Reinventing Collective Care Practices: Precarious Collaborations and Sacred Rupture

To follow the matsutakes is to take an interest in lives that unfold in the interstices of a system that ignores or exploits them. It is also to observe how practices emerge without prior design, without any declared collective intent. Anna Tsing invites us to look at these foragers in Oregon—precarious workers, veterans, undocumented immigrants—whose daily labor connects degraded forests to luxury markets. Their very existence raises a question: what does it mean to care when dominant structures make it impossible?

Foragers in the Ruins

To follow the matsutakes is to take an interest in Oregon’s foragers—precarious workers, American war veterans, undocumented immigrants—who sell each evening the mushrooms gathered that day, only for them to end up as luxury goods on the shelves of high-end Japanese grocers.

These foragers are not portrayed as heroes or resistors. Their activity is not presented as a political alternative or a form of activism. It simply exists, in the margins of a system that grants them no stable place. Matsutakes grow in forests scarred by industrial exploitation, and these foragers harvest them under conditions of extreme precarity. Their labor does not transform the world, but it persists nonetheless.

Tsing does not propose a model to emulate. She does not claim these practices are solutions. She merely shows that they exist, and that their very existence is a kind of response to a world that renders them invisible. The mushrooms become luxury products, but the foragers remain outside dominant narratives. Their care, if it can be called that, is one of persistence: to keep living, gathering, selling, despite everything.

The Machine That Makes Things

Faced with this precarious persistence, Ailton Krenak offers a radically different path. For him, the problem is not merely exploitation or precarity, but the very logic that turns everything into a resource. He names it without hesitation:

THE MACHINE THAT MAKES THINGS — Text based on the live conversation Conversa Selvagem, with Ailton Krenak and Marcelo Gleiser, April 17.

The “machine that makes things” is no abstract metaphor. It designates a system that reduces the Earth, bodies, and relationships to exploitable objects. Krenak does not describe this machine to propose reforming it. He calls for a radical rupture, an exit from this logic. For him, care can only emerge from that break.

Unlike Tsing’s foragers, whose practices unfold in the system’s interstices, Krenak demands an outright refusal of the system. It is not about finding margins in which to survive, but about restoring relationships destroyed by extractive modernity. These relationships are not precarious: they are sacred. They bind humans to the Earth, to ancestors, to non-humans, in an interdependence that requires no economic or political justification.

Two Trajectories, One Refusal

These two voices do not converge in any easy synthesis. Tsing observes practices that persist despite the system, without idealizing them. Krenak demands a rupture with that system, without offering a concrete plan of action. Yet they share a common refusal: that of seeing care as a technical or institutional question.

For Tsing, care is not a policy but a practice that emerges where least expected. For Krenak, care is not an action but a way of being in relation to what exceeds us. Neither presents care as a ready-made solution. They show it as an open question, a tension to be held.

The matsutake foragers do not form a community united by a project. Their activity is not organized resistance. It simply exists, in capitalism’s ruins, like a trace of what persists despite everything. Krenak, for his part, does not speak of persistence but of reactivation. It is not about surviving in the margins but about restoring relationships broken by the “machine that makes things.”

These two trajectories do not converge. They do not complement each other. They coexist, like two possible responses to the same impasse. One shows that care practices can emerge even in the most precarious conditions. The other reminds us that care can only exist in a rupture with the logics that make it impossible.

Neither offers a model. Neither prescribes how to organize collectives or negotiate with those in power. They merely show that care, if it is to exist at all, cannot content itself with dominant frameworks. It must either nestle in their interstices or reject them outright.