Precarity and indeterminacy in a prized forest mushroom
Traditional practice to frenzied urban marketplaces in Northern Thailand
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2177403 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Elliot Lodge (Chiang Mai University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-21 |
| Publication date | 2024-01-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Asian Anthropology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1683-478X • E-ISSN: 2168-4227 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/1683478x.2023.2283359 |
| OpenAlex | W4389567489 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 17 |
Across Northern Thailand, het thop mushrooms (Astraeus) are foraged and sold into an increasingly commodified marketplace. A species of wild fungi that only appears for a short time each year, it is widely enjoyed across the diverse range of communities living in the region and increasingly positioned as part of the Lanna food and cultural aesthetic. Through a rapid rise in price over recent decades and the subsequent forging of supply chains linking rural communities to urban and online markets, foraging practices now provide significant seasonal incomes and form an essential part of annual livelihoods. However, as this paper contends – working closely with the analytical framing of "precarity" put forth by Tsing (Citation2015) in a similar fungal context – there are forms of precariousness and uncertainty that are inherent in wild products, from the indeterminant ecologies from which it emerges, to the unreliable livelihoods that arise from it, and the fickle market for such products. The purpose is not to dismiss this market as frivolous or problematic, but rather to suggest that in a disturbed and distorted environmental and economic context such as Northern Thailand, this is indicative of a wider shift toward a "salvage economy."
Agriculture · Biology · Business · Commodification · Economics · Economy · Foraging · Geography · Livelihood · Market economy · Precarity · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Ecology
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |