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  • Insectopedia Hugh Raffles

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    Mararía Pavel
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    Habla sobre la co-construcción entre humanos y no humanos a traves de la agencia de los insectos

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    Habla sobre la co-construcción entre humanos y no humanos a traves de la agencia de los insectos

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    445 views21 pages

    Insectopedia Hugh Raffles

    Uploaded by

    Mararía Pavel
    Habla sobre la co-construcción entre humanos y no humanos a traves de la agencia de los insectos

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    of 21
    Inthe Beginning... Im the beginning. a long. long time ago. a time before any people were bere a time close to the primordial gas and ooze, a time not too long afer the time (we are, after all, talking geological time) when those Jneroic protozoa created the plane's first encyclopedia by turning them- setves into mitochondria and chloroplasts within other cells, which in ‘nam formed lances that grew into yet other beings, which joined up vwith vet others to make invisible cities, worlds within worlds ... Some- ‘some after that time but still long before our time, there were the insects. For a8 long as we've been here, they've been here too. Wherever we've ‘eoveied. they've been there too. And still, we don't know them very well. nor even the ones we're closest to, the ones that eat our food and share cour frets Who are they, these beings so different from us and from ‘eacs other? What do they do? What worlds do they make? What do we sate of ther? How do we live with them? How could we live with them aithenen teangone 40 insect. What cones to mind? A housefly? A dragoniy? A bumbicoee? A parusitic wasp? A grat? A mosquito? A bombardier bee- te? A rhanoceron bertle? A morpho buttertly? A death’s-head moth? A Praying mantis? A stick insect? A caterpillar? Such varied beings. so dif: ferent from each other and from us. So prosaic and so exotic. so tiny and 80 huge. so socal and so solitary, so expressive and so inscrutable, so generative and so opaque, so seductive yet so unsettling. Pollinators, Pests, disease vectors, decomposers, laboratory animals, prime objects ‘of scientific attenon, experimentation, and intervention. The stuff of dreams and nightmares. The stuff of economy and culture. Not jst deeply present in the world but deeply there, creating i. tom. Stinson Detroiter SM-1 six-seater r tary airstrip at Tallulah tilt with an electr Glick variables, They already ‘They had heard about (! bookdice, and katydid that, in 1925, made" Barents Sea betwee has ever been taken above the surface of the earth.” 1+ ballooning spider, a feat that reminded Glick of spiders te Ihave cirewennavigated the globe on the trade winds and led the young of most spiders are more or less addicted to eameportation,” an image of excited little animals packing lick's subsequent nb up to an exposed site Uiptoe, raise their abc ithe atmosphere, throw out silk filaments, and launch ther . blue, al free legs spread-eagled. but that they also use the | Besand their silk to control their descent and the location of 1 se, there seviah plankton wanna anager fying, larger insects b der potent boundary, he gab maggating, sccording sade migraning York Zookogsal Sex se exploration ir orthern Venezuela that atleast 18 The giant dragontiies of the late Paleozoic, with their thiry-inch wringspans. are no more. As insec red, they developed thetr ‘Rearendiess variety of aerodynamic body shapes and their » muscles for super-high-frequency wingbeats OF the mull Iles caarrenthy described, the average adult body length is a ‘two tenths of an inch, and the median length is significa ‘theless, it is the larger. more visible insects. th or more in length (that is, at least twice the averag a ‘Mftention of researchers. If we subtra r . studies of the fruit fly Drosophila ‘Merete is scant" It seers clea! the author of a classic text on insect Pointed out that many, perhaps most, individ- ‘voyages, but “this is the price such species pay " Johnson conjured an image of a planet under “the surface of the Earth is thus scanned very effectively as ‘Aying on air currents, continuously encounter either by the wind or themselves.” It is a fact of planetary “diffusion systern® that transports immense populatons of "day after day, year after year, century after century.” What hap- \t0 the notion of an invasive species in the face of this continuous “and icrepressible traffic of short and long-range travel. dispersal, and ‘Migration? What is left of 4 notion that everything has its own place. that ‘Grerything belongs somewhere and nowhere else, that boundanes are Aaviolable, that with vigilance and chemicals this hyperabundance of | Willful and random life can be brought under control? P ‘what Glick glimpsed 3.000 feet above Duran Pak bollworm moth. its flapping wings gleaming in th manshine fiver, we saw that each house we passed had | Thousands of yellow butterflies had “Amazonia into EI Donido, encrusted this quiet village in layers of gold When we reached home, there were golden yellow summer butter ies dancing around our house too. High in the eaves. all around the 7 porch, low in the muddy yard where the pigs rooted under the floor 4 Benedito's house. near the of Amapd. | lived here for 1 Tlook at this photo of Cornelia Hesse-Honegger in her apartment in Ziirich and try to imagine what she sees through her microscope Beneath the lens is a tiny golden-green in: guborder Heteroptera that she has been pair years’ The binocular microscope magnifies to eighty times. The ce Gimeter scale in the left eyepiece allows her to map every detail of the fmsect's body with pr sct, one of the leaf bugs of the ing for more itis ealtected tile animal close to the Gur me sImmactenecin But her painting practic its down with her mic this. When she 5! cences the insect as 2 © texture, quantity and mechanical as possibl square centimeter to th tells me.) Attimes, aS formal randomne Je structure, which she repeat and abstracting a sing ignated points on the ce, a8 she €XP evolved being but as form ‘volume, plane and aspect. Hi He. ("1 want Ye neat, 1 see it, I show it; | inthe painting below, she intr

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