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).
Thank you for this, Uli. I have not read Insectopedia yet, but I have delved into Raffles earlier work, In Amazonia. What it took me a while to realise when reading this book, was that how I went about reading it mattered. Actually, I was reminded of John Law’s comment in Organising Modernity where he draws attention to how we read academic and fiction texts differently. From memory he mentions how we focus closely on the detail of academic text, wringing their meaning out of them, and fiction is relegated to the few moments after we get into bed and before we fall asleep. Reading In Amazonia as an academic text didn’t work for long. I tried, but the experience was pretty unrewarding and no doubt a bit disrespectful to the stories he had crafted. After a while I started to admit to myself that I was going to actually have to take this book seriously and read it properly, or not at all. I think that to work, its stories had to begin to weave themselves into me, and give me new experiences which enlivened theory, just as the description used the theory to render the specificity of the stories relevant to more than just their participants.
What I get a sense of – from your review – is that the disciplines that Raffles draws on in writing his text, also get somewhat mutated in the stories he tells. That perhaps in order to develop the capacity to tell stories well, the means for story telling are also altered. And so the story itself requires a reworking of its own linguistic locations and resources in becoming able to tell of encounters with others… the stabilised colonial/objective/unidirectional gaze becomes undone and redone as a generative relationship here. Then I guess, in adding my earlier experience of reading Raffles’ to this thought, this generative relationship exists in the reading as well as just the writing.
It seems that I am going to have to fork over a few more dollars to Amazon pretty soon!
Michaela
Hey Michaela,
Thanks for your thoughts! And yes, it’ll be worth the $$s I guess. I did really like the book and its intervention.
And you are also right, it requires a different kind of attentiveness to read it. I really like how you put it: the stories weave into you. It is really enlived theory. And beautifully done so. But as I hint at towards the end of the book, it also sometimes has overwhelmingly much stories and information and in some chapters he digs deeper and deeper and deeper. A bit like what you said about Haraway’s When Species Meet to me once: Do we really have to read all these 300 pages about dogs to get the point? This is a valid question here too
I also think more and more that the answer might be yes, we have to.
But Hugh also sometimes grants a bit too much space to his stories, for my taste. I did ask myself why he didn’t make more of the Bachelard framing? Why does one have to go away and find out about it to get why he put it there? why it was so influential? Or the implicit re-writing of Heidegger? In that sense, it is then really an insider book, only who knows the theory hints, gets the real academic intervention. There is of course another massive audience, who “just” enjoys his way of story telling and the lessons that are in this and the stories themselves…
But who he looses I guess is the academic audience who is not “in the know”, who haven’t read Heidegger and Haraway and Law and Mol and….. which is a bit of a shame. So, I still think he should write something about Bachelard!
Uli
Yes, Bachelard… I get the impression there is a ‘poetics’ Bachelard (who says things like ‘the poet lives on the edge of knowing’) and the philosopher of science Bachelard who says things far less fuzzy… and I would like to know more about both!
I agree with you on the point of whether we do have to read all of these words. Yes, we do… even though I struggle sometimes. But I am starting to realise that assuming I may like to write in detailed and specific ways about objects in my thesis, refracts back into how I learn to see in my research. So this way of telling stories shifts back down to other places. However, how the profligate detial of stories is gathered together in a text – as types of relational multiplicity, rather than fragments – is something that I would like to be aware of as an eventual author. And I am curious as to what Raffles’ answer is to this. Perhaps his gathering through the letters of the alphabet then says something about an insectified language/grammar? (or then perhaps it doesn’t). Probably I should stop wondering, and just read it!!
Michaela
Haha, yes – read it and enjoy!
I look forward to discussing your impression after you’ve read it!
Uli