by Hugh Raffles
13. Ibid., 550.
14. Michel Lecoq, “Recent Progress in Desert and Migratory Locust Management in Africa: Are Preventative Actions Possible?” Journal of Orthoptera Research 10, no. 2 (2001): 277–91; Joffe, Desert Locust Management; Rowley and Bennett, Grasshoppers and Locusts.
15. Alpha Gado, Histoire des famines au Sahel, 49.
16. Joffe, Desert Locust Management; Mousseau and Mittal, Sahel; Rowley and Bennett, Grasshoppers and Locusts.
17. See Emmanuel Grégoire, The Alhazai of Maradi: Traditional Hausa Merchants in a Changing Sahelian City, trans. Benjamin H. Hardy (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1992).
18. For a detailed and insightful analysis of these colonial fiscal strategies, their long-term trajectories, and their contemporary effects, see Janet Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).
19. Barbara M. Cooper, Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900–1989 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1997), xxxv.
20. See Barbara M. Cooper, “Anatomy of a Riot: The Social Imaginary, Single Women, and Religious Violence in Niger,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 37, nos. 2–3 (2003): 467–512.
21. Grégoire, Alhazai of Maradi, 11, 92.
22. The recent surge in interest in nuclear energy as a “green” fuel, the depletion of stockpiles in the United States and the European Union, and the rush to build a large number of nuclear power stations over the next decade in Asia and Europe have pushed the price of uranium up significantly, giving the Nigerien government added incentive to resolve the Tuareg rebellion.
23. David Loyn, “How Many Dying Babies Make a Famine?” BBC News, August 10, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4139174.stm. See also “Editor’s Instinct Led to Story,” BBC News, August 2, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/newswatch/ifs/hi/newsid_4730000/newsid_4737600/
4737695.stm.
24. See Jean-François Bayart’s discussion of “extraversion” in The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, trans. Mary Harper, Christopher Harrison, and Elizabeth Harrison (London: Longman, 1993).
Il Parco delle Cascine on Ascension Sunday
1. Dorothy Gladys Spicer, Festivals of Western Europe (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1958), 97–98. My thanks to Gabrielle Popoff for sensitive translation and research work on this chapter and to Riccardo Innocenti for sharing his memories of the festa.
2. Timothy Egan, “Exploring Tuscany’s Lost Corner,” New York Times, May 21, 2006.
3. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, 1786–1788, trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (London: Penguin Books, 1962), 117.
4. Peter Dale, “The Voice of the Cicadas: Linguistic Uniqueness, Tsunoda Tadanobu’s Theory of the Japanese Brain and Some Classical Perspectives,” Electronic Antiquity: Communicating the Classics 1, no. 6 (1993).
5. Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone dei pensieri, ed. Rolando Damiani (Milan, Italy: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1997), 1:189. For an elaboration of this thinking in relation to birds, see David Rothenberg, especially his fascinating discussion of the biologist Wallace Craig. Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing: A Journey into the Mystery of Bird Song (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 123–28.
6. I have drawn heavily here on Jack Zipes’s informative introduction to Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio, trans. Mary Alice Murray (London: Penguin, 2002), ix–xviii.
7. Collodi, Pinocchio, 14.
8. Agostino Lapini, Diario fiorentino dal 252 al 1596 [Florentine Diary 252–1596], ed. Gius. Odoardo Corazzini (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1900), 217.
9. Frances Toor, Festivals and Folkways of Italy (New York: Crown, 1953), 245. As with the fighting crickets of Shanghai, it is only the males who sing.
10. For a brief background to the Cascine and the festa, see Alta Macadam, Blue Guide: Florence (London: Somerset Books, 2005), 265; Cinzie Dugo, “The Cricket Feast,” http://www.florence-concierge.it; and Riccardo Gatteschi, “La festa del grillo,” Coop Unicoop Firenze, http://www.coopfirenze.it/informazioni/speciali/articoli/5464.
11. Feliciano Philipp, Protection of Animals in Italy (Rome: National Fascist Organization for the Protection of Animals, 1938), 5, 9, 8, 4.
12. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: HarperPerennial, 1976), 16.
13. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 176.
14. Karl Jacoby, “Slaves by Nature? Domestic Animals and Human Slaves,” Slavery and Abolition 15 (1994): 89–99.
15. Philipp, Protection of Animals, 19.
16. Mauro Bottigelli quoted in Nicole Martinelli, “Italians Protest ‘Beastly’ Traditions after Palio Race Death,” Zoomata: A Close-up on Italy, August 17, 2004, http://zoomata.com/index.php/?p=1069.
17. And all of them, I suspect, despite their differences, could agree with the philosopher Ian Hacking when he argues that “expanding the circle of moral concern” to include animals demands a sympathy with—rather than a sympathy for—more than just pain and suffering; it demands a “range of sympathies” such that one can, as Hacking puts it, “resonate to the state of the animal,” resonate, that is, as two tuning forks of equal pitch—even at a distance—resonate when only one is played. Hacking, “On Sympathy: With Other Living Creatures,” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 63, no. 4 (2001): 703. Similar arguments, more poetically rendered, can be found in several of Alphonso Lingis’s brilliant essays; see, for example, “The Rapture of the Deep,” in Excesses: Eros and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 2–16; “Antarctic Summer,” in Abuses (New York: Routledge, 1994), 91–101; and “Bestiality,” in Dangerous Emotions (New York: Routledge, 2000), 25–39.
18. See the news articles collected by Ufficio per i diritti degli animali, http://www.comune.firenze.it/servizi_pubblici/animali/grillo2001.htm.
The Quality of Queerness Is Not Strange Enough
1. George O. Krizek, “Unusual Interaction between a Butterfly and a Beetle: ‘Sexual Paraphilia’ in Insects?,” Tropical Lepidoptera 3, no. 2 (1992): 118.
2. Plutarch, Moralia, trans. Harold Cherniss and William C. Helmbold, Loeb Classical Library 406 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 12.989.519–20.
3. Paul L. Vasey and Volker Sommer, “Homosexual Behaviour in Animals: Topics, Hypotheses and Research Trajectories,” in Homosexual Behaviour in Animals: An Evolutionary Perspective, ed. Volker Sommer and Paul L. Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 5. I have drawn extensively on Vasey and Sommer’s useful essay in this section. See also the immense labor of love that is Bruce Bagemihl’s Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). Bagemihl adopts a very generous (and therefore contentious) definition of sex that allows him to include many interactions that might otherwise be construed as nonsexually social. But he effectively demonstrates his key point: that nonreproductive sex among animals is far more varied and widespread than scientists, for various reasons, have allowed. See also Joan Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), and the essays collected in Sommer and Vasey, Homosexual Behaviour in Animals.
4. Antonio Berlese, Gli insetti: loro organizzazione, sviluppo, abitudini e rapporti coll’uomo [The Insects: Their Organization, Development, Habits, and Relationship with Man], vol. 2 (Milan, Italy: Società Editrice Libraria, 1909), quoted in Edward M. Barrows and Gordon Gordh, “Sexual Behavior in the Japanese Beetle, Popillia japonica, and Comparative Notes on Sexual Behavior of Other Scarabs (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae),” Behavioral Biology 23 (1978): 341–54.
5. Vasey and Sommer, “Homosexual Behaviour in Animals,” 20.
6. Scott P. McRobert and Laurie Tompkins, “Two Consequences of Homosexual Courtship Performed by Drosophila melanogaster and Drosophila affinis Males,” Evol
ution 42, no. 5 (1988): 1093–97.
7. Adrian Forsyth and John Alcock, “Female Mimicry and Resource Defense Polygyny by Males of a Tropical Rove Beetle, Leistotrophus versicolor (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae),” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 26 (1990): 325–30.
8. George D. Constantz, “The Mating Behavior of a Creeping Water Bug, Ambrysus occidentalis (Hemiptera: Naucoridae),” American Midland Naturalist 92, no. 1 (1974): 237.
9. Barrows and Gordh, “Sexual Behavior in the Japanese Beetle,” 351.
10. Kikuo Iwabuchi, “Mating Behavior of Xylotrechus pyrrhoderus Bates (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) V. Female Mounting Behavior,” Journal of Ethology 5 (1987): 131–36.
11. See Vasey and Sommer, “Homosexual Behaviour in Animals,” 20–31.
12. Vasey, “The Pursuit of Pleasure: An Evolutionary History of Female Homosexual Behaviour in Japanese Macaques,” in Sommer and Vasey, Homosexual Behaviour in Animals, 215.
13. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin launched their counterattack to “hyperadaptationist” theory in the following terms: “We fault the adaptationist programme for its failure to distinguish current utility from reasons for origin …; for its unwillingness to consider alternatives to adaptive stories; for its reliance upon plausibility alone as a criterion for accepting speculative tales; and for its failure to consider adequately … competing themes.” Gould and Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 205 (1979): 581–98. See also two articles by Stephen Jay Gould, “Exaptation: A Crucial Tool for an Evolutionary Psychology,” Journal of Social Issues 47, no. 3 (1991): 43–65; and “The Exaptive Excellence of Spandrels as a Term and Prototype,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 94, no. 20 (1997): 10750–55.
Sex
1. David Jack, “2,000 Pound Fine for Importer of Animal ‘Snuff’ Videos,” Scotsman, August 1, 1998; Damien Pearse, “Man Fined for Obscene ‘Crush’ Videos,” Press Association, Home News, January 16, 1999.
2. The Mo Show, FOX TV, January 31, 1994.
3. Jeff Vilencia, American Journal of the Crush-Freaks (Bellflower, Calif.: Squish Publications) 1 (1993): 145–48.
4. Ibid., 1:130.
5. Ibid., 1:10, 149.
6. As well as from my conversations with Jeff Vilencia, the narrative in this section draws heavily on Martin Lasden’s excellent “Forbidden Footage,” California Lawyer, September 2000, http://www.callawyer.com/story.cfmpubdt=NaN&eid=306417&;evid=1; Dan Kapelovitz, “Crunch Time for Crush Freaks: New Laws Seek to Stamp Out Stomp Flicks,” Hustler, May 2000; and Patrick Califia, “Boy-Lovers, Crush Videos, and That Heinous First Amendment,” in Speaking Sex to Power: The Politics of Queer Sex (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2001), 257–77.
7. California Penal Code and Health and Safety Code quoted in Lasden, “Forbidden Footage,” 4.
8. Quoted in Kapelovitz, “Crunch Time.”
9. Ibid.
10. I owe this mapping to Katharine Gates. See her Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex (New York: Juno Books, 2000).
11. Carla Freccero, “Fetishism: Fetishism in Literature and Cultural Studies,” in New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz (New York: Scribner’s, 2005), 2:826–28.
12. Vilencia, Journal of the Crush-Freaks, 1:149.
13. Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco: City Lights, 1989), 19, 70n23.
14. Edward Wong, “Long Island Case Sheds Light on Animal-Mutilation Videos,” New York Times, January 25, 2000. See also Edward Wong, “Animal-Torture Video Maker Avoids Jail,” New York Times, December 27, 2000.
15. Act to amend title 18, U.S. Code, to punish the depiction of animal cruelty, H.R. 1887, 106th Cong., 1st Sess., Congressional Record, 145, no. 74 (May 20, 1999): H3460.
16. “Hall of Fame” is Gallegly’s glamorous term. Officially, he was named in the U.S. Border Control Congressional Honor Roll.
17. Lasden, “Forbidden Footage,” 5.
18. “Rooney Backs ‘Crush’ Video Ban,” BBC News, August 25, 1999, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/429655.stm; Associated Press, “Activists, Lawmakers Urge Congress to Ban Sale of Animal-Death Videos,” August 24, 1999; Lasden, “Forbidden Footage,” 5.
19. Associated Press, “Activists, Lawmakers Urge Congress.”
20. “Rooney Backs ‘Crush’ Video Ban.”
21. Testimony of Representative Bill McCollum of Florida, speaking for an act to amend title 18 on October 19, 1999, H.R. 1887, 106th Cong., 1st Sess., Congressional Record 145, no. 142, H10267.
22. Pros and Cons, COURT TV, September 3, 1999.
23. Testimony of Robert C. Scott (D-Va.), ibid., H10268. For an incisive discussion of these points, see Lasden, “Forbidden Footage.”
24. Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520 (1993).
25. Testimony of Representative Spencer Bachus of Alabama, speaking for an act to amend title 18, H10271.
26. Testimony of Representative Elton Gallegly (R-Ca.), ibid., H10270.
27. Testimony of Susan Creede to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime, September 30, 1999, judiciary.house.gov/legacy/cree0930.htm.
28. Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil, in Masochism, which also contains Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 40–41, 74–76.
29. Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, 271.
30. Vilencia, American Journal of the Crush-Freaks (Bellflower, Calif.: Squish Publications) 2 (1996): 12–13.
31. William J. Clinton, Statement on Signing Legislation to Establish Federal Criminal Penalties for Commerce in Depiction of Animal Cruelty, December 9, 1999, at John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=57047.
32. Adam Liptak, “Free Speech Battle Arises from Dog Fighting Videos,” New York Times, September 18, 2009.
33. Testimony of Representative Gallegly, speaking for an act to amend title 18, H10269 (emphasis added).
Temptation
1. C. R. Osten-Sacken, “A Singular Habit of Hilara,” Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine 14 (1877): 126–27. All uncited quotations in section 1 are from this paper.
2. George Henry Verrall, obituary of C. R. Osten-Sacken, Entomologist 39 (1906): 192.
3. Edward L. Kessel, “The Mating Activities of Balloon Flies,” Systematic Zoology 4, no. 3 (1955): 97–104. All uncited quotations in section 2 are from this paper.
4. Thomas A. Seboek discusses the symbolic qualities of the empidid gift in the context of Peircian linguistics, although largely just to emphasize its inflexibility in comparison with human symbols. Seboek, The Sign and Its Masters (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), 18–19.
5. See, among others, Natasha R. LeBas and Leon R. Hockham, “An Invasion of Cheats: The Evolution of Worthless Nuptial Gifts,” Current Biology 15, no. 1 (2005): 64; Scott K. Sakaluk, “Sensory Exploitation as an Evolutionary Origin to Nuptial Food Gifts in Insects,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 267, (2000): 339–43; and T. Tregenza, N. Wedell, and T. Chapman, “Introduction. Sexual Conflict: A New Paradigm?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 361 (2006): 229–34.
6. Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 1998), 129, 136.
7. Joan Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 171.
The Unseen
1. Karl von Frisch, Ten Little Housemates, trans. Margaret D. Senft (New York: Pergamon Press, 1960), 91.
Vision
1. These discoveries are routinely attributed to von Frisch, but it seems that at least some of the experimental work was completed independently, and possibly earlier, by Turner (1867–1923
), a pioneer in ethology. Despite his doctorate and his authorship of scholarly papers (including the first by an African American to appear in Science), Turner spent the majority of his career teaching high school—it appears that he may have turned down academic positions, preferring to teach public school because of both a sense of social commitment and the additional time it gave him to pursue his research. Turner published his demonstration of honeybees’ ability to distinguish among colors in 1910. He is also credited with discovering the ability of insects to hear sounds and distinguish pitch, with recognizing the capacity of bees to utilize geographic memory, with showing that cockroaches are able to learn from experience, with documenting a characteristic motion of ants approaching their nests (“Turner’s circling”), and with developing methodology—particularly conditioning strategies—that would become basic in animal-behavior studies. See Selected Papers and Biography of Charles Henry Turner (1867–1923), Pioneer in the Comparative Animal Behavior Movement, ed. Charles I. Abramson (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002).
2. Karl von Frisch, Bees: Their Vision, Chemical Senses, and Language (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1950).
3. But see the detailed critique of von Frisch’s methodology in Georgii A. Mazokhin-Porshnyakov, Insect Vision, trans. Roberto Masironi and Liliana Masironi (New York: Plenum Press, 1969), 145–54.
4. See Kentaro Arikawa, Michiyo Kinoshita, and Doekele G. Stavenga, “Color Vision and Retinal Organization in Butterflies,” in Complex Worlds from Simpler Nervous Systems, ed. Frederick R. Prete (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 193–94.
5. For a survey of debates on color and the problem of “color realism,” see Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert, eds., Readings on Color, vol. 1, The Philosophy of Color (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), particularly the editors’ lucid introduction (xi–xxviii). Further evidence of this point can be found in color constancy, the ability of humans and other animals, including bees and butterflies, to recognize the color of an object under changing light conditions. Goethe famously revealed that color was also a function of additional relationships: those between an object and its neighbors. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Locke Eastlake (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970).