Boundary-Crossing Species: Making the Realities of the Caterpillar Fungus

Abstract

ABSTRACTUnderstanding reality-making in different cultures is crucial. Focusing on reality-making, a cultural difference emerges from ontological worlds, epistemic commitments and methodological practices. A good case of reality-making is divergent understandings of a caterpillar fungus, half animal and half plant, by Chinese materia medica studies and European natural history. The two profoundly differ regarding the organism’s reality, either as alternating constantly between plant and animal, or as remaining a plant after fungal infection, respectively. The reality of the organism came into being in imperial China through a method of collecting heterogenous, contradictory anecdotes, poems and administrative records. The Chinese saw everything as fluid, inscribing heterogenous forms using heterogenous sources. In contrast, the Eurocentric metaphysical framework of science was based on stable objects, so that its method made a reality through measurement and empirical observation of concrete materials. Analysis of the caterpillar fungus texts illuminates the tripartite framework of reality-making: methodologically how to know, ontologically what to know and epistemically what counts as knowledge. The juxtaposition of these texts also highlights postcolonial alternatives, where Western science becomes merely one among many realities. Tracing and understanding fluid ontologies and ways of making reality might therefore help us decenter the Western scientific world as universal.