Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023. US$32.00, paper. ISBN 9780295751801.
“Histories” appears an ambitious word in relation to insect lives. Some, such as Rhithrogena germanica (known in Britain as the “March brown mayfly”), have adult-stage lifespans measured in hours and days, others like the Magicicada septendecim are famous for seventeen-year lifecycles, leaving progeny projecting their genetic legacy far into the future (2025 is a “Brood XIV” year for the eastern United States). The temporal spans of insect lives therefore are highly different from human lives, so how can we imagine or demarcate them in historical terms? Bello and Burton-Rose’s collection, Insect Histories of East Asia, traverses a number of disciplines adjacent to environmental history. The volume is partitioned into three parts comprised of contributions by authors from specific historical subdisciplines, each of which relate to each other in a cohesive and coherent manner. While insects themselves do not speak in a conventional manner (though many deploy a noisy mechanism to make themselves heard), humans speak about them, and in speaking about them we bestow meaning and value upon them. The first part of the volume thus focuses on the linguistic histories of insects, particularly in the Sino-centric world. Federico Valenti’s chapter interrogates how early Chinese linguistic scholars bequeathed the designation for insects of all categories of chong, the generic sounding “creature,” distinguishing them from more complicated animals, but allowing for a later process of more detailed specification. When it comes to entomological designations in Manchu, Mårten Söderblom Saarela’s chapter finds almost the opposite in the word umiyaha, which means that in that language “there was no ambiguity in the vocabulary comparable to that…in the Chinese writing system” (59). Olivia Milburn explores the linguistic gendering of bees by Chinese Confucian literati over time. These scholars, Milburn suggests, essentially projected particular forms of Confucian gender norms onto the bodies and social structures of bees, so that the queen bee became the “king bee” (fengwang), and female identity was subject to linguistic erasure. This was because of normative notions of the nature of rule and ruling in such Chinese Confucian traditions, in that only males could rule. While encounters with examples of female leadership in Europe later opened up the possibility for human polities to be controlled by females, when it came to bees, as Milburn puts it: “the biological functions of the monarch were irrelevant when faced with the overwhelming majesty of their role” (35).
The second and third part of Insect Histories of East Asia move away from the linguistic construction of insect lives and bodies, to perhaps more practical manifestations generated by the state’s politico-developmental ambitions. David Bello’s own chapter records the extraordinary disconnection as well as interactions between some historical vernacular Chinese perceptions of locusts. As the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries progressed and the later Chinese dynasties sought to develop agriculture and mitigate the impact of infestations, the authorities at both Imperial and local levels came up against the implications of more ancient ideas that locusts were actually metamorphosed shrimp that had transformed due to rapid changes in water availability. These later Chinese polities also had to deal with residual quasi-Confucian folk mythologies around outbreaks of locusts (Bello records the furious words of Ming encyclopedist Xu Guangqi critiquing residents of “Shandong and Shaanxi [who] all can be observed superstitiously sacrificing to” locusts “…and consider it a taboo to harm or touch them” [71]). Rural authorities and officials, Bello recounts, also faced many difficulties in encouraging farmers and subjects to change local topographies to make them less supportive of locust populations, and a reluctance to report locust swarms, in case the then necessary eradication campaign meant the trampling of their own fields and paddies, or the removal of useful nearby reed beds. Sango-ho Ro and Kerry Smith also contribute fascinating chapters, focused on time periods and process more familiar to this reviewer. Ro in particular details an aspect of Imperial Japan’s colonizing and assimilationist strategy on the Korean Peninsula. The production of silk fabric and the breeding and management of silkworms were a key element in the bureaucratic and social life of Chosŏn prior to 1910. Silk clothing became, under Chosŏn’s Confucian and neo-Confucian principles of social ordering, part of the stratification of life between peasantry, yangban aristocrats and those connected to the court. Silkworms and the silk trade between Chosŏn and China was a key piece of state business, regulated by the Border Defense Council, and managed through yugŭijŏn guilds of chartered merchants. Aristocrats and those high up the social ladder wore silk derived from Bombyx Mori (wŏnjam), those lower down the wild silks of Antheraea yamamai. Ro recounts how, for the Japanese, neither forms as bred by Koreans were regarded as suitable for modern methods of production, and colonial authorities, experts, and farmers themselves sought to replace traditional local variants with Japanese-bred varieties. In this exercise, Japanese colonialists and Koreans themselves engaged in what we might term “necropolitical” choices, making decisions about which silkworm varieties would die out or be exterminated, and which would travel onwards as part of a modernizing imperial state’s developmental efforts. Such necropolitics are also present in Kerry Smith’s chapter on health campaigns in post-1945 Japan, which were predicated essentially on the complete extermination of insects and flies, going so far as to reconfigure the topography of towns and urban areas to eradicate those spaces from which creatures which spread malaria and encephalitis came. Flies, roaches, ants, and other insects who had lived in symbiosis with humans in Japan throughout their history, like Korean silkworms, apparently had no place in modernity. The final part of Insect Histories of East Asia with chapters from Daniel Burton-Rose and Lijing Jiang, for this reviewer carries on from Japan’s “Campaign for Lives without Mosquitos and Flies,” to recount examples from the People’s Republic of China, where it is not just developmental ambition and ideas about practical or hygienic modernity that excluded or impacted on the bodies of insects, but political philosophy itself. Not simply Maoist mass-action efforts like the “Four Evils Campaign” (Chu Si Hai), but instances where, beyond the scientific principle, political ideology itself became key to defining the nature of insect evolution, purpose, and relationships with the human.
Insect Histories of East Asia is an insightful, thought-provoking volume, of great value to East Asianists, entomologists and environmental historians, among others. For this reviewer, it left a few questions about whether it is possible to write histories of such temporally limited creatures, and whether it is possible to write them in relation with themselves and their ecologies, outside or away from the lives and impacts of humans and human society. But for this reviewer, whatever framing flaws, or issues of category creep this volume might possess, to echo the title of a ground-breaking special issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, “Bringing the Animals Back In” (guest edited by Jennifer Wolch and Jacque Emel, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 13 [1995]), this volume succeeds in bringing the insects into East Asian history.
Robert Winstanley-Chesters
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh