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).

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…)

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?

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Nanomedicine pinboards as an experimental participation technology…

Across 2008-2009 I speant a fair amount of time hanging out at interdisciplinary conferences where scientists (and a few social scientists) gathered to discuss their research in the field of nanomedicine (i.e. medical research which works with nano-sized materials). At each of these conferences I was asked to conduct a participatory exercise which involved the creation of a ‘nanomedicine pinboard’[1]

Conference participants were posed the question: ‘What would a collective map of nanomedicine look like?’ Then they were invited to come and visit the nanomedicine pinboard, and to place on it what was important in Nanomedicine for them. They could put up whatever they liked, arrange their contributions as they saw fit, and shift or alter other contributions which were already on the board. The idea was that over the course of a week a collective map of nanomedicine would emerge, grow and change.

What I ended up with was the many conversations which I had with conference participants whilst standing at the pinboard, and a result which looked like this:

Nanomedicine Pinboard (ESF Conference on Nanomedicine, San Feliu 2009)

It looks pretty messy… and many would say that as a research outcome this is an indesciperable result. I would not like to concede that this result is ultimately unworkable, but so far it has been a bit problematic. What I have found is that  despite numerous attempts to write about this event/technology/result, I haven’t been able to decide how to deal with it in a meaningful way. And so I sidelined this material for a long time, and only pulled it out again to give it an airing as an overflow.

Unfortunately, I cannot remember all the useful comments that people made on this overflow (and so if you would like to re-tell me your thoughts here as a comment, it would be much appreciated!) however, what became apparent, was that I had not settled on one particular tension through which I could work an analysis. What was the process, or set of practices which I wanted to focus on here?

• It seemed that if I concentrated on the board itself, and talked about how it worked in the conference space to invite a reflection on, or performance of nanomedicine as a collective, then I would lose the specific content of the tags which were placed on the board
• If I concentrated on the tags, and what they said, then I would lose the conference space and the contextual work of this technology within that space

By talking this through, this focussing problem seemed to become less intractible. When I had just felt the problem of writing about the pinboard as a paradox which would require a necessary betrayal, this material became painful to write about and to think through productively. However, by making explicit (the now seemingly mundane and easy to see) contradiction between technology and content, I could either make a decision can be made about which way to go, and/or it becomes possible to speak of this situation as a methodological issue which researchers such as myself are often confronted with. What is the tension we are working with? If the tension is unfamiliar, is it considered problematic? And if so, do we craft a way to work with the problem, or do we discard the troublesome material (as I had done till this point) and leave and its interesting questions aside, out of our papers and theses?

Michaela

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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In her introductory discussion, Helen set the context of the meeting for us. She remembered a previous event which was held in Melbourne in 1994. This was the moment at which she and John had first met, and it was through this meeting that the sensibility of ‘after-ANT ’ was able to officially enter onto the scene of the social studies of science in Australia [1]. So that meeting had been very significant, and now here we were again. Helen welcomed John back, and looked forward to a day in which we would be able to nurture and interleave our different contexts and affiliated works.  For us, it is a treat to be able to have such conversations here in Australia. There are stories to be told here which are not present in Europe, but these stories don’t often travel well; or if they do travel, they often somehow end up being a bit interruptive of other narratives, and so can be awkward to take with you into polite company.

Indigenous Australian and Euro-American knowledges and narratives are placed side-by-side in Chapter 7 of John’s book After Method (2004), and our discussion would start off with this text. In this chapter John narrates a trip to the Northern Territory, and his first visit to Uluru – the big red rock which sits out in the central Australian desert. By reading from a guidebook which tells parallel scientific and indigenous narratives of Uluru, this chapter works a relation between Euro-American and Indigenous Australian knowledge practices.

And so the question to John is: In ‘After Method,’ what does the chapter on postcolonialism do for you? It comes in there as your final story, the last chapter before the conclusion. So how does the postcolonial help the book, what work does it do?

Disconcertment and ontological disjunctions

In walking about at Uluru, John sensed that there was an otherness which was present here. He wasn’t just there walking around in a space which was empty. Here, there were also present other versions of space there which were impinging on his Euro-American space-time box. And he felt the disconcertment which comes when you feel your body affected by something which speaks of metaphysical difference.

Buying a guide book of the area – one that was just the right size for the amount of time that he was to spend in the place – helped John to learn a bit more. Here the western scientific explanation for the creation of Uluru was written next to the intersecting indigenous stories which also speak of its creation, and recreation, within knowledge practices which are linked to the dreaming. This is interesting; but then further, what John also starts to learn is that unlike in western knowledge traditions, aboriginal knowledge is restricted. Not in the sense that certain people have rights to some knowledge, but the certain knowledge can only emerge with certain people and in certain places. With the wrong person or in the wrong place, people will say ‘I don’t know about that’.

Such disconcertment is attractive to those who are drawn to ‘ontological disjunction’. It is difficult to see difference when you are in the belly-of-the-beast and so here was a pressing difference which was easy to see and could not be ignored.

JL: Uluru is in the book because it was contingent and interesting. In this event, there was a massive difference which you have to get your head around. The difference here is bigger than the hospital and atherosclerosis, and so is sharpening.

What meeting Uluru had offered John, was a bodily disconcertment which he had never experienced in Britain, although he did suggest that this could in part relate to the insensitivity of the methods which be brought from the North, and he felt that this was a disconcertment which was worthwhile cultivating. When you are interested in how differences ‘get done,’ there is a value in the way that the postcolonial forces you to attend more urgently to questions of power and asymmetry, and requires you to do this is in a non-reductive way.

‘I couldn’t write this…’

During our morning’s discussion, Helen noted that she couldn’t have written the chapter that John wrote. As a researcher and author she is specifically located, and the techniques which are available to her as she writes, are caught up in the requirements of this context.

Within the After Method chapter, there is a comparison which is generated between indigenous and western knowledge practices. The contrast which appears when placing these practices side-by-side works as a mechanism for highlighting difference; and it is through this relativising move that ‘difference’ becomes transportable.

Having walked about in the desert at Uluru, John had felt the notion of a singular reality dropping away as he came to notice reality as being done within two co-existing sets of knowledge practices. Here, disjunctures and non-coherences were not reducible to variations in opinion or effects of perspective; rather difference was embedded within metaphysics and ontologies. By re-presenting the rare clarity afforded by this case, John hopes that his chapter will be also be sensitising for his readers who are in ‘the belly of the northern beast’ (JL), and who are not attuned to reading difference in this way.

However, what Helen’s comment draws attention to, is that an Australian academic she must write in a way that directly addresses practitioners within both of the knowledge traditions which John identifies, and in doing so she must also respond to their struggles to ‘do difference’ whilst simultaneously ‘going on together’. Here the sensitivity generated through relativising difference becomes a necessary beginning step, and what proceeds from this is the struggle to do ontological difference together.

And so where the audience of this text sits seems to be quite important, because this also involves who your text is responsible to. The audience of the After Method chapter is a British audience with Euro-American sensibilities, and the account of this text is an interruption for them. The contrast of the chapter works to break up assumptions of western universalism and hegemony. And the writing of this chapter is the cultivation of a moment of disconcertment felt at Uluru so that the ability to detect difference in less extreme situations may be nurtured. Where this account does not specifically speak back to is the location which inspired these stories. It does not tell itself back to the context of its characters; and so it does not need to think about how to do the translation work that this might involve, and the effect this has on the located authorial figure.

A question arose in relation to this… in moving to the post-colonial, this chapter located difference between two differing knowledge traditions, and so outside of the traditions themselves. When speaking of atherosclerosis, difference is located inside the object, inside the atherosclerosis. And so perhaps when located at home, it is easier to speak of difference as internal to objects, but when visiting, difference – at least at first – becomes external again.

So what does this gesture to? We all move about now, successful books will not just have British audiences, and Australians would often like to be able to speak somewhere else than in and for their country. We do not only write at home.  So in what better and worse ways can difference be lived with and inhabited as both an internal and an external quality? And/or how can we work to feel at home in new places? What sort of an ‘authorial figure’ does this require if we are not to invoke literary techniques of colonial passage?

Logics of generalising: Romantic/baroque

And so, at times we seemed to be speaking about different types of difference. A lot of literature came out of the Foot-and-Mouth epidemic in Britain, and not all of it was government policy documents. There was also poetry written, and such accounts told the epidemic very differently to the policy speak. John said that to him it was not clear analytically why the poetry was less important.  Within poetry, whole worlds were conjured up which were not seen by government agencies, but this creativity was frequently marginalised as ‘the personal’.

Not very long ago massive bushfires raged through bushland and towns just outside Melbourne. In the aftermath, these towns were full of stories of the fires which were also told in formats which were not compatible with government inquiries. These stories were powerfully told, and what came up within them was the 200 years of Australia’s settler history. This history was recognised as present in the landscape, and it was now being opened up by the fires and told in its stories. However, in a similar manner to the F&M report, the Bushfire Royal Commission report seemed much less able to attend to the disparate timescales,  and to the inter-weaving of people and place which was possible in other types of stories.

However, with that said, each of these discourses – the stories of fire told by the residents of affected areas, and the stories of fire told in the government report – both worked through particular logics of generalising.

One is ‘Baroque’ – its generalising works with a whole and its emergent parts. For residents to tell of the fires, to explain what they meant, they worked from the experience of fire and ranged over 200 years of history to pull up place as the parts which could work to tell the stories well.

The other is ‘Romantic’ – its generalising works with a unit, and tracks this unit as repeating across time or space. And this is what the report did. It started with units, emergency institutions and functions, and looked for their location and repetition or lack of such.

And so beyond differences between knowledge practice, it is possible to also tell of doing different types of difference, and then thinking of how they relate. So it is not only relevant where these logics end up getting positioned in relation to each other within hierarchies or otherwise; but also how these logics work, how they produce realities in their generalising, and how they can co-exist well.

‘Going on/not going on’

We have recognised ontological disjunctions and felt their disconcertment, we have wondered about where difference is, and about the logics in which difference’s location is designated and worked with. So what do we do next? The question is Helen’s and she poses it to John. Once we have felt disconcertment, and we still have to keep going on, what do we do? Where do we take this, and with what?

When Helen started to teach in Nigerian classrooms, she suddenly found herself without the verb ‘to be’. And the question she was faced with was how do you puzzle yourself out of the paralysis of a radical difference such as this?  How do you both go on, and not go on? Because this moment of disconcertment cannot be forgotten, and the difference which has heralded it should not be just bleached out. So how do you both preserve the difference, and work to go on both with it and past it?

By way of an answer, John offers an example. He presented a keynote speech at a conference in Taiwan in which he talked about mess, and as I understand it, about embracing the mess. Then in question time, an audience member told a story about the surfeit of mess within which Taiwan makes its way, and said, ‘with the greatest respect, Professor Law, what we need in Taiwan is a bit less mess.’

And so a moment of disconcertment. The stories which work in the UK, do not work in Taiwan. And so what do you do. John’s answer was to dig into it. He, and his colleague Wen-yuan Lin, wrote a paper which re-created this moment of disconcertment as a set of contexts – economy, religion etc[3].  And so this piece then worked to recreate a situation of metaphysical collision as a performative, rather than a reducible, moment. This bundle of  contexts created an explanation about the moment of disconcertment John had felt. So this was one response to ‘what do you do with it?’ You turn up the magnification of the occasion, and see what might have enacted it. Although, John did have the good grace to then say to Helen, ‘although, my sense is that your question of ‘what do we do with it’ goes further than this’.