Insectopedia

by Hugh Raffles

  3. Primo Levi, Other People’s Trades, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, 1989), 17.

  4. Nossack, “Der Untergang,” quoted in Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, 35.

  Evolution

  1. Jean-Henri Fabre, “The Greenbottles,” in The Life of the Fly, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1913), 232; Fabre, “The Bluebottle: The Laying,” in Life of the Fly, 316. A full-length critical account of Fabre’s work is Patrick Tort, Fabre: Le Miroir aux insectes (Paris: Vuibert/Adapt, 2002). See also Colin Favret, “Jean-Henri Fabre: His Life Experiences and Predisposition against Darwinism,” American Entomologist 45, no. 1 (1999): 38–48, and Georges Pasteur, “Jean Henri Fabre,” Scientific American, July 1994, 74–80. More often, biographers have been happy to participate in Fabre’s self-fashioning while ignoring his theoretical ambitions. See, for example, Yves Delange, Fabre: L’homme qui aimait les insectes (Paris: Actes Sud, 1999). The “authorized biography” of Fabre was written by his friend and admirer Georges Victor Legros. G. V. Legros, Fabre: Poet of Science, trans. Bernard Miall (1913; repr., Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2004).

  2. Fabre, “The Harmas,” in Life of the Fly, 15.

  3. Tort, Fabre, 64.

  4. Fabre, “Harmas,” quoted in ibid., 16.

  5. Tort, Fabre, 27.

  6. Jean-Henri Fabre, “The Odyneri,” in The Mason-Wasps, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1919), 59.

  7. Fabre, “Harmas,” 18.

  8. Jean-Henri Fabre, “The Fable of the Cigale and the Ant,” in Social Life in the Insect World, trans. Bernard Miall (New York: Century, 1912), 6; Fabre, “Harmas,” 24.

  9. Fabre, “The Song of the Cigale,” in Social Life in the Insect World, 36.

  10. Norma Field, “Jean Henri Fabre and Insect Life in Modern Japan” (unpublished manuscript, n.d.), 6. My thanks to Norma Field for sending me this extremely helpful paper.

  11. Fabre, quoted in Delange, Fabre, 55.

  12. Jean-Henri Fabre, “The Bembex,” in The Hunting Wasps, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1915), 156.

  13. Fabre, “The Great Cerceris,” in Hunting Wasps, 12.

  14. Fabre, “The Yellow-Winged Sphex,” in Hunting Wasps, 36.

  15. Fabre, “The Eumenes,” in Mason-Wasps, 10, 12, 13.

  16. Fabre, “Aberrations of Instinct,” in Mason-Wasps, 109.

  17. Fabre, quoted in Legros, Fabre, 14.

  18. Fabre, quoted in ibid., 13.

  19. Fabre, quoted in ibid.

  20. Tort (Fabre, 57) describes the two men: “Unis par une vaste érudition, une sympathie éthique et l’expérience partagée de la douleur.” Fabre and Mill undertook a joint, never-completed project to produce a flora of the Vaucluse.

  21. Romain Rolland, letter to G. V. Legros, January 7, 1910, quoted in Delange, Fabre, 322. The Nobel Prize that year was awarded to another great admirer of Fabre’s, the dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck, a writer with an interest in entomology rather than an entomologist who was also a writer.

  22. Fabre, “Harmas,” 14.

  23. Legros, Fabre, 17; Fabre, quoted in Tort, Fabre, 25–26.

  24. Fabre, “Odyneri,” 47.

  25. Ibid., 46; Fabre, “Eumenes,” 25.

  26. See the thorough discussion in Tort, Fabre, esp. 205–40.

  27. Fabre, “The Modern Theory of Instinct,” in Hunting Wasps, 403.

  28. Fabre, “The Ammophilae,” in Hunting Wasps, 271.

  29. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: Penguin, 2004), 88, 87. See also Daniel R. Papaj, “Automatic Learning and the Evolution of Instinct: Lessons from Learning in Parasitoids,” in Insect Learning: Ecological and Evolutionary Perspectives, ed. Daniel R. Papaj and Alcinda C. Lewis (New York: Chapman and Hall, 1993), 243–72.

  30. Fabre, “Modern Theory of Instinct,” 411.

  31. Fabre, “Ammophilae,” 269.

  32. Ibid., 270.

  33. Ibid., 377–78.

  34. R. J. Herrnstein, “Nature as Nurture: Behaviorism and the Instinct Doctrine,” Behavior and Philosophy 26 (1998): 83; previously published in Behavior 1, no. 1 (1972): 23–52.

  35. Ibid., 81.

  36. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1890), 2:384, quoted in Herrnstein, ibid., 81.

  37. William McDougall, An Introduction to Social Psychology (London: Methuen, 1908), 44.

  38. Christian Kerslake, “Insects and Incest: From Bergson and Jung to Deleuze,” Multitudes: Revue Politique, Artistique, Philosophique, October 22, 2006, 2.

  39. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (1911; repr., Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1989), 174. It is interesting to note that the wasps continue on this route via Bergson through the continental philosophy of the twentieth century to reach Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus in the form of the becoming animal, the wasp and the orchid that each becomes partly the other in the moment of embrace, the famous wasp-orchid that seems to have its originary spark in the Ammophila-Fabre. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

  40. Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1921), 56, quoted in Kerslake, “Insects and Incest,” 3.

  41. Tort, Fabre, 232–35.

  42. Fabre, “Harmas,” 14.

  43. My thanks to Gavin Whitelaw for his generous gift of a complete set of Fabre 7-Eleven figurines! Thanks also to Shiho Satsuka for finding a copy of Yokota Tokuo’s Konchu no tankensha Faaburu (Tokyo: Gakken, 1978), a very popular manga of Fabre’s life story. On this, see Field, “Jean Henri Fabre,” 4.

  44. I take this figure from Pasteur, “Jean Henri Fabre,” 74.

  45. Okumoto Daizaburo, Hakubutsugakuno kyojin Anri Faburu [Henri Fabre: A Giant of Natural History] (Tokyo: Syueisya, 1999), 27. All translations from the Japanese, unless otherwise noted, are by CJ Suzuki. See also Field, “Jean Henri Fabre,” 18–20.

  46. Osugi Sakae, “I Like a Spirit,” in A Short History of the Anarchist Movement in Japan, ed. Libertaire Group (Tokyo: Idea, 1979), 132. Osugi’s wife, the feminist Ito Noe, and their seven-year-old nephew were murdered with him in 1923.

  47. Jean-Henri Fabre, Souvenirs entomologiques (Paris: Delagrave, 1886) 3:309, quoted in Favret, “Jean-Henri Fabre,” 46.

  48. Osugi was an admirer and early translator of Peter Kropotkin, who argued powerfully for mutual aid and cooperation rather than competition as the basis for evolution. Yet paradoxically, Osugi was also known as a social Darwinist, a philosophy widespread in Japan at the time. It was via the Spencerian disdain for cooperation and the celebration of competition as the motive force of human existence that Darwinism entered Meiji Japan, along with Western science, in the 1870s. See Field, “Jean Henri Fabre,” 19 and 27n80.

  49. Fabre, Souvenirs entomologiques, vol. 8, quoted in Favret, “Jean-Henri Fabre,” 46.

  50. Okumoto, Faburu, 189.

  51. Yoro Takeshi, Okumoto Daizaburo, and Ikeda Kiyohiko, San-nin yoreba mushi-no-chi’e [Put Three Heads Together to Match the Wisdom of a Mushi] (Tokyo: Yosensya, 1996).

  52. Imanishi Kinji, The World of Living Things, trans. Pamela J. Asquith, Heita Kawakatsu, Shusuke Yagi, and Hiroyuki Takasaki (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002); Imanishi, “A Proposal for Shizengaku: The Conclusion to My Study of Evolutionary Theory,” Journal of Social and Biological Structures 7 (1984): 357–368.

  53. For an attack on Imanishi that can only be described as racist, see Beverly Halstead, “Anti-Darwinian Theory in Japan,” Nature 317 (1985): 587–89. And for a smart response, see Frans B. M. de Waal, “Silent Invasion: Imanishi’s Primatology and Cultural Bias in Science,” Animal Cognition 6 (2003): 293–99.

  54. Imanishi, “Proposal for Shizengaku,” 360.

  55. Arne Kalland and Pamela J. Asquith, “Japanese Perceptions of Nature: Ideals and Illusions,” in Japa
nese Images of Nature: Cultural Perceptions, ed. Pamela J. Asquith and Arne Kalland (Richmond, U.K.: Curzon Press, 1997), 2. See also Julia Adeney Thomas’s fascinating Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

  56. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962). See also Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).

  57. Stephen Jay Gould, “Nonmoral Nature,” in Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 32.

  58. Ibid.

  59. Ibid.

  Generosity (the Happy Times)

  1. Jia’s Cu zhi jing is most readily accessible in Wu Zhao Lian, Xishuai mipu [Secret Cricket Books] (Tianjin, China: Gu Ji Shu Dan Ancient Books, 1992).

  2. Quoted in Hsiung Ping-chen, “From Singing Bird to Fighting Bug: The Cricket in Chinese Zoological Lore” (unpublished manuscript, Taipei, Taiwan, n.d.), 15–16 (translation slightly amended). My thanks to Professor Hsiung for her generosity in providing a copy of this fascinating paper.

  3. Ibid., 17. The entomologist Chou Io is less forgiving. “From this presentation [of Jia’s activities],” he writes, “one can see how the luxurious rulers in feudal society treated the fate of the nation and people.” Chou, A History of Chinese Entomology, trans. Wang Siming (Xi’an, China: Tianze Press, 1990), 177.

  4. Isolated descriptions of insect life, often poetic, can be found much earlier, in, for example, the Er-ya (ca. 500–200 B.C., a work that likely predates Aristotle’s Historia animalium as the world’s first taxonomic natural history. For a detailed history of Chinese insect knowledge, see Chou, History of Chinese Entomology. For historical accounts of crickets in Chinese culture, see Liu Xinyuan, “Amusing the Emperor: The Discovery of Xuande Period Cricket Jars from the Ming Imperial Kilns,” Orientations 26, no. 8 (1995): 62–77; Yin-Ch’i Hsu, “Crickets in China,” Bulletin of the Peking Society of Natural History 111, pt. 1 (1928–29): 5–41; Berthold Laufer, Insect-Musicians and Cricket Champions of China (Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1927), reprinted in Lisa Gail Ryan, ed., Insect Musicians and Cricket Champions: A Cultural History of Singing Insects in China and Japan (San Francisco: China Books and Periodicals, 1996); Jin Xingbao, “Chinese Cricket Culture,” Cultural Entomology Digest 3 (November 1994), http://www.insects.org/ced3/chinese_crcul.html; and Hsiung, “From Singing Bird to Fighting Bug.”

  5. Hsiung, “From Singing Bird to Fighting Bug,” 17.

  6. Liu, “Amusing the Emperor.”

  7. Pu Songling, “The Cricket,” in Strange Tales from Make-Do Studio, trans. Denis C. Mair and Victor H. Mair (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2001), 175–87. For the ethnohistorical background to Pu’s story, see Liu, “Amusing the Emperor,” 62–65.

  8. Seventy-two is a widely cited total, perhaps because it is both a significant number in popular Taoism and the number of Earthly Warriors in Water Margin (also known as Outlaws of the Marsh), a work first published in the sixteenth century and considered one of the four great classical novels of Chinese literature.

  9. Jin Xingbao and Liu Xianwei, Qan jian min cun de xuan yan han guang shang [Common Singing Insects: Selection, Care, and Appreciation] (Shanghai, China: Shanghai Science and Technology Press, 1996), 114. Thomas J. Walker and Sinzo Masaki make the same point but identify different species. They write, “Even though more than 60 varieties of fighters are recognized in Chinese cricket manuals, all belong to four species (Velarifictorus aspersus, Teleogryllus testaceus, T. mitratus, and Gryllus bimaculatus).” Walker and Masaki, “Natural History,” in Cricket Behavior and Neurobiology, ed. Franz Huber, Thomas E. Moore, and Werner Loher (Ithaca, N.Y.: Comstock/Cornell University Press, 1990), 40. There is a significant scientific literature on aggression among male crickets, although I’m not aware of studies on the relevant species. See, for example, Kevin A. Dixon and William H. Cade, “Some Factors Influencing Male-Male Aggression in the Field Cricket Gryllus integer (Time of Day, Age, Weight and Sexual Maturity),” Animal Behavior 34 (1986): 340–46, which finds that aggression is more marked among sexually mature individuals, and L. W. Simmons, “Inter-Male Competition and Mating Success in the Field-Cricket, Gryllus bimaculatus (de Geer),” Animal Behavior 34 (1986): 567-69, which concludes, rather interestingly, that “individual competitive ability was determined by … an individual’s past experience of winning (‘confidence’).”

  10. An authoritative list of these variables can be found at Xishuai.com (http://www.xishuai.com), a cricket-lovers’ site organized by Dr. Li Shijun. See also the “Song for the Selection of Northern Crickets” in Wu Hua, Chong qu [Insect Delights] (Shanghai, China: Xue Ling, 2004), 168.

  11. Xu Xiaomin, “Cricket Matches—Chinese Style,” Shanghai Star, September 4, 2003. Three hundred million yuan equals about U.S. $44 million at the 2009 rate of one yuan equaling fifteen cents.

  12. Li Shijun, “Secrets of Cricket-Fighting,” Xinmin Evening News (Shanghai), September 25, 2005.

  13. Wu, Chong qu, 165.

  14. On migrant labor in Chinese cities, see Dorothy J. Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), and Li Zhang, “Migration and Privatization of Space and Power in Late Socialist China,” American Ethnologist 28, no. 1 (2001): 179–205. Projected revisions to the hukou household registration system are not slated to include Shanghai at this time.

  15. On head shaking, see James Farrer, Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 311–12.

  16. Li Shijun, Zhongguo dou xi jian shang [An Appreciation of Chinese Cricket Fighting] (Shanghai, China: Shanghai Science and Technology Press, 2001); Li Shijun, Zhonghua xishuai wushi bu xuan [Fifty Taboos of Cricket Collecting] (Shanghai, China: Shanghai Science and Technology Press, 2002); Li Shijun, Nan pen kuan tan [Pots of the South] (Shanghai, China: Shanghai Science and Technology Press, 2003); Li Shijun, Min jien cuan shi: shang pin xishuai 108 pin [An Anthology of Lore of One Hundred and Eight Excellent Crickets] (Hong Kong: Wenhui, 2008).

  17. Li Jun, “Anthropologist Studying Human–Insect Relations, U.S. Professor Wants to Publish a Book on Crickets,” Shanghai Evening Post, September 30, 2005.

  18. For a useful introduction to ideas of nature in China, see Yi-Fu Tuan, “Discrepancies between Environmental Attitude and Behaviour: Examples from Europe and China,” Canadian Geographer 12, no. 3 (1968): 176–91. My thanks to Janet Sturgeon for pointing me to this article.

  19. See Ackbar Abbas, “Play It Again Shanghai: Urban Preservation in the Global Era,” in Shanghai Reflections: Architecture, Urbanism and the Search for an Alternative Modernity, ed. Mario Gandelsonas (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 37–55; and Abbas, “Cosmopolitan De-scriptions: Shanghai and Hong Kong,” Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000): 769–86. See also Andrew Ross, Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade; Lessons from Shanghai (New York: Pantheon, 2006).

  20. Li Shijun, “Secrets of Cricket-Fighting.”

  21. Li Shijun, Fifty Taboos of Cricket Collecting, 84.

  22. Wu, Chong qu, 247–51.

  23. I have taken this version of “The Seventh Month” from Liu, “Amusing the Emperor,” 63; the original source is Chen Huan, Shijing maoshizhuan shu [Mao’s Edition of The Book of Songs] (Shanghai, China: 1934), 10, 76. Discussions also appear in Hsiung, “From Singing Bird to Fighting Bug,” 7–9, and Jin, “Chinese Cricket Culture.”

  24. Simmons, “Inter-Male Competition,” 578.

  Heads and How to Use Them

  1. Nicholas Wade, “Flyweights, Yes, but Fighters Nonetheless: Fruit Flies Bred for Aggressiveness,” New York Times, October 10, 2006; Herman A. Dierick and Ralph J. Greenspan, “Molecular Analysis of Flies Selected for Aggressive Behavior,” Natur
e Genetics 38, no. 9 (September 2006): 1023–31. See also Ralph J. Greenspan and Herman A. Dierick, “‘Am Not I a Fly Like Thee?’ From Genes in Fruit Flies to Behavior in Humans,” Human Molecular Genetics 13, no. 2 (2004): R267–R273.

  2. Wade, “Flyweights.”

  3. Robert E. Kohler, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 23.

  4. Anita Guerrini describes Louis Pasteur using animals “as his test tubes.” “Thereafter,” she writes, “bacteriological and immunological research became inextricably linked to the use of animals as culture media.” Guerrini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 98.

  5. Kohler, Lords of the Fly, 53.

  6. Thomas Hunt Morgan, quoted ibid., 73.

  7. Ibid., 67.

  8. On this, see Rebecca M. Herzig, Suffering for Science: Reason and Sacrifice in Modern America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005). The Haldane quote is from a letter to L. C. Dunn, October 19, 1932, cited in Kohler, Lords of the Fly, 80.

  9. Erica Fudge, Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2002). My thanks also to Danny Solomon at UC Santa Cruz for interesting conversations on this question.

  10. Greenspan and Dierick, “‘Am Not I a Fly Like Thee?,’” R267.

  11. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962), 205. My thanks to Dejan Lukic for pointing me to this passage.

  12. Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 126.

  The Ineffable

  1. Joris Hoefnagel, The Four Elements, vol. 1, Animalia rationalia et insecta (Ignis), watercolor and gouache on vellum, 1582, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. For this chapter, I have drawn extensively on the work of Lee Hendrix, curator of drawings at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and authority on Joris Hoefnagel, particularly her excellent “Of Hirsutes and Insects: Joris Hoefnagel and the Art of the Wondrous,” Word and Image 11, no. 4 (1995): 373–90. In addition, see Lee Hendrix, “Joris Hoefnagel and The Four Elements: A Study in Sixteenth-Century Nature Painting” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1984), and, with Thea Vignau-Wilberg, Mira calligraphiae monumenta: A Sixteenth-Century Calligraphic Manuscript Inscribed by Georg Bocskay and Illuminated by Joris Hoefnagel (Malibu, Calif.: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1992). See also the helpful contextualizing discussion of Hoefnagel and his son Jacob in Thea Vignau-Wilberg, Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii, 1592: Nature, Poetry and Science in Art around 1600 (Munich, Germany: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, 1994).