Entangled more-than-human value at the margins: Negotiating spatial hierarchies in the caterpillar fungus commodity chain

Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, this paper investigates the assembly of the caterpillar fungus commodity chain at the intersection of market narratives, human labor, and nonhuman agency. It highlights how market discourses establish spatial value hierarchies by decontextualizing geographical knowledge and rearticulating key harvesting sites based on yanzhi (visual appearance). This process draws on consumer imaginaries of the Tibetan Plateau to construct the commodity's symbolic value. However, this top-down valuation is not uncontested. The material agency of the fungus, entangled with the situated actions of gatherers in peripheral production zones, co-creates an “encounter value” that challenges these established price hierarchies. The study thus argues that commodity value is not a unilateral imposition by dominant market structures, but rather emerges as a negotiated outcome of multispecies entanglements rooted in ecological particularities.