Atmospheric scenes compel anthropology into a dilution: a shift in concentration. Working through suspension as a condition through which to ask into life in the air, this Opening pauses with moments of arrest, distribution, and deposit by various airs. Such moments compel a reorientation of attention toward airy things even as they model a recomposition of anthropological inquiry by atmosphere. Exploring how sands shift and settle in a Chinese wind tunnel and how matsutake mushroom solids become aromatic vapors in Seoul, we move from considering materials in airborne states to a condition of suspension in atmosphere to which particulates and people alike are held. What could an anthropology in suspension become when its anthropos is subject to vaporization into a thing among others in the atmosphere's composition?

Critiques of universalism require rethinking when confronted with environmental political arenas, in which the very concepts of “universality” and “particularity” are in a constant process of self‐conscious deployment. In this article, I attend to the analytic and political implications of such deployments in a recent incinerator controversy in Hong Kong. I suggest that an aesthetic of local appropriateness and its formal requirement of simultaneous universal and particular truth value normalize the politics of environmental expertise such that the only legible form for counterknowledge is one of articulated knowledges. To understand how the knowledges emergent in an NGO–village collaboration were scaled, linked, and mobilized, I analyze a translation of expert knowledge and the event's metapragmatic effects. A subsequent account of unarticulated knowledges emphasizes the political‐economic conditions that limit whose knowledges can count as particular in articulations of counterexpertise.

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.

No abstract

It is a challenging and important time to breathe together. A reflection on the timeliness and resonance of the thematic collection "Breathing Late Industrialism."