Making Value and Making Money with Amateur Applied Mycology

• In Event: Methods of Engagement: Feminist Approaches to Collaborations in Studying Beyond the Human

Abstract

The cultural and technical practices of open source and do-it-yourself mycologists are often grounded in ecological lifestyles, post-humanist ethics, and ambivalence (or outright antagonism) towards consumer capitalism. At the same time, most of them (like most of us) need to sell their labor to make money to live. In my field work with these communities in the SF Bay Area and the Pacific Northwest, questions of money, value, and status cut subtle rifts through otherwise genial social networks. As participants in radical ecological imaginaries—often by way of mycological practices—these ethical evaluations of money, work, and capitalism are worth thinking about, especially when the commodity they are selling is mycological knowledge and expertise generated in these open source and post-humanist contexts. Younger members in particular negotiated a number of competing values and goals: the accessibility and horizontality of the open source ethos; the desire to actively contribute to new ecological ways of living; the belief that working with fungi was their vocation; their aversion to middle-class aesthetics (e.g., presentability); the metrics of legitimacy in mainstream science versus that of amateur and countercultural circuits; and, lastly, the pragmatic necessities of comfort and survival. In this talk, through vignettes from the field, I explore how these negotiations played out for a few individuals who are trying to make a living out of working with fungi--including their responses to my own ethnographic reflections of these negotiations.

Author

• Joanna Steinhardt