by Hugh Raffles
About the Author
Hugh Raffles lives in New York City and teaches anthropology at the New School. He is the author of In Amazonia: A Natural History, which received the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. His essays have been published in The Best American Essays and Granta. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award.
Copyright © 2010 by Hugh Raffles
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of this book originally appeared in different form in the following: “My Nightmares” in Anthropology Now; “Generosity (the Happy Times)” as “Cricket Fighting” in Granta and in The Best American Essays 2008, edited by Adam Gopnik (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008); “Chernobyl” as “A Conjoined Fate” in Orion; and “Jews” as “Jews, Lice, and History” in Public Culture.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: The Hokuseido Press: “Oku no hosomichi” by Bashō Matsuo from Haiku by R. H. Blyth. Reprinted by permission of The Hokuseido Press. • W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: Excerpt from “Seen from Above” from Miracle Fair by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Joanna Trzeciak, copyright © 2001 by Joanna Trzeciak. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Raffles, Hugh, [date]
Insectopedia / Hugh Raffles.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37972-6
1. Insects. 2. Human-animal relationships. I. Title.
QL463.R34 2010 595.7—dc22 2009024302
www.pantheonbooks.com
v3.0
Table of Contents
In the Beginning …
Air
Beauty
Chernobyl
Death
Evolution
Fever/Dream
Generosity (the Happy Times)
Heads and How to Use Them
The Ineffable
Jews
Kafka
Language
My Nightmares
Nepal
On January 8, 2008, Abdou Mahamane Was Driving through Niamey …
Il Parco delle Cascine on Ascension Sunday
The Quality of Queerness Is Not Strange Enough
The Deepest of Reveries
Sex
Temptation
The Unseen
Vision
The Sound of Global Warming
Ex Libris, Exempla
Yearnings
Zen and the Art of Zzz’s
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments