Reader’s Corner

Insects fascinate, repulse, and transfix us all at once. Hugh Raffles’s Insectopedia is a delightful and utterly surprising tour of the vast world that buzzes, squirms, and lives all around (and with) us.

Did you know that a spider can ride a breeze 15,000 feet into the sky—and control how, when, and where it lands? That aphids have been spotted climbing ice floes in the Arctic Ocean? That in Shanghai, crickets are trained to battle like prizefighters?

Hugh Raffles’s Insectopedia is full of bewildering insights like these, and it opens with a well-chosen epigraph: “The minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world.” That world—the insect world—is incomprehensibly strange and diverse. In an effort, perhaps, to reflect those qualities, Raffles peers at bugs through lenses as disparate as evolutionary biology, travel essay, and art history. Each chapter, you might say, crawls up a different sleeve. One of them, about nineteenth-century French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre, tells of Fabre’s frustration with science’s drive to classify and objectify insects rather than engage with them. The growing heap of specimens and icons and organizational schemes was “burying us,” he complained. Raffles probably shares some of this sensibility: Insectopedia isn’t, after all, a traditional work of science writing or natural history—it doesn’t hold poetry and wonder at an arm’s length. Instead, this book revels in insects’ tiny escapades. Fabre might have liked it.

The ways insects have crawled beneath our collective skin can be as breathtaking as the animals themselves. Raffles points to some of human culture’s most salient ideas—like resurrection, transformation, progress, and emergence—and references the caterpillar’s utterly magical metamorphosis into a butterfly. Some of this is frightening: the sick logic of the Holocaust cast Jews as “lice” to be “exterminated.” And now, as the world heats, Africa’s relationship with locusts—once local cultural touchstones, now competitors for food—complicates.

“It is as though, along with their beauty, these animals find their way to some deep part of us,” Raffles writes. Is it their utter indifference to human life that’s so intriguing? Their resilience in the face of change? Their vast diversity and number? Whatever it is, “We should be paying attention,” he says. “Who knows how much more interesting this world could be?”

About the Author
Hugh Raffles 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 appeared in Best American Essays, Granta, and Orion. Insectopedia is the recipient of a Special Award for Extending Ethnographic Understanding from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. In 2009 he received a Whiting Writers’ Award. He lives in New York City.

Learn More
Insectopedia
By Hugh Raffles
Pantheon, 2010. Kindle edition available.

Read an excerpt from the Jan/Feb 2010 issue of Orion.
Listen to an interview with the author.