344 Book Reviews Emilia Roza Sulek, Trading Caterpillar Fungus in Tibet: When economic boom hits rural area. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 2019. 328 pp., hardback €109. isbn: 978-946298526-1 Around the turn of the millennium, the Tibetan plateau witnessed a spectacu- lar resource boom centred on an unusual organism: the caterpillar fungus. This parasite feeds on the larvae of ghost moths, and is found only on the Tibetan plateau. It is particularly valued in Chinese medicine and came to command high prices in the 1990s, partly due to its suitability as a gift which could be used to open bureaucratic doors. Sulek’s compelling study provides an ele- gantly written ethnographic account of the production and exchange of this commodity as it takes place in Golok, Qinghai. But the book also shines impor- tant light on the empirical question of what Tibetan pastoralists do with the money they earn from caterpillar fungus, as well as on theoretical questions concerning the relationship between the state, marginalised communities and development. The first chapter introduces the region of Golok, a place that has been rep- resented as remote and bandit-ridden and which even today remains largely immune to tourism. Prior to the caterpillar fungus boom, pastoralism was the economic mainstay of this high grassland region. In chapter 2, the labour involved in extracting this resource from the grasslands is described with a meticulousness that is characteristic of the book as a whole. This labour is un- dertaken by both men and women, though the latter spend more of their time on it and can gain a degree of economic independence by hiding some for sale later. The medicinal uses of caterpillar fungus are described in chapter 3, though we learn that Tibetan herders made little use of it themselves. Sulek then charts the history of its trade, showing how this predates the boom which began in the 1990s, and was in fact a feature of the collective era. The gifting of caterpillar fungus, which is key to the boom, is touched upon briefly, though this aspect of the ‘social life’ of the fungus is not the author’s focus. In this part of the Tibetan plateau, ethnicity is an important feature of com- modity chains. Chapters 4 and 5 provide a detailed account of the ways in which the caterpillar fungus is traded, with Hui and Salar constituting the ma- jority of traders. Given this multi-ethnic, multilingual context, a complex sys- tem of hand gestures is used to negotiate price. Exemplifying the ethnographic thoroughness of this book, Sulek includes series of drawings which show the various hand signs deployed in bargaining. As the Chinese state adopted measures to tackle environmental deg- radation in the country’s western regions in the early 2000s, the digging of © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/22105018-12340156