Preface This book surveys the folk usage of fungi worldwide from the perspective of a specialist in germplasm conservation and research. It catalogs the scientific names of fungi used for food, medicine, and other miscellaneous applications by indigenous peoples, peasant farmers, hunter-gatherers, and others commonly referred to as “folk” in ethnographic literature. The origins of the discipline of ethnomycology are sketched, and an argument is made for the origins of scientific mycology from the herb-wives and other “wise-women” of premodern Europe. The evolution of ethnomycology is traced from a focus on “entheogenic” fungi to broader folk practices and applications. Synopses are provided of the most important groups and species of fungi used for food or medicine or in craft production on each habitable continent or major geographic region, and a sampling of folklore pertinent to fungi in each such region is given. Multiple examples are provided of the cultivation or harvest of edible or medicinal fungi, especially when such activities sustain seasonally employed or underemployed people, such as Roma in Europe, certain immigrant groups in North America, and peasant farmers in various geographic regions. A work of this size cannot be completely comprehensive, but sufficient literature is cited to guide readers toward in situ and ex situ sources of fungal germplasm and to broader appreciation of folk uses (“primitive” biotechnology) of fungi and other anthropological aspects involving the fungal kingdom.
iii
Acknowledgements The author thanks Daniel MartĂnez-Carrera (Colegio de Postgraduados en Ciencias AgrĂcolas, Campus Puebla, Mexico), Shung-Chang Jong (American Type Culture Collection, U.S.A.), Levi Yafetto (Harvard University, U.S.A.), and Sveta Yamin-Pasternak (University of Alaska, USA) for thoughtful comments on the manuscript; Elio Schaechter (San Diego State University, U.S.A.) for advice on historically important images of fungi; and Terry Henkel (Humboldt State University, U.S.A.) for using the manuscript in directed study of undergraduates. Andrea Ubrizsy Savoia (University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy), Dora Bobory (Central European University, Hungary), and Esther van Gelder and Florike Egmond (University of Leiden, Netherlands) supplied collegial and instructive correspondence regarding Carolus Clusius and premodern Europe.
v
Contents I. The Present Scope of Ethnomycology: From Entheogens to Biotechnology ......................................................................... 1 Introduction Tradition and change In Wasson’s footsteps (sort of) Documentation and conservation of fungal germplasm Food and nutrition Folk medicine and medicinal mushrooms Ethical and legal issues Some global perspectives
II. Ethnomycological knowledge in the premodern Western tradition: The herb-wives of Reformation Europe as midwives to the birth of mycology............................................................ 15 Highlights and summary Archives and archetypes Herb-women, root-women, wise-women, and witches The market-women of Europe Ethnobotanical and ethnomycological studies Carolus Clusius, Franciscus van Sterbeeck, and the beginnings of mycology Some important caveats Women and mycology in the Enlightenment and beyond
III. Europe and the Mediterranean ................................................ 37 Highlights and summary Mycophilia and mycophobia Magic and folklore Edible fungi Medicinal uses Miscellaneous uses
IV. Asia and the Pacific.................................................................... 47 Highlights and summary Asian and Pacific ethnomycology sensu Wasson Fungi in myths and folklore of Asia and Oceania Indigenous uses of fungi for food, medicine, and crafts in Asia and Oceania Asian use of fungi for fermented foods
V. Sub-Saharan Africa .................................................................... 63 Highlights and summary Psychoactive fungi Fungi in myths and folklore Culinary and medicinal uses of fungi
VI. Latin America and the Caribbean ............................................. 73 Highlights and summary Ethnographic studies on psychoactive species Mythology and folklore Culinary and medicinal uses, emphasizing commercial harvest of wild mushrooms and cultivation by farmers
VII. North America ........................................................................... 85 Highlights and summary Folklore and mythology, with emphasis on Native Americans Fungi as food, medicine, craft supplies, or other uses, with emphasis on Native Americans Fungi commercially harvested from the wild or recently cultivated for profit vii
viii / CONSPECTUS OF WORLD ETHNOMYCOLOGY
VIII. Summary and Conclusions........................................................ 93 IX. Literature Cited ......................................................................... 97 X. Appendixes .............................................................................. 123 1. Sources of germplasm for edible or medicinal mushrooms 2. Sources of germplasm for other fungi, including microfungi, used in food or beverages or as medicine 3. Not just sautĂŠed in butter: Examples of preparation of fungi in regional cuisine
XI. Index ........................................................................................ 137
viii
II. Ethnomycological Knowledge in the Premodern Western Tradition: The Herb-Wives of Reformation Europe as Midwives to the Birth of Mycology Highlights and summary Long-existing documentation affirms that Carolus Clusius (1526–1609) and Franciscus van Sterbeeck (1630–1693), two pioneers in first describing fungi in functional, “botanical” terms, communicated about mushrooms with the marketwomen of their times. Women known as “herb-women” or “wise-women” in premodern Europe were a prime source of information on botanical lore and medicinal plants (including larger fungi) for early herbalists and doctors, most of whom were men. Clusius and other herbalists repeatedly made general statements acknowledging women’s contributions. Market-women in cities and villages throughout Europe were the primary suppliers of vegetable produce and herbs, including mushrooms harvested from the wild. These facts, plus additional ethnographic and historical information from later periods, strongly suggest that such women were the ultimate source of information about mushrooms for Clusius, van Sterbeeck, and their immediate associates. This transfer of knowledge happened at a time when persecution of women as witches for “illicit” botanical knowledge and practice had horrific consequences for numerous women. Such persecution and other restrictions long impeded, but did not prevent, women’s contributions to plant science and medicine, including early mycology. To definitively document these contributions, ethnomycological knowledge of premodern European herb-wives is placed in the wider context of their ethnobotanical knowledge, herein summarily sketched on the basis of period texts and art and comparative archeobotany and ethnobotany.
Archives and archetypes The image of an older woman selling mushrooms in the market or by the roadside is virtually archetypical for most European countries, especially those in Eastern Europe. Contemporary reports from newspapers and blogs contain repeated examples. Thus we read of outdoor markets in Ljubljana, “crowded with peasant women selling mushrooms” (Kaplan 1990), of “rickety old women [who] stand behind rickety old tables and aggressively peddle wild mushrooms painstakingly gathered in the woods” (Debeljak 2003), and of “women with baskets of wild mushrooms, damp humus from the woods still clinging to their roots” (Lozar 2006). In Lithuania, mushrooms picked in the forests are sold by old women outside supermarkets (Mullett 2008). Dryden (2008) describes a bus station in the Czech Republic, where “the first thing we saw on exiting the bus was a woman selling mushrooms as big as her head from a basket.” Another travel writer reported that in Ukraine, “old women in headscarves were selling mushrooms by the roadside” (Quirk 2003). Such reports crop up in academic discourse as well. In Russia, “old ladies from villages near Moscow sell cheap, freshly picked mushrooms” in open-air stands (Sik and Wallace 2002). In contemporary Poland, 15
16 / CONSPECTUS OF WORLD ETHNOMYCOLOGY
women earn extra money by picking summer mushrooms (Tarkowska 2002). In Hungary, women gathering medicinal herbs are reported to do their gathering alone, whereas “women who were gathering fruits, berries, mushrooms, and flowers always worked in groups” (Huseby-Darvas 2001). Sometimes photographs of notably picturesque mushroom vendors and their wares appear on blogs or photography websites. “Indiana Jane” (http://nicolevarner. blogspot.com) posted a photo of a plump and smiling woman with a tub of Boletus mushrooms north of St. Petersburg, and Susanne Schroeder (www.pbase.com) shows a friendly Latvian matron with jars of mushrooms and herbs that she has gathered. Henry and Kathleen McLaughlin (www.leafpile.com) present photographs of Roma women and children selling mushrooms at the roadside (Fig. 1). Iain Masterton’s expressive photograph features an elderly woman of the Russian Far East, selling mushrooms by the roadside in a rural area of Sakhalin Island (Fig. 2). At other times the photographer is preoccupied with portraiture to the exclusion of actual fungi, as in the character-rich faces of a “Hungarian mushroom vendor” (Don Roberts, www.artwanted.com) and an “Elder Madonna selling mushrooms” at the side of a highway in Romania (Istvan Leszai, www.usefilm.com) and in Leo Erkin’s snapshot of “An old woman collecting mushrooms” near Konstantinovo, Bulgaria (www.panos.co.uk). Such examples are easily multiplied. Older, but still modern, reports include “Polish women selling mushrooms in the marketplace” in 1933 (in Guggenheimer 2005), women with baskets of mushrooms at Lwów, Poland, in 1934 (Fig. 3) (Boyd 1937), a photo of women vendors standing behind heaps of mushrooms at the “fungus-market at Munich, 1936” (Ramsbottom 1953a), and an analogous photo of the mushroom market at Bosen, Austria (Fig. 4) (Duggar 1915).15 Martin Freud, son of Sigmund Freud, noted in his biography of his father that their mushroomcollecting expeditions were not discussed
Fig. 1. Roma woman and children selling mushrooms in Romania. (Used by permission of Henry and Kathleen McLaughlin, www.leafpile.com) 15
Fig. 2. Elderly woman selling mushrooms by the roadside in rural Sakhalin Island, Russia. (Used by permission of Iain Masterton, pa.photoshelter. com)
Additional photographs of the Munich market are found in Duggar (1915). Photographs from Duggar (1915) are reproduced on the Australian Fungi Website (www.anbg.gov.au/fungi) in an article on early efforts to regulate the sale of mushrooms in European mushroom markets. Women are the vendors in all these photographs. The mushroom market at Munich is well known historically and is still quite active.
ETHNOMYCOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE IN THE PREMODERN WESTERN TRADITION / 17
with people “outside our circle” because foraging for mushrooms was “something only poor old women did with dilapidated baskets which they carried to the local market to earn a few kronen” (Freud 1958). Going back in time, Scott’s (1888) travelogue devotes a chapter to the interactions of mushroom buyers with women gatherers in Tuscany, where one could find “the peasant women selling the great crop of mushrooms (three thousand pounds a day at Piteglio)” (Nation 1888). From nineteenth-century art, we have Camille Pissarro’s (1830–1903) Women Gathering Mushrooms, Henry Herbert La Thangue’s (1859–1929) The Mushroom Gatherers, Felix Schlesinger’s (1833– 1910) The Mushroom Gatherers, Ivan Shiskin’s (1832–1898) Gathering Mushrooms, and the anonymous Irish School’s (ca. 1830s–1840s) Mushroom Picking on the Lagan at New Forge, all paintings depicting women in country dress and with baskets of mushrooms. A French ceramic dish by Victor Ranvier from about 1860 (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London) depicts two seminude women in romanticized classical attire; one picks mushrooms while the other carries a mushroom-laden basket. And from the eighteenth century, we have Thomas Gainsborough’s (1727–1788) Haymaker and Sleeping Girl (whose basket is full of mushrooms) and Francesco Zuccarelli’s (1702–1788) Wooded River Landscape with a Boy Fishing and Two Peasant Women (one of whom has a basket overflowing with mushrooms). In Rosalba Carriera’s (1675–1757) series The Four Elements, Earth (1744) is personified as a woman with a basket of mushrooms. In literature, Turgenev’s (1818–1883) classic Fathers and Sons records that “for mushrooms alone the peasant woman had been paid forty-two kopeks in copper.” Again, such examples from art and literature could be multiplied. Although mushroom gathering in Russia has been described as a “gender-free activity” (Barta 2001), most commonly it is women (often accompanied by children) who indulge; e.g., in Tolstoy’s (1828–1910) Anna Karenina, women and children “drive out for mushroom-picking and bathing,” gather a basket of mushrooms, and converse with “peasant women in holiday dress, out picking herbs,” and Chekhov’s (1860–1904) “In the Ravine” has “old women and children returning from the woods carrying baskets of mushrooms” (Chekhov 1914). In villages around Moscow, women (typi-
Fig. 3. Women with baskets of mushrooms in Lwów, Poland, 1934. (Reprinted from Boyd 1937 by permission of the American Geographical Society)
Fig. 4. Women selling mushrooms in the market at Bozen, Austria (now Bolzano, South Tyrol, Italy). (Reprinted from Duggar 1915)
18 / CONSPECTUS OF WORLD ETHNOMYCOLOGY
cally old women, but sometimes younger women) were bearers of culture concerning mushrooms (Toporov 1985). Not men but “women and children gathering berries and mushrooms” in the forests are threatened by the Russian leshii spirits (Ivanits 1992). Travelogues convey the same message; e.g., an etching of women gathering mushrooms, described as “one of the principal articles of food among a large proportion of the peasantry” (Arthur 1879). Going further back, we still find evidence of such activities. In premodern Germany, for example, women were said to find work “gathering firewood, herbs, fruits, berries and mushrooms” (Wiesner 1999). “Innumerable observers record mothers and daughters gathering weeds berries mushrooms and herbs” in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe (Hufton 1993). Women and children (but apparently not men) were designated as being allowed to gather mushrooms and “all forest fruits” on lands belonging to royalty or other nobles in sixteenth-century Lithuania (from a decree transcribed in Russkaya Istoricheskaya Bibloteka, summarized in French 1970). Explicit documentation of this type is more difficult to obtain for premodern Europe than analogous reports from modern times, but is particularly germane. Fortunately, we have two pieces of highly relevant evidence, both stemming from two preeminent early mycologists, Carolus Clusius (1526– 1609) and Franciscus van Sterbeeck (1630–1693). Clusius noted that marketwomen near Frankfurt knew the fly-killing properties of the mushroom Amanita muscaria (the fly agaric) (Fig. 5), and the frontispiece of van Sterbeeck’s notable contribution to mycology featured a picture of a man (probably van Sterbeeck
Fig. 5. Page from Carolus Clusius’s Fungorum historia (1598), illustrating Amanita muscaria and referencing its sale by market-women near Frankfurt.
ETHNOMYCOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE IN THE PREMODERN WESTERN TRADITION / 19
himself, according to an antiquarian dealer selling a rare copy of the first edition)16 examining mushrooms from the baskets of market-women (Fig. 6). We will return to these latter two pieces of evidence after a broader review of interrelated sets of facts: (1) that early herbalists, including many physicians (nearly all men), relied on women informants, i.e., “herb-women,” “wise-women,” and even “witches,” who collected plants (and fungi) for private use, income, and/or healing; (2) that women were well represented, and usually dominant, among vendors of herbs, vegetables, and other edible plants (and mushrooms) throughout Europe; (3) that ethnographic evidence demonstrates a deep, widespread, and probably ancient ethnomycological knowledge among such women, especially in central and eastern Europe; but (4) that the circumscription of women’s opportunities (by regulations, by the danger of persecution, and by other difficulties in entering the professions) virtually guaranteed that women’s knowledge of fungi would be accorded the status of science only when collected, systematized, and transmitted by men.
Herb-women, root-women, wisewomen, and witches The role of herb-women (root-women, wise-women, herb-wives) as informants to the male authors of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century herbals has often been referenced, although seldom with regard to a specific plant or a specific female informant. Statements by herbalists crediting “highly expert old women” or “lowliest women” with plant knowledge are found from Otto Brunfels (1488–1534) and Euricius Cordus (1486–1535), respectively (Arber 1912). Polish botanist Anton Schneeberger (1530–1581) stated that he “was not ashamed to be the pupil of an old peasant woman,” and Joseph Banks (1743–1820), as well as the great Goethe (1749–1832), learned their plants from herb-women or “herb-gatherers” (Arber 1912). Similar credit is extended to these women in the discovery of medicinal plants. A woodcut from 1556 shows an old Polish woman gathering such plants (in Bogucka 2004). Paracelsus (Phillip von Hohenheim, 1493–1541) wrote that he “did not talk only to learned doctors, but to barber surgeons, learned artisans, [and] witches skilled in black arts” because “things which the common person believes such as magic, hexes are natural and have a
16
Fig. 6. Frontispiece to Franciscus van Sterbeeck’s Theatrum fungorum (1675), showing a man (possibly van Sterbeeck himself) examining mushrooms being sold by market-women. (Used by permission of Farlow Library of Cryptogamic Botany, Harvard University)
A. Schierenberg, representing Junk B.V. (Natural History Bookseller) in Antiquariaat (28th Amsterdam Antiquarian Book, Map & Print Fair, 2007), in the exhibition catalog, which featured a reproduction of the frontispiece. Wasson and Wasson (1957) also assume that van Sterbeeck is portrayed, and present further interpretations on symbolic content.