damaged environments. We fol- low salvage rhythms, whether of the market for scrap or of the entan- gled histories of foraging for matsutake mushrooms. By “rhythms,” I mean forms of temporal coordination. Without the singular, forward

Translating value, Oregon. Khmer buyers

sort a picker’s matsutake to determine the price.

Economic diversity enables capitalism

but also undermines its hegemony.

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132 ChaPter 10

pulse of progress, the unregularized coordination of salvage is what we have.

During most of the twentieth century, many people— perhaps par- ticularly Americans— thought that business carried forward the pulse of progress. Business was always getting bigger. It seemed to be increas- ing the world’s wealth. It was effectively reshaping the world according to its goals and needs, so that people could be empowered by money and things for use and commercial exchange. All it seemed people had to do— even ordinary people without investment capital— was to tie their own rhythms to the forward pulse of business, and they too would move forward. This worked through scalability; people and nature could join progress by becoming units in its algorithm of expansion. Advancement, ever expanding, would move through them in tandem.

All of that now seems increasingly strange. Yet experts in the busi- ness world seem to be unable to do without this apparatus for making knowledge. The economic system is presented to us as a set of abstrac- tions requiring assumptions about participants (investors, workers, raw materials) that take us right into twentieth- century notions of scalabil- ity and expansion as progress. Seduced by the elegance of these abstrac- tions, few think it important to take a closer look at the world the eco- nomic system supposedly organizes. Ethnographers and journalists give us reports of survival, flourishing, and distress, here and there. Yet there is a rift between what experts tell us about economic growth, on the one hand, and stories about life and livelihood, on the other. This is not helpful. It is time to reimbue our understanding of the economy with arts of noticing.

Thinking through salvage rhythms changes our vision. Industrial work no longer charts the future. Livelihoods are various, cobbled to- gether, and often temporary. People come to them for diverse reasons, and only rarely because they offer the stable wages- and- benefits pack- ages of twentieth- century dreams. I have suggested we watch patches of livelihood come into being as assemblages. Participants come with var- ied agendas, which do their small part in guiding world- making proj- ects. For Open Ticket mushroom hunters, these include surviving war trauma and negotiating a working relationship with U.S. citizenship. Such projects mobilize commercial foraging, drawing pickers into the forest to follow “mushroom fever.” Despite differences across these proj-

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salvage rhYthms 133

ects, boundary objects have formed— and particularly a commitment to what the pickers call freedom. Through such imagined common ground, commercial picking gains coherence as a scene— and a gather- ing becomes a happening. Multidirectional histories become possible through its emergent qualities. Without top- down discipline or syn- chronization, and without expectations of progress, livelihood patches help constitute the global political economy.

In collecting goods and people from around the world, capitalism itself has the characteristics of an assemblage. However, it seems to me that capitalism also has characteristics of a machine, a contraption lim- ited to the sum of its parts. This machine is not a total institution, which we spend our lives inside; instead, it translates across living arrange- ments, turning worlds into assets. But not just any translation can be accepted into capitalism. The gathering it sponsors is not open- ended. An army of technicians and managers stand by to remove offending parts— and they have the power of courts and guns. This does not mean that the machine has a static form. As I argued in tracing the history of Japanese- U.S. trade relations, new forms of capitalist translation come into being all the time. Indeterminate encounters matter in shaping capitalism. Yet it is not a wild profusion. Some commitments are sus- tained, through force.

Two have been particularly important for my thinking in this book. First, alienation is that form of disentanglement that allows the making of capitalist assets. Capitalist commodities are removed from their life- worlds to serve as counters in the making of further investments. In- finite needs are one result; there is no limit on how many assets inves- tors want. Thus, too, alienation makes possible accumulation— the amassing of investment capital, and this is the second of my concerns. Accumulation is important because it converts ownership into power. Those with capital can overturn communities and ecologies. Mean- while, because capitalism is a system of commensuration, capitalist value forms flourish even across great circuits of difference. Money be- comes investment capital, which can produce more money. Capitalism is a translation machine for producing capital from all kinds of liveli- hoods, human and not human.2

My ability to think with patches and translations draws from a ro- bust body of scholarship on such issues, particularly that emerging from

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134 ChaPter 10

feminist anthropology. Feminist scholars have shown that class forma- tion is also cultural formation: the origin of my patches.3 They also pio- neered the study of transactions across heterogeneous landscapes: my translations.4 If I have added to the conversation, it is in drawing atten- tion to livelihoods that are simultaneously inside and outside of capital- ism. Rather than focus our attention only on the capitalist imaginary, with its disciplined workers and savvy managers, I have tried to show precarious living in scenes that both use and refuse capitalist gover- nance. Such assemblages tell us of what’s left, despite capitalist damage.

Before they arrive in the hands of consumers, most commodities journey in and out of capitalist formations. Think about your cell phone. Deep in its circuitry, you find coltan dug by African miners, some of them children, who scramble into dark holes without thought of wages or benefits. No companies send them; they are doing this dan- gerous work because of civil war, displacement, and loss of other liveli- hoods, owing to environmental degradation. Their work is hardly what experts imagine as capitalist labor; yet their products enter your phone, a capitalist commodity.5 Salvage accumulation, with its apparatus of translation, converts the ores they dig into assets legible to capitalist business. And what of my computer? After its short useful life (as I surely must replace it with a newer model), perhaps I will donate it to a chari- table organization. What happens to such computers? It seems they are burned for potential components, and children indeed, following sal- vage rhythms, get to pick them apart for copper and other metals.6 Com- modities often finish their lives in salvage operations for the making of other commodities, to be recouped again for capitalism through sal- vage accumulation. If we want our theories of the “economic system” to have anything to do with livelihood practices, we had better take note of such salvage rhythms.

The challenges are enormous. Salvage accumulation reveals a world of difference, where oppositional politics does not fall easily into uto- pian plans for solidarity. Every livelihood patch has its own history and dynamics, and there is no automatic urge to argue together, across the viewpoints emerging from varied patches, about the outrages of accu- mulation and power. Since no patch is “representative,” no group’s struggles, taken alone, will overturn capitalism. Yet this is not the end of politics. Assemblages, in their diversity, show us what later I call the

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salvage rhYthms 135

“latent commons,” that is, entanglements that might be mobilized in common cause. Because collaboration is always with us, we can maneu- ver within its possibilities. We will need a politics with the strength of diverse and shifting coalitions— and not just for humans.

The business of progress depended on conquering an infinitely rich nature through alienation and scalability. If nature has turned finite, and even fragile, no wonder entrepreneurs have rushed to get what they can before the goods run out, while conservationists desperately con- trive to save scraps. The next part of this book offers an alternative pol- itics of more- than- human entanglements.

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