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Hugh Raffles’ Insectopedia – draft of book review

Hi all,

I wanted to share my draft of a book review of Hugh Raffles’ Insectopedia (for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute), as I think the book is both excellent, and also raises important questions about how we relate to, but also write about the world…..

Looking forward to your thoughts & comments,

Uli

Raffles, H. (2010). Insectopedia. New York: Pantheon Books

Mosquito-induced fever dreams, the author’s eye-to-eye encounter with a water bug in the shower, measurements of insect densities in the air. Hugh Raffles’ Insectopedia is beautiful and poetic, and wide-ranging: It not only covers a -at times overwhelming- variety of insects, their collectors, admirers, researchers and their shared Umwelt, but it also cuts across major sub-fields of anthropology, it is as much a work of ecological and cultural anthropology, as it as an anthropology of science. Let me discuss each in turn.

First, and most obviously, the book is concerned with ecological anthropology: In each of the A-Z stories human-insect relations are carefully excavated. Just like Raffles’ last book “In Amazonia”, “Insectopedia” can be seen as re-writing natural history through layerings of lively, evolving, animate and affective entanglements. In chapter W for The Sound of Global Warming, sounds of insects inside a tree become not only a vehicle to register micro-changes in the environment, but also encourage us to develop a sensitivity to the worlds surrounding us, they “offer more intimate relationships with other life-forms” (p.325).

Second, Insectopedia is a rich work of cultural anthropology. It’s a book about fascination with and adoration of insects, and their wondrous ways of being – beautifully laid out e.g. in Y for Yearnings, a chapter about insect-boys in Japan, who grew up collecting, observing and loving insects, and who stuck with them in their adult lives. But there are also more unsettling reflections on how we sometimes create dangerous distance: As can be seen in the Nazi’s use of lice in their anti-Semitic rhetoric (p.141-161), or surfaces in Raffles’ thoughtful exploration of “chrush freaks” (people who are sexually aroused by seeing insects being crushed) and their struggle for recognition in society (p.267-290).

Third, the book is an anthropology of science – for Raffles knowing insects is intimately tied to the practices of people, who study(ied) insects. In E for Evolution Jean-Henri Fabre’s insect poems are located in Fabre’s house and its garden, which he constructed as a “laboratory of living entomology” (p.49).  L for Language explores Karl von Frisch’s work on bees, who were more than an object of scientific inquiry to him – they became his collaborators, his friends: “They were his bees in the way that anthropologists of the past may have fancied the remote tribes among which they lived to be their tribes. That same heady mix of science sentiment, and proprietorial pride, the same willingness to assume responsibility for another’s fate” (p. 173). Von Frisch was thinking with bees. And it is in this manner that Hugh Raffles thinks with insects, he practises and celebrates a style of inquiry into insects that is situated, specific and part of a culture, it is a dedicated practise. Good insect science is curious about and with insect, it detects affinities and carefully registers differences.

And Insectopedia is a book that makes a difference. It lets a different understanding emerge about humans and naturecultures, about our entanglements with nonhumans – working towards a “humanism generous enough to include the nonhuman”? (p. 196). It is a plea to see everything that surrounds us as constituted by a fullness, not by a lack (as Heidegger would have had it, p.249-50). What the cat is for Derrida, is an encounter with a water bug for Hugh Raffles (p. 300). “We live in the midst of multiple worlds” (Raffles says in one of the videos that one finds on the webpage accompanying the book www.insectopedia.org), he sees it as his task to enrich reality, to evoke different worlds that we tend to overlook. Insectopedia is not a book that discusses theories at great length; Raffles’ theoretical engagement is folded into the art of storytelling. This makes for a beautiful and poetic ethnography; at the same time it sometimes leaves us in the dark: The book is framed by a quote from Gaston Bachelard, and while reading I was yearning for some more ‘explication’ of why this was chosen (Bachelard does not even appear in the index of the book)? Having said that, Bachelard’s “epistemic ruptures” were aimed at exactly those shifts in reality that Raffles is interested in, and performs so well. And this is Hugh Raffles very own summary of his insect-intervention: “They [the pesky flies on the beach] kept repeating the same thing, a four-part mantra: This is our beach too. Learn to live with imperfection. We’re all in this together. The miniscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world” (p.386).

(Re)sharing our overflows: Pigeons & Lions

My (Endre) overflow consisted of a photo I took during fieldwork in Budapest and three short stories. Here’s the photo:

And here are the stories:

- The greatest enemies of parliamentary democracy are not fascists or communists, but pigeons – at least this is what I learned during an interview with one of the employees of the Hungarian Parliament. They (the pigeons) do more damage to the white limestone building than revolutions and acid rain. In order to keep them away, the Department of Repair and Maintenance decided to keep trained falcons in the inner courtyards. Anyone who claims maintenance is a task beyond human capacity is completely right.

(more soon…)

(Re)sharing our overflows…

At the  ‘Flows, Doings, Edges III’ held in Oxford earlier this year, the last session of the day took the form of a flea market. In this market format, we shared stories/pictures/ideas etc which had come up in the course of our research, but which would not make it into our PhD’s. Showing these ‘overflows’ to others helped us to think about what would be included and excluded from our PhD’s, and why.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I found that the discussion which resulted around my overflow to be incredibly helpful – I am still thinking about it – and so I thought I would (re)share my overflow here. Perhaps others would like to do the same?

After-ANT in the Antipodes

Being based in Australia means that it will not be very often that I get to report back to the northern hemisphere about one of its own. So let me now relish the opportunity to tell you about a recent event held just outside of Melbourne in which Helen Verran hosted a meeting with John Law. The event was entitled ‘An Impromptu Conversation with John Law: ‘After Method, After Nature, and Postcolonialism’. It was held in Helen’s library, and was attended by around 20 postgraduate students and academics from Melbourne and other Australian universities.

In what follows I will pick up on a few of the threads of discussion which wove through the day, and  re-present them here . What then appears below is not a report of events, but a slightly polished up version of what I took from the discussion.

Michaela

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‘Relationality’: what are we actually talking about?

I just thought I kick off proceedings with one of the questions which was posed, several times, throughout the symposium… what is meant by ‘relationality?’