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Towards a Sinophone Insect Humanities: A Review Essay

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Notes

  1. Pattinson (2019; bees) and Few (2013; locusts) are the only insect-focused chapters in the first Animal Studies anthologies focusing on Chinese and Latin American history, respectively. This ratio of roughly 10-1 non-insect, non-human animal to insect subject matter is also evident in the monograph series devoted to individual non-human animal species. See the discussion in Bello and Burton-Rose forthcoming.

  2. For a forceful case that culture shapes biology, see Hartigan (2014).

  3. This culturally-specific positive attitude towards bats is due in part to “good fortune” (fu 福) being a homophone of “bat” (fu 蝠) in Classical Chinese. Note that this character for “bat” includes the chong classifier, discussed below.

  4. For an overview of the concept of chong from the earliest sources to the present, see Fèvre (1993).

  5. Non-human animals—domestic, wild, and fabulous—appear in his earliest work in Dutch and English in the 1970s. For a full listing, see Anonymous (2010). For a recent example of his scholarship on non-human mammal-focused stories, see Idema (2019).

  6. A cautionary tale from botany is the character gui 桂; see Chennault (2006).

  7. For an introduction, see Sterckx (2008).

  8. For an exemplary analysis, which included soliciting species identification assistance from a colleague in the British Natural History Museum, see Whitfield (1993). On verisimilitude in visual studies of insects among the peers of Qi, see Claypool (2015).

  9. See Bello (2005), Yang (2010), and Shen (2017).

  10. See also “Schafer Sinological Papers,” unpublished manuscript, dated 1983–1989; copy in author’s possession.

  11. For a recent insistence on incommensurability of modern and pre-modern disease categories, see Smith (2017). A cogent proposal for a middle ground is set forth in Green (2014).

  12. See also his chapter, “Locusts Made Simple: Holding Humans Responsible for Insect Behavior in China, 18th and 19th Centuries,” in the forthcoming book, Insect Histories of East Asia, ed. D. A. Bello and D. Burton-Rose, to be published by the University of Washington Press.

  13. See chapter 1, “Can the Mosquito Speak?”

  14. I removed parenthetical citations from the original.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Lijing Jiang for her encouragement in writing up these ideas and providing a venue for circulating them. I would also like to express my gratitude to David Bello, my collaborator on the anthology Insect Histories of East Asia (University of Washington Press, forthcoming), for our discussions of many of the ideas developed here. The interdisciplinary project “Accounting for Uncertainty: Prediction and Planning in Asia’s History,” organized by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the “Fate, Freedom and Prognostication” project of the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnburg over the summers of 2016 and 2017, provided a forum for the early gestation of these interests. I am also grateful to Diogo de Carvalho Cabral, Frederico Freitas, and Nancy Jacobs for their participation in the panel “Insects Histories: Contested Boundaries in Human-Insect Interfaces, 1700s-1950s” that I organized at the 2018 annual meeting of the American Historical Association.

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    Daniel Burton-Rose

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Burton-Rose, D. Towards a Sinophone Insect Humanities: A Review Essay. J Hist Biol 53, 667–678 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-020-09624-3

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