Review de Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2015, pp. 331

International audienceCan a mushroom become our guide to explore the “dark wood” of the current global capitalism, the “savage, dense and harsh” wood in which, paraphrasing Dante, we seem to have lost “the straightway”? This is the journey that anthropologist Anna Tsing invites us to engage in: the journey of the matsutake mushroom (Tricholoma matsutake), from gift to commodity and back. This journey brings us from “disturbed” forestry landscapes that, in such disparate places as the US state of Oregon, the Chinese province of Yunnan, Finland and Japan, result from “the overlapping world-making activities of many agents, human and not human” to the realm of disembedded market commodities in which the mushroom shortly, but decisively, dwells before its transformation into what is considered in Japan as a highly appreciated gift.With this book Tsing pursues the programme of ethnography of “global connections” she began in the 1990s, with her work on predatory business and local struggles around Indonesian tropical rainforests. That work already focused on the study of “frictions”, meaning the potentially empowering but also compromising effects of “encounters across differences”. Now Tsing observes these frictions in the encounters of value regimes across the Matsutake mushroom global supply chain