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A B S T R A C TExperiments in collaboration open new investigative possibilities for cultural anthropologists. In this report, we use our research on matsutake mushrooms to show the promise of collaborative experiments for ethnographers of scale making, global connection, and human-nonhuman relations. Anna Tsing introduces. Mogu Mogu (Timothy Choy and Shiho Satsuka) argue that the mushroomic figure of mycorrhizal life illuminates workings of capital and power, nature and culture. Lieba Faier examines contingency-through the effect of weather and bugs on matsutake production-as a form of self-positioning that emerges from local understandings of connection. Michael Hathaway uses postcolonial science studies to examine the transnational production, flow, and transformation of scientific knowledge about matsutake. Miyako Inoue discusses the anthropological subject that emerges through the kind of collaboration envisioned and practiced by the Matsutake Worlds Research Group.

This article explores how global environmental organizations unintentionally fostered the notion of indigenous people and rights in a country that officially opposed these concepts. In the 1990s, Beijing declared itself a supporter of indigenous rights elsewhere, but asserted that, unlike the Americas and Australia, China had no indigenous people. Instead, China described itself as a land of "ethnic minority" groups, not indigenous groups. In some sense, the state's declaration appeared effective, as none of these ethnic minority groups launched significant grassroots efforts to align themselves with the international indigenous rights movement. At the same time, as international environmental groups increased in number and strength in 1990s China, their policies were undergoing significant transformations to more explicitly support indigenous people. This article examines how this challenging situation arose, and discusses the unintended consequences after a major environmental organization, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), carried out a project using the language of indigeneity in China.

This paper engages with the critical literature on development through a study of transnational environmentalism in China. Within the last decade, international development efforts have become increasingly important in shaping China's encounters with global sensibilities, funds, and projects. The author builds on scholarship that approaches China as a transnational entity and examines the emerging politics of the environment in China. Based on an ethnographic case study of a conservation and development project in Yunnan Province, the paper argues against conceptions that international development agendas can be unilaterally imposed. Rather, it suggests that in order to gain traction, agendas require a variety of agents. These agents create convergences through forms of “transnational work,” by and through particular social engagements. Finally, this paper reveals how such convergences remain tenuous and fleeting, and can be quickly dissolved when one side or another changes its orientation.

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