Foraging for northern Thailand’s political mushroom: precarious economies, social change, and contested environmentalism

Abstract

Wild het thop mushrooms have emerged as a conspicuous source of blame for the air pollution which plagues Northern Thailand on an annual seasonal basis, with detractors arguing that “irresponsible” villagers set the forest ablaze before foraging in the wilderness. Concurrently, and potentially as a defensive mechanism, the mushroom has taken on a significant position as an object of observable public affection in the contested and constructed cultural imagination of the north. Both developments have been preceded by a process of commodification, as a formerly traditional village product has taken on notable mass market characteristics, reflecting a steep surge in price. This research seeks to understand the practices, beliefs and narratives surrounding het thop and the roles of the people involved, its delicate economic positioning across urban and rural spaces, and the growth of its dual competing narratives – particularly the coalitions of actors on either side and the specific types of discourse they produce, which lead to the emergence of a “political mushroom”. It involves a multi-sited ethnographic approach, incorporating elements of ethnomycology, further influenced by the field of critical political ecology and its place in the context of Thai forest politics and contested environmentalism, and supplemented by an analysis of relevant public discourse. While the thesis remains narrowly focused on the journey of this humble mushroom, it engages this distinctive lens to ask broader, pertinent questions about the nature of environmentalism and economic and social change in Northern Thailand. It argues that elite-driven conservationist forms of hegemonic environmentalism remain dominant in Thailand, albeit with several key shifting dynamics. It situates het thop as a form of “salvage economy” – a liberating yet precarious exception emerging from the fragility of economic and environmental decline. Lastly, it contends that the collective of diverse, rural-urban and working-class actors comprising the defense of het thop indicates an erosion in conventional ways of understanding social divides and collective consciousness in Northern Thailand.