Recently, I started being interested in mushrooms. As such an amazing organism, it plays essential roles in the whole ecological system. So during today’s lunchtime, my partner and I searched from YouTube for some videos about mushrooms and watched them together when we had lunch.
I would like to talk about one video we have watched, Stephen Axford: How fungi changed my view of the world.
The video itself is amazing, starting from Stephen Axford’s own sad life experience of losing his wife and experiencing fatal illness. These had him launch his exploration into the world of fungi and become a fungi photographer. The video stunned us with the astonishing visual documents of a lot of fungi in different colours and forms. What is more, the photographer did not limit his journey to Australia but reached to other areas including Yunnan Province in China and India.
However, it was this part of his journey that rang a bell in my mind. Stephen travelled to India and asked a local young tourist guide, whose name is Tyndleness Khongsni if there existed any fungi that would glow in darkness. The young man immediately replied, “yes.” and said that they called the fungi “bright mushroom” because it brought light in the darkness. When the photographer asked if Tyndleness Khongsni knew where to find it, he immediately answered another “yes” and led Stephen to a dark place (maybe inside a cave). Tyndleness showed them a piece of wood spotted with several clusters of glowing fungi. Then, from Stephen and his fellow’s conversation, the difference of these fungi was that the stem of this one glow brightly. While at the same time, the one Stephen had already encountered in Australia in his backyard, the glow from its stem was much weaker. The fungi being found in India then was taken back to Australia. After testing its DNA, they found that it is “a new species.”
A couple of things are problematic here. First, the local tourist guide, Tyndleness Khongsni, was not given any opportunity to talk about the mushroom except at the beginning. One thing which is pretty obvious is that he showed a strong familiarity in their short exchange of information. So why didn’t Stephen let the tourist guide or any other local people talk about their experience with the mushroom. The second thing is, from what perspective can these fungi be claimed as a new discovery? If the local have already gained familiarity with the mushroom, then is it still “new” from their side? Or, if it had not been named scientifically, can we say that it had never been discovered? Or, discovered by whom?
It seems only an insignificant section of the video, yet shows the unsolved issue relating to colonisation, the global impact of which reaches to many aspects of our daily life. The dominating power from western science system to Asia local, non-science, folk knowledge, and from westerners’ narrative upon Asia people of their life erase their own voice about their life experience and construction of knowledge.
