by Hugh Raffles
6. Mazokhin-Porshnyakov, Insect Vision, 276.
7. Prete, introduction to pt. 1, “Creating Visual Worlds: Using Abstract Representations and Algorithms,” in Complex Worlds, 3–4.
8. Karl Kral and Frederick R. Prete, “In the Mind of a Hunter: The Visual World of the Praying Mantis,” in Prete, Complex Worlds, 92–93.
9. For a discussion of this problem in relation to the human mind, see John R. Searle, “Consciousness: What We Still Don’t Know,” New York Review of Books, January 13, 2005, a critical review of Christof Koch’s best-selling Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (Englewood, Colo.: Roberts, 2004); and note also Koch’s recent comment: “We don’t understand how mind emerges out of this vast collection of neurons. We have no intuition. It’s like Aladdin rubbing a lamp, and a genie appears.” Quoted in Peter Edidin, “In Search of Answers from the Great Brains of Cornell,” New York Times, May 24, 2005.
10. Eric R. Kandel, “Brain and Behavior,” in Eric R. Kandel and James H. Schwartz, Principles of Neural Science, 2nd ed. (New York: Elsevier, 1985), 3. Indeed, much as the size of the human brain was once a measure of racial hierarchy, the marvelous complexity—and, as ever, the size—of the modern hominid brain is now a marker of human exceptionalism.
11. For a reliable popular introduction, see John J. Ratey, A User’s Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain (New York: Vintage Books, 2002). For an appraisal of debates in the philosophy of mind that is both sympathetic to neuroscientific claims of biological primacy and suspicious of their reductionism, see John R. Searle, Mind: A Brief Introduction (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2004).
12. See, for important contributions, two works by Jonathan Crary: Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), and Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001); Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); and Hal Foster, ed., Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press/ Dia Art Foundation, 1988).
13. David Howes, ed., The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991); Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across Cultures (New York: Routledge, 1993).
14. On linear perspective, see Robert D. Romanyshyn’s rather overstated Technology as Symptom and Dream (New York: Routledge, 1989), and, for effective delineations of the discontinuities in and displacements of linear perspective, see Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” and Jonathan Crary, “Modernizing Vision,” both in Foster, Vision and Visuality, 3–28, 29–50. On the shift to the morphological, see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
15. A fascinating discussion of some of the cultural components of vision along these lines can be found in Oliver Sacks’s celebrated essay “To See and Not See,” in An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 108–52.
16. Henry Mallock quoted in Michael F. Land’s excellent “Eyes and Vision,” in Encyclopedia of Insects, ed. Vincent H. Resh and Ring T. Cardé (New York: Academic Press, 2003), 397; I have drawn substantially on that article (393–406) for this section. See also Michael F. Land, “Visual Acuity in Insects,” Annual Review of Entomology 42 (1997): 147–77; and Michael F. Land and Dan-Eric Nilsson, Animal Eyes (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2002). Recent recalculations that take into account the poorness of human peripheral vision have reduced Mallock’s calculations to a much smaller but still unwieldy 400 inches diameter.
17. Land, “Eyes and Vision,” 397.
18. Robert Hooke, Micrographia, or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon (1665; repr., Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2003), 238.
19. Ibid.
20. Anton van Leeuwenhoek quoted in Land, “Eyes and Vision,” 394.
21. Sigmund Exner, The Physiology of the Compound Eyes of Insects and Crustaceans, trans. Roger C. Hartree (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1989); originally published as Die Physiologie der facettierten Augen von Krebsen und Insekten (Leipzig, Germany: Deuticke, 1891). See Land and Nilsson, Animal Eyes, 157–58.
22. Land, “Eyes and Vision,” 393.
23. Ibid., 401.
24. Land and Nilsson’s choice of Charles Darwin to demonstrate the remarkable optics of the superposition eye is more than apposite. For creationists and proponents of so-called intelligent design, the eye is the Achilles’ heel of natural selection. Drawing on Darwin’s own uncertainties about the precise mechanisms for the evolution of the eye and the self-evident point that each of its elements must function both independently and collectively, they assert that such a complex, integrated structure could never have evolved piecemeal through natural selection. But Nilsson and his collaborator Susanne Pelger have recently proposed a convincing 364,000-year sequence of incremental developments and pathways by which an originary patch of light-sensitive cells could evolve through extant intermediary stages into the contemporary mammalian eye. See Dan-Eric Nilsson and Susanne Pelger, “A Pessimistic Estimate of the Time Required for an Eye to Evolve,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Science 256 (1994): 53–58; and the clear summary in Evolution of the Eye, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/1/l_011_01.html.
25. See Jakob von Uexküll, “A Stroll through the World of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds,” in Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept, ed. and trans. Claire H. Schiller (New York: International Universities Press, 1957), 5–80.
26. Von Uexküll, “A Stroll through the World,” 13, 29.
27. Ibid., 65.
28. Ibid., 67.
29. Ibid., 72.
30. Ibid., 80.
The Sound of Global Warming
1. David Dunn, The Sound of Light in Trees (Santa Fe, N.M.: EarthEar/Acoustic Ecology Institute, 2006).
2. John A. Byers, “An Encounter Rate Model of Bark Beetle Populations Searching at Random for Susceptible Host Trees,” Ecological Modelling 91 (1996): 57–66.
3. Dunn, CD liner notes for Sound of Light; David Dunn and James P. Crutchfield, “Insects, Trees, and Climate: The Bioacoustic Ecology of Deforestation and Entomogenic Climate Change” (working paper 06-12-055, Santa Fe Institute, 2006), http://www.santafe.edu/research/publications/workingpapers/06-12-055.pdf; William J. Mattson and Robert A. Haack, “The Role of Drought in Outbreaks of Plant-Eating Insects,” BioScience 37, no. 2 (1987): 110–18.
4. David D. Breshears, Neil S. Cobb, Paul M. Rich, Kevin P. Price, Craig D. Allen, Randy G. Balice, William H. Romme, Jude H. Kastens, M. Lisa Floyd, Jayne Belnap, Jesse J. Anderson, Orrin B. Myers, and Clifton W. Meyer, “Regional Vegetation Die-off in Response to Global-Change-Type Drought,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102, no. 42 (2005): 15144–48.
5. Dunn and Crutchfield, “Insects, Trees, and Climate.”
6. For the foundational statement on the soundscape and acoustic ecology, see R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, Vt.: Destiny Books, 1994). Schafer defines acoustic ecology as “the study of the effects of the acoustic environment … on the physical responses or behavioral characteristics of creatures living within it” (271), a formulation that signals the movement’s affinity with biological science.
7. Steven Feld in conversation with Donald Brenneis, “Doing Anthropology in Sound,” American Ethnologist 31, no. 4 (2004): 462. See also Steven Feld, “Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea,” in Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld and Keith Basso (Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press, 1996), 91–135.
8. For extraordinary accounts of transduction and immersion, see Stefan Hel
mreich’s Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
9. See Andra McCartney, “Alien Intimacies: Hearing Science Fiction Narratives in Hildegard Westerkamp’s Cricket Voice (or ‘I Don’t Like the Country, the Crickets Make Me Nervous’),” Organised Sound 7 (2002): 45–49.
10. On musique concrète, see Pierre Schaeffer, “Acousmatics,” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, eds. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2004), 76–81. A further key distinction between acoustic ecology and musique concrète is the latter’s concern with sounds as self-contained entities complete in themselves without reference to their source.
11. David Dunn, “Chaos and the Emergent Mind of the Pond,” on Angels and Insects (Albuquerque, N.M.: ¿What Next?, 1999); the quotation here and those in the following paragraphs are from the CD liner notes.
12. Doug Struck, “Climate Change Drives Disease to New Territory,” Washington Post, May 5, 2006; Paul R. Epstein, “Climate Change and Human Health,” New England Journal of Medicine 353, no. 14 (2005): 1433–36; Paul R. Epstein and Evan Mills, eds., Climate Change Futures: Health, Ecological, and Economic Dimensions (Boston: Harvard Medical School/United Nations Development Program, 2006). For a careful study suggesting that causative models centered on climate change sideline the remediable social factors critical to epidemiology (for example, health care, poverty, drug resistance, urban development), see Simon I. Hay, Jonathan Cox, David J. Rogers, Sarah E. Randolph, David I. Stern, G. Dennis Shanks, Monica F. Myers, and Robert W. Snow, “Climate Change and the Resurgence of Malaria in the East African Highlands,” Nature 415 (2002): 905–9.
13. Data from Dunn and Crutchfield, “Insects, Trees, and Climate,” 3, citing Dan Jolin, “Destructive Insects on Rise in Alaska,” Associated Press, September 1, 2006; Doug Struck, “‘Rapid Warming’ Spreads Havoc in Canada’s Forest: Tiny Beetles Destroying Pines,” Washington Post, March 1, 2006; Jerry Carlson and Karin Verschoor, “Insect Invasion!,” New York State Conservationist, April 26–27, 2006; Jesse A. Logan and James A. Powell, “Ghost Forests, Global Warming, and the Mountain Pine Beetle (Coleoptera: Scolytidae),” American Entomologist 47, no. 3 (2001): 160–73. See also Jim Robbins, “Bark Beetles Kill Millions of Acres of Trees in West,” New York Times, November 17, 2008, in which the additional point is made about lodge pole pine stands that “because fires have been suppressed for so long, all forests are roughly the same age, and the trees are big enough to be susceptible to beetles.” For an interesting account of mountain pine beetle activity in western forests, see Robbins, “Some See Beetle Attacks on Western Forests as a Natural Event,” New York Times, July 6, 2009.
14. Dunn and Crutchfield, “Insects, Trees, and Climate,” 4.
15. Thomas Eisner, For Love of Insects (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).
16. For overviews, see David L. Wood, “The Role of Pheromones, Kairomones, and Allomones in the Host Selection and Colonization Behavior of Bark Beetles,” Annual Review of Entomology 27 (1982): 411–46; and John A. Byers, “Host-Tree Chemistry Affecting Colonization of Bark Beetles,” in Chemical Ecology of Insects 2, ed. Ring T. Cardé and William J. Bell (New York: Chapman and Hall, 1995), 154–213.
17. Dunn and Crutchfield, “Insects, Trees, and Climate,” 8.
18. Jayne Yack and Ron Hoy, “Hearing,” in Encyclopedia of Insects, ed. Vincent H. Resh and Ring T. Cardé (New York: Academic Press, 2003), 498–505.
19. Dunn and Crutchfield, “Insects, Trees, and Climate,” 10.
20. Reginald B. Cocroft and Rafael L. Rodríguez, “The Behavioral Ecology of Insect Vibrational Communication,” BioScience 55, no. 4 (2005): 323, 331.
21. Dunn and Crutchfield, “Insects, Trees, and Climate,” 10.
22. Ibid., 7.
Ex Libris, Exempla
1. Claudine Frank, introduction to The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 28–31.
2. Roger Caillois, “Letter to André Breton,” in Edge of Surrealism, 84.
3. Ibid., 85.
4. Ibid. (emphasis in the original).
5. Denis Hollier, “On Equivocation (between Literature and Politics),” trans. Rosalind Krauss, October 55 (1990): 20.
6. Caillois, “Letter to André Breton,” 85.
7. Maria Sibylla Merian, Dissertation sur la génération et la transformation des insectes de Surinam (Hague, Netherlands: Pieter Gosse, 1726), 49, quoted in Roger Caillois, The Mask of Medusa, trans. George Ordish (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1964), 113.
8. On Bates, see my In Amazonia: A Natural History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).
9. Caillois, Mask of Medusa, 118–20.
10. Ibid., 104.
11. Ibid., 117.
12. Ibid., 121.
13. Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” trans. John Shepley, October 31 (1984): 19; Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones, trans. Barbara Bray (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985), 2, 3, 104.
14. Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874), quoted in Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 31.
15. Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 27.
16. Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History: Being a Study in Biography, Which, after Twelve Preliminary Chapters Indispensible for the Preparation of the Lay Reader, Deals with the Life History of Typhus Fever (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press/Little, Brown, 1935), 183.
17. See William Gates, ed. and trans., An Aztec Herbal: The Classic Codex of 1552 (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2000).
18. Pedro de Cieza de León, The Second Part of the Chronicle of Peru, trans. Clements R. Markham (London: Hakluyt Society, 1883), 51, 219.
19. Virginia Sáenz, Symbolic and Material Boundaries: An Archaeological Genealogy of the Urus of Lake Poopó, Bolivia (Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University, 2006), 50–51; Reiner T. Zuidema, The Ceque System of Cuzco: The Social Organization of the Capital of the Inca, trans. Eva M. Hooykas (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1964), 100.
20. Günter Morge, “Entomology in the Western World in Antiquity and in Medieval Times,” in History of Entomology, ed. Ray F. Smith, Thomas E. Mittler, and Carroll N. Smith (Palo Alto, Calif.: Annual Reviews, 1973), 77.
21. George Poinar, Jr., and Roberta Poinar, The Amber Forest: A Reconstruction of a Vanished World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 129.
22. Jo-shui Chen, Liu Tsung-yüan and Intellectual Change in T’ang China, 773–819 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 32. Also, Anthony DeBlasi, Reform in the Balance: The Defense of Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2002), and Richard E. Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California, 1994).
23. Richard E. Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 141; Liu Zongyuan, “My First Excursion to West Mountain,” in Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 141.
24. Liu Zongyuan quoted in Chou Io, A History of Chinese Entomology, trans. Wang Siming (Xi’an, China: Tianze Press, 1990), 174 (translation amended).
25. Liu Zongyuan, Liu Tsung-yüan chi [Collected Works of Liu Zongyuan] (Beijing: Zhong Hua Books, 1979), quoted in Chen, Liu Tsung-yüan, 112.
26. Karl von Frisch, Ten Little Housemates, trans. Margaret D. Senft (New York: Pergamon Press, 1960), 141.
27. Ibid., 84.
28. Ibid., 107–8.
29. Roger Caillois, “The Praying Mantis: From Biology to Psychoanalysis,” in Edge of Surrealism, 79.
30. Von Frisch, Ten Little Housemates, 107–8.
Yearnings
1. Kawasaki’s website can be found at http://ww3.ocn.ne.jp/∼fulukon/.
2. See Miyazaki’s manga in Yoro Takeshi and Miyazaki Hayao, Mushime to anime (Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten, 2002). Reports from 2003 suggest that the city government of Nagoya was hoping to build a development based on Miyazaki and Arakawa’s
designs.
3. Matsuo Basho quoted in Haiku, vol. 3, Summer–Autumn, ed. and trans. R. H. Blyth (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1952), 229.
4. Lafcadio Hearn, Shadowings (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1971), 101.
5. See K. Takeuchi, R. D. Brown, I. Washitani, A. Tsunekawa, and M. Yokohari, Satoyama: The Traditional Rural Landscape of Japan (Tokyo: Springer-Verlag, 2003).
6. See, for example, Yasuhiko Kasahara’s Kay’s Beetle Breeding Hobby, http://www.geocities.com/kaytheguru. It is worth noting that Japan has long been the world leader in insect breeding. To the best of my knowledge, the country’s butterfly houses are still the only ones in which the animals are raised on-site rather than bought in as pupae.
7. See Harumi Befu, Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysis of Nihonjinron (Melbourne, Australia: Trans Pacific Press, 2001). On Japanese ideas of nature, see Arne Kalland and Pamela J. Asquith, “Japanese Perceptions of Nature: Ideals and Illusions” and other chapters in Japanese Images of Nature: Cultural Perceptions, ed. Pamela J. Asquith and Arne Kalland (Richmond, U.K.: Curzon Press, 1997); Julia Adeney Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Re-Inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998). All of these authors work hard to historicize what is sometimes regarded—both inside and outside Japan—as a timeless and unique Japanese relationship with nature, showing how ideas of nature have taken particular forms at particular moments and trying to make sense of the coexistence of a widely held ideology of oneness with nature and long-standing commercial practices that have produced large-scale environmental destruction.