Tubs in the basement of one of my interlocutors growing culinary mushrooms.

“Home Tek 101: cross-kingdom intimacy and the re-domestication of the lab” was a paper I presented as part of “The Mushroom Multiple,” a panel I co-organized at the annual meeting of the American Anthropology Association, November 2017, in Washington DC.

Peter Oviatt and I organized this panel for the 2017 annual meetings of the AAAs in DC. We got the dreaded 8am time slot on the last day of the conference but nonetheless it was a blast to hang out with these academic mycophiles.

In my presentation, “Home Tek 101: cross-kingdom intimacy and the re-domestication of the lab,” I spoke about the spatial dimension of the domestication of fungal life among DIY mycologists and the intimacy and ambivalence involved in these practices.

Madeline Brown spoke about on the communal partnerships among Yi households in Yunnan for gathering matsutake, and how the mushroom creates temporal, spatial, and social patterns in these communities, from her dissertation on the same topic.

Peter discussed truffle farmers through the lenses of alternative forms of capital such as leisure capital. He is currently researching truffle farming in the Pacific Northwest and France in the context of the science of mycorrhiza (i.e., fungi that live symbiotically with plant associates, like truffles) and multispecies collaborations in truffle farming.

Nate Greenslit read a paper about how to make sense of this transformative encounter with the Other in the psychedelic experience and the whiteness and colonial logic implicit in this narrative. He is currently working on a book project on the subject of psychedelia and questions of race.

Pierre du Plessis presented a paper about gathering Kalahari Truffle with the San tribe in South Africa by way of traditional tracking skills, thinking about what it means to track-gather rather than track-hunt. Unfortunately, Pierre couldn’t make it to the conference so his paper was read by Filippo Bertoni.

🥁… And the award for best anthropology-mushroom pun goes to…. Pierre du Plessis for “Staying With The Truffle” (for the Haraway fans)! 🏆

“Mycoremediation: the making and unmaking of a citizen science,” on the panel, “Citizen Science I: Co-Constructing Citizen Science” @ the Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Boston, MA, Aug 30 – Sept 2, 2017

In this presentation, I look at how the vision of mycoremediation–that is, the bioremediation of toxins by fungi–has fared among amateur applied mycologists. The idea has circulated for sometime among academic mycologists but it found a popular audience in Paul Stamets’s book Mycelium Running: how mushrooms can help save the world (2005). During my field work among such do-it-yourself mycologists in the SF Bay Area, I found that this vision of a heroic, grassroots citizen science that can heal the earth through human-fungal collaboration was gradually replaced by disillusionment and doubt about this technique.

In this paper, I explore how we might understand this technological vision as scholars. Participants’ ideas about what citizen science can and should be (I.e., dispersed, accessible) reveal a vision of science that is participatory and biocentric. Drawing on Jamie Lorimer’s work, mycoremediation illustrates the tension that can emerge in citizen science between the affective and imaginative force of its ideal and the satisfactions of mastery, and its social recognition, in its implementation. Situated at the boundaries between amateur, speculative, and professional science, mycoremediation sheds light on these competing scientific modes.

In this paper, I think about what it means to call psilocybin mushrooms the “gateway mushroom.” As a counterpoint to the newfound visibility and legitimacy of psilocybin, DIY mycology attests to the significant underground permeation of psychedelia in the last half-century, especially its influence on popular ideas about natural science, technology, and nonhuman life within North American countercultures.

DIY mycologists draw on the accumulated know-how of Psilocybe cultivators and elaborate on philosophical and practical currents associated with American psychedelia. The human-fungal relationship epitomized by DIY mycology is an intertwined interspecies trajectory. Shaped by the constraints of criminalization, by the unique morphology of fungi, and by countercultural and biocentric ethos, this relationship eludes typical modern categories (e.g., wild/domesticated, subject/object). Looking ahead, possibilities for further intertwining are explored as these and other beloved species co-evolve into our homes, labs, factories, gardens, and public spaces.

The monotub, originally invented for growing psychoactive psilocybin mushrooms, is adapted for growing reishi (Ganoderma lucidium), a medicinal mushroom used in traditional Chinese medicine. (This image was uploaded by a pseudonymous user on an online forum.)

I presented this paper, “You can do this with mushrooms?!”: Wonder and DIY mycology, at a conference called Wonder and the Natural World, June 20 – 23, 2016, at the University of Indiana, Bloomington. The topic was expressions of wonder and amazement among practitioners of DIY (do-it-yourself) mycology. The paper is based on my field work among such practitioners primarily in the SF Bay Area but also in urban areas in the Pacific Northwest. I discuss how these feelings of wonder are constituted and I consider their origins, inspired by the historical work by Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston and drawing on anthropological inquiry into potentiality.

This conference was hosted by the Indiana University Consortium for the Study of Religion, Ethics, and Society (CSRES).