Fungi in popular culture reconsidered: Four more-than-human entanglements

Abstract

This article challenges the enduring binary of mycophilia and mycophobia, introduced by R. Gordon Wasson in 1957, which has long framed cultural perceptions of fungi. While the dichotomy distinguishes between cultures that embrace fungi as edible and culturally meaningful, and those that regard them with suspicion or fear, it remains rooted in anthropocentric assumptions. I argue that the conceptual opposition between mycophilia and mycophobia reflects an anthropocentric view of nature-culture entanglements by centring human affective responses and positioning fungi as mere passive projections of these emotions. The article first outlines relevant ethnomycological and posthumanist scholarship before analysing how these four entanglements reflect shifting environmental imaginaries in history and contemporary popular culture. Drawing on cross-cultural analysis of literature, film, television, and visual culture, this paper proposes a new framework for understanding human-fungal relations through the lens of more-than-human entanglements. I identify four such distinct human-fungal entanglements that transcend the mycophilia-mycophobia divide: (1) nationalised identity of the human, (2) the infantilized magic of mushrooms, (3) fungal horror and (4) environmental myco-optimism. These categories capture how fungi emerged in popular culture both as anthropomorphised, decorative elements and metaphorical instruments for reflecting human community and conflict, but also as agents that complicate human exceptionalism and invite new imaginaries of environmental sensitivity, identity and multispecies coexistence.