The Moral Economy of Mushrooms

Abstract

This article examines wild-mushroom foraging in Wayanad, Kerala, as an instance of everyday collective action that unsettles the hierarchies of caste, class, and knowledge within a neoliberal agrarian economy. Through ethnographic fieldwork and micro-phenomenological attention to smell, sound, and memory, the study examines how communities mobilise mushroom foraging as a moral economy (Thompson, 1971, Past & Present, 50(1), 76–136). Mushrooms, ephemeral, uncommodified, and undomesticable, constitute a ‘liminal’ (van Gennep, 1960, The Rites of Passage) good that resists capitalist extraction and complete social erasure. Their gathering depends on inter-sensory collaboration, kinship beyond blood relation, and moral negotiations of access and gifting that reconfigure property relations. By situating this practice within the political-economy debates on public goods and collective action, the article shows that the sensory, moral, and ecological dimensions of foraging generate covert yet significant forms of social action. These actions neither replicate market rationality nor fully oppose it. Rather, they inhabit the porous space between autonomy and alienation, subsistence and exchange, and ecology and economy. Our argument contributes to re-imagining the public sphere in contemporary India by revealing how everyday ecological practices, often dismissed as marginal, contribute to the layeredness of multispecies entanglements, moral reasoning, and sensory engagements.