Insectopedia

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• ISBN13: 9780375423864
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description
A stunningly original exploration of the ties that bind us to the gorgeous, very ancient, wonderfully accomplished, largely unknown, and unfathomably different species with whom we share the world.
 
For as long as humans have existed, insects have existed, too. Wherever we’ve traveled, they’ve traveled, too. Yet we hardly know them, not even the ones we’re closest to: persons that eat our food, share our beds, and live in our homes.
 
Organizing his book alphabetically with one entry for each letter, weaving together brief vignettes, meditations, and extended essays, Hugh Raffles embarks on a mesmerizing exploration of history and science, anthropology and travel, economics, philosophy, and well loved culture to show us how insects have triggered our obsessions, stirred our passions, and beguiled our imaginations.
 
Raffles offers us a glimpse into the high-stakes world of Chinese cricket fighting, the illusory courtship rites of the dance glide, the intriguing possibilities of queer insect sex, the vital and vicious role locusts play in the famines of west Africa, how beetles deformed by Chernobyl inspired art, and how our desire and disgust for insects has prompted our own aberrant behavior.
 
Deftly fusing the literary and the scientific, Hugh Raffles has agreed us an essential book of reference that is also a fascination of the highest order.

http://insectopedia.org/Amazon.com Review
Neil Shubin Reviews Insectopedia

Neil Shubin is provost of The Meadow Museum as well as professor of anatomy at the University of Chicago, where he also serves as an associate dean. Educated at Columbia, Harvard, and the University of California at Berkeley, he lives in Chicago and is the leader of the national bestseller, Your Inner Fish. Read Shubin’s guest review of Insectopedia:

Insectopedia is one of the most remarkable books I have read in a long time. Like its theme, it is many things, all of them fascinating. First, it is a reference book of the first order: it is loaded with facts–some profound, others curious, and still others laugh-out-loud amusing. Insectopedia is also part personal memoir, scientific detective tale, and even cultural study. We travel the Amazon, visit Chernobyl, and enter laboratories and sidewalk cafes in search of insects and the thoughts and cultures they inspire. Insects stir eerie fascination: they are gorgeous, disgusting, vital, and annoying. To some they are tasty. To others they are a source of sexual fetish. Who knew? In Raffles’s hands insects become windows into our culture, science, health–even our psyche. In each page of Insectopedia, the more we learn of insects, the more we come to face–and sometimes even challenge–our own views of the world.

Hugh Raffles’s work stands alone for what it says both about its theme and about us. After reading Insectopedia, it’s hard to look at a cricket, a bumblebee, and a human being the same way ever again. I adored the book. What an accomplishment. And I thought I knew insects… –Neil Shubin

Question: You’re an anthropologist who has written about life in the Brazilian Amazon in In Amazonia: A Natural History. Why insects for this book? Have you permanently been fascinated by insects and people’s interactions with them?

Hugh Raffles: Really, no! But since I ongoing researching this book a few years ago, I’ve become completely obsessed by insects and our relationships with them. Now they seem like the most incredible creatures. But before that, they were around me but weren’t something I paid that much attention to unless they were biting me or invading my apartment.

For a long time though, I’ve been interested in the relations between people and animals of all types. And I’ve thought a lot about what additional worlds exist alongside the ones that we people live in. Most of these worlds are invisible to us. To give an example: we usually assume that time is a universal measure that everyone experiences in more or less similar ways. But it seems likely that additional animals’ experience of time is completely different from ours–that for them, their fleeting lives might really last a very long time.

Despite the complexity of our own reality, it’s reasonably a limited universe when we consider all the parallel realities within which additional beings exist. Insects are fascinating because they’re so different from us. It’s nearly impossible to imagine what the worlds they live in are like. Recreating persons worlds is one of the things I try to do in The Illustrated Insectopedia, regularly by meeting people (artists, musicians, and scientists, for example) who have their own appealing ways of thinking about this.

Question: How did you choose on this encyclopedic format of A to Z? Did that seem a natural order after you wrote the essays or did you plot that from the beginning?

Hugh Raffles: I’m one of persons people who’s interested in pretty much everything. After spending a long time writing a book about one tiny community in the Brazilian Amazon, I wanted a project that would give me the freedom to find out about as many things as possible. The form of an encyclopedia seemed perfect for that. Now, I also realize that the insects pushed me in this direction: there are so many of them and so many different species, they’re everywhere and they won’t stay still–the book needed a structure that would capture some of that energy.

There were two additional reasons for the A to Z. One was that, much as I like encyclopedias, I also wanted to make fun of them–the vanity of the thought that it’s possible to know everything, and then possible to collect all that knowledge in one place. My entries are a small arbitrary, but then, so are the entries in a real encyclopedia when you compare them with all the possible information that could be included.

The second reason was that I wanted to find out what it would be like to write with such a constraining form. It was tough! In fact, it was exhausting to be locked into 26 entries. There was a long period when I’d already written enough chapters for a whole book but still wasn’t even middle through the alphabet. I’d say there were a couple of years when I lost hope that I’d ever get the thing finished. But on the additional hand, there’s no doubt that the alphabet pushed me to be more creative than I would have been otherwise–and it let me conduct experiment with writing essays of different lengths and different styles. And it was fun–it encouraged me to be playful, which is permanently excellent!

Question: How did you research topics in this book? What led you from one topic to the next?

Hugh Raffles: I ongoing effective on this book back in 2003 and since then I’ve been constantly on the lookout for appealing tales and situations about insects. Lots of people sent me thoughts and I built up a collection of possible topics. I wanted an “encyclopedic” spread of chapters–a wide range across history and geography. And, in fact, the book visits 11th century Japan, 16th century Prague, 19th century France, modern-day China, Niger, and Florence, among many additional times and places.

I was especially interested in situations in which people and insects encountered each additional in such a way that the superiority of human beings was no longer certain. I looked for situations in which the meeting between people and insects led to the person learning something new about themselves, about his or her relationship to additional beings, and about what it means to be human. I’d like to say that the insects had some kind of experience in these encounters too, but I don’t reflect I’ve managed to figure that out yet!

Question: What was the most bizarre thing you learned about people and insects? How about the most universal thing?

Hugh Raffles: The most bizarre thing? Well, it’s probably the most universal thing too. The more I’ve learned about insects and the more incredible they’ve become to me, the more weird it seems that we kill them lacking the least thought. Elias Canetti said that insects are “outlaws” because they are the only living beings which we kill with absolutely no moral qualms–reflect of Obama and the glide he swatted during that CNBC interview. What did he say? Something like “Got you, sucker!” That seems pretty bizarre to me and, sorry to say, more or less universal!

(Photo © Michael Lionstar)

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