Morgaine Lee
Anthropology
Simon Fraser University, MA
Unceded Coast Salish Territory
Abstract
In the last several years, scientific debates about the roles fungi play in nature have been brought to mainstream public attention by way of the ‘wood wide web’. The debate about the roles of fungi in nature concerns the larger implications of what it means that fungi act and build relationships in agentive and creative ways. In this paper I use affect theory, feminist posthumanism, and critical discourse analysis to address fungal interspecies affectual relations as written in wood-wide-web science, tending to the agentive ways fungi build relationships with other species. I argue that tending to affectual pulls (Stewart, 2007) in the complex relationality between mycologists, fungi, and trees in wood wide web science teases out underlying assumptions about nature and interspecies relationships that go beyond Western scientific rationality. In doing so, I propose thinking with fungi supports the anthropological endeavor of pushing past the boundaries of rational Western scientific thought as they move us to challenge our anthropocentrism and to imagine alternative scientific narratives beyond the limits of human exceptionalism.