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Paper short abstract

Across Italy and Spain, truffle ecologies materialize as multispecies assemblages where human, animal, and fungal agencies co-produce emergent forms of mycorrhizal commoning. These entanglements expose shifting regimes of value, care, and ecological reciprocity in more-than-human rural worlds.

Paper long abstract

In the intertwined landscapes of northwestern Italy and northeastern Spain, truffle hunting and cultivation unfold as multispecies practices of coexistence.

This paper explores how truffle hunters in Piedmont’s Langhe hills and cultivators on Aragon’s highlands enact forms of commoning that cross species boundaries and temporal rhythms.

White truffles (Tuber magnatum) and black truffles (Tuber melanosporum) thrive through fragile ecologies of soil, trees, animals, and humans whose lives become entangled in acts of care, speculations, and extractions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and more-than-human anthropology (Tsing, 2015; Kohn, 2013; Haraway, 2016), the paper examines how truffle ecologies both sustain and destabilize local economies, moral landscapes, and senses of place.
In Piedmont, truffle hunters and their dogs cultivate intimate, embodied relations of attentiveness that resist commodification yet operate within global luxury markets.
In Aragon, black truffle “plantations” transform marginal lands into experimental commons where human labor mediates microbial and arboreal relations.

Across both sites, truffles operate as agents of negotiation between market and community, cultivation and foraging, human ambition and ecological contingency. By tracing these multispecies collaborations, it can be argued that truffle practices exemplify emergent forms of “mycorrhizal commoning”: shared life rooted in mutual dependence rather than ownership. These fungal encounters invite us to reconsider the politics of more-than-human stewardship in contested European ruralities.