Knowing Insects: Hosts, Vectors and Companions of Science

Abstract

The social analysis of insects has challenged our concepts of sociability, intentionality and language, while investigations of their habitats have informed how we construct and manage public space. Including entomological expertise, insect knowledge has been integral to the expansion of empire, the emergence of secular science, and in the managerial revolution that linked technology to agricultural improvement. Reading insects as hosts, vectors and companions of science, this special issue Introduction opens up the epistemic, biopolitical and social dimensions of human–insect connections. Drawing insight from studies into the material culture of science, postcolonial geographies and a burgeoning literature on human–animal relations, we invite readers to consider how practices and products of science are made up of encounters between scientists and insects. By parsing these intersections, we can begin to understand the kinds of knowledge made possible and elusive by insects' capacity to connect and carry, inscribe and destabilize, disgust and inspire. Insects are good to think with because of the analogies that can be drawn to human life and social order. Moreover, thinking with insects is foremost a task of theoretical innovation, one that has allowed us to re-examine how life produces space, time and history, and to intensify entanglements of ecological, institutional and experimental relations.

Keywords:

• Insects
• non-human
• agency
• entomology
• model organism
• vector
• companion
• materiality
• scientific labour

Insects, Science and Culture

In his Berlin childhood around 1900, Walter Benjamin recalls his summers spent in Brauhausberg, near Potsdam. His butterfly collection is his madeleine—the spacious cabinet hanging above his boyhood bed filled with morning cloaks, admirals and sphinx moths—conjures blue-misted mornings teeming with coloured wings. Benjamin describes how the pursuit of a specimen would overtake him, his every movement subsumed into the anticipation of a brimstone butterfly gliding from a flower to hang in the air:

And so close to fulfillment was this desire of mine, that every quiver or palpitation of the wings I burned for grazed me with its puff or ripple. Between us, now, the old law of the hunt took hold: the more I strove to conform, in all the fibers of my being, to the animal—the more butterfly-like I became in my heart and soul—the more this butterfly itself, in everything it did, took on the colour of human volition; and in the end, it was as if its capture was the price I had to pay to regain my human existence. (Benjamin 2006 [1938], p. 51)

The mimetic tempo of the hunt—the oscillations between shadows and flight, tremor and evasion—threaten to bring about a total metamorphosis, held at bay only by the cotton, ether, pins and tweezers; for once caught, the prey resumes its shape as a specimen: ‘from the foreign language in which the flower and butterflies had come to an understanding before his eyes he is able to derive some precepts’ (p. 52). But the boy of Benjamin's memory belongs to the chase; a German bourgeois childhood enmeshed in the clumsy exertions of the net.

The vignette illuminates the particular—and peculiar—affective and aesthetic dimensions of our efforts to know insects. In the tension between becoming butterfly and classifying specimens lie ambivalent pleasures: of losing oneself, of capturing a moment, of coming to possess a small and strange piece of the natural world. The collection, moreover, is a complex object of nostalgia. In contrast to the souvenir, writes Susan Stewart, ‘in the collection, time is not restored to its origin, rather time is made synonymous or synchronous within the collection's world’ (1993, p. 153). Yet the material reality of the butterfly—the visual brilliance and delicacy of its wings—distils the mesmeric experience of the hunt, the texture of the net, the dexterity of the collector's hands.

This special issue begins with this possibility of transformation: of boys into butterflies, butterflies into collections, specimens into memories, tiny organisms into instruments of self-reflection. Following the seam of insect bodies and ingenious objects, deft movement and enchanted curiosity, it elaborates the culture of science as a practice of uncanny encounters and ambiguous exchange. While captivated by the reshuffling of boundaries, we are equally concerned with what gets pinned down: a dead butterfly in the order of species, a boy in the social order of turn-of-the-century Berlin.

This issue builds upon long-standing philosophical traditions and more recent social scientific investigations that have used insects to unfold the dense intersections between science, technology, nature and politics. For centuries, the heuristic power of insects has rested in their capacity to provide imaginaries of the social, illuminating exemplars of political order from absolute hierarchies to the wisdom of crowds. More recently, bugs have been taken up as subjects and agents of social transformation in their own right (e.g. Sleigh, 2007; Clark, 2009). For some authors, taking the agency of insects seriously—their capacities to swarm, infest and infect—has provided a critical entry point to rethink the role of animal life in imperial history (e.g. Mitchell, 2002; Hoppe, 2003), environmental politics (e.g. Buhs, 2004; McNeill, 2010), public health (Humphreys, 2001; Kelly, 2012) and the trajectory of modern warfare (e.g. Russell, 2001; Kosek, 2010). For others, considering the quiddity of insects—the very ‘insectness’ that produces such anxiety and awe—has provoked reflection into being-human and the meanings that bind human and insect natures together (e.g. Hollerbach, 1996; Crist, 2004; Wylie, 2012). Breeding beneath floorboards and attached to the skin under clothes, insects are inextricably intimate and wholly other, what Hugh Raffles describes as ‘the nightmare of knowing and the nightmare of nonrecognition’ (2010, pp. 201–203).

This special issue draws together these different questions that are at once about what insects do for science and what scientists do with insects. We explore these questions from the vantage of scientific practice—the research places and experimental spaces where insects cross paths with the protocols and purposes of knowledge production. This analytical geography is the province of entomologists, but as we shall see, the power of insects to penetrate and cross-pollinate natural, political, domestic and scientific contexts expands the domain of insect-knowledge to include geneticists, toxicologists, agronomists, economists, city planners and public health experts. Across diverse case studies, we argue that being attentive to ways of knowing with, about and through insects can shed considerable light on changing understandings of the natural world and on promises of technocratic order involved in its control.

So what makes insects good to think with? Animals, Levi-Strauss had asserted, serve well as totems not merely because they are ‘good to eat’ but also ‘good to think’ (Levi-Strauss, 1963, p. 89; see also Leach, 1964, pp. 31–32). In other words, the diverse forms and habits of natural species provided an idiom to classify social distinctions and naturalize cultural institutions.1 Taking inspiration both from bugs and those who attempt to know them, this special issue takes ‘thinking with’ in a double, interconnected sense: we are interested in teasing out how scientists think with insects about the natural world, its cohabitation and its transformation; and how we, as social scholars of science, think with insects about scientific understandings of and interventions in the world. Is it the scalar interplay between tiny bodies and collective coverage? Or the paradox of prehistoric origins and the brevity of existence? Is it in their liminal position between animal and environment, pet and pestilence? Is it the capacity to simultaneously evoke the abundant and the rare, the alien and the mundane? Or the creative intelligence revealed in their efficient biologies and dense ecologies? What of the interests that coalesce and clash around their control—the empires extended and capital generated? For whether we embrace or dismiss anthropomorphic readings of insect behaviours, their capacities of aggregation—to team and swarm, distribute tasks or act as one—are sure to unsettle ontological and epistemological distinctions. Knowing insects cultivates humility through hubris: as if the ease with which they pass into our nets serves only to show how large the gaps are.

We begin by outlining some of the empirical and critical possibilities a study of ‘knowing insects’ can offer. We have chosen ‘hosts’, ‘vectors’ and ‘companions’ as insect roles in both nature and science to formulate some of the threads that are and might be followed by ‘entomologically-oriented’ social scholarship of science, including the papers in this issue. These three figures hardly exhaust the diverse modes through which insects become entangled with scientific practice, as object, instrument, actor or matter of concern. But by parsing these intersections, we can begin to understand the kinds of knowledge made possible and elusive by insects' capacity to connect and carry, inscribe and destabilize, disgust and inspire.

Insects as Hosts: Minute Bodies, Big Claims

The visual brilliance that captivated Benjamin in Brauhausberg is the hallmark of Robert Hooke's Micrographia. Though it examines hundreds of objects—animate, inanimate, natural and manmade—its engravings of insects are, by far, the most sensational. The ‘head and eye of the grey drone fly’, for example, is startling even in an age where such images are commonplace. In lurid detail, Hooke replicates the uncanny symmetry of the hideous face: its horned antennae and proboscis, the bearded mouth obscured by soft palps, both invite and forbid comparison to human parts (Figure 1). The eye that dominates the image almost defies description: in one light, Hooke writes, it appears as ‘a lattice drilled with abundant small holes … in the sunshine, golden nails … in another posture, pyramids and in another, cones’ (Hooke 2005 [1664], Observ. 39].

Figure 1. Eye and head of a grey drone fly. Source: Schema 24 of Robert Hooke's Micrographia.

From cones to pyramids, the plate (larger than the folio when folded out) indexes the universe of invisible things Hooke reveals with his microscope. But the thrill of uncovering what lies beneath the surface of everyday existence does not exhaust Micrographia's aesthetic experience (Campbell, 1999, p. 198). Upon closer examination, the fly's eye (an organ which, in humans, Hooke regarded as the necessary corrective for speculative philosophy 2reveals the world above: each of its ‘neer 14,000 hemispheres’

reflecting as exact, regular and perfect an Image of any Object … a Landscape of those things that lay before my window, one thing of which was a large Tree, whose trunk and top I could plainly discover, as I could also the parts of my window, and my hand and fingers. (p. 238)

The mise en abyme of compound eye and compound microscope is analytically provocative. On the one hand, it encapsulates the recursive process of configuring scientific objects (the fly as an extension of the lab and vice-versa); on the other, it evokes the transformation of organism into instrument prompted by the experimental arrangement. Indeed, for Hooke, the fly is as much mirror as it is marvel: dissections of its ocular hemispheres grounded his wave-pattern theory of colour; observations comparing the tone and number of wing-vibrations developed into theories on acoustics, aerodynamics and memory (Inwood, 2003).3 The fly brings the microscope into contact with universal mechanics. What Hans-Jörg Rheinberger would term ‘an epistemic thing’; the fly is ‘the surface on which apparatus and objects make contact’ (Rheinberger, 2010, p. 217).

The fly has persisted as a model of nature, though the scientific understandings it materializes have changed dramatically. A canonical text in Science and Technology Studies, Robert Kohler's Lords of the Fly (1994) grounds the history of classical genetics in the experimental manipulation of the Drosophila melanogaster—or fruit fly. Resilient, omnivorous and opportunistic, Drosophila, Kohler suggests, ‘was ideal for life in the lab’ (p. 51). Further, because colonies were quick to establish and cheap to maintain, those labs could be anywhere, for instance, at colleges with limited resources and inexperienced staff. But most important was the fly's quick and prolific reproductive capacity: within a matter of weeks, a researcher could induce and observe new mutations. Once domesticated in the lab, Drosophila became what Kohler terms a ‘biological breeder reactor’, producing enough excess experimental matter to allow scientists to map the fly's chromosome. In short, the transformation of the Drosophila from a ‘natural’ to a ‘model’ organism prompted the shift from theories of heredity to modern genetics.

Other insects breed alternate experimental practices; the history of science is teeming with ants, bees, moths, beetles, cockroaches and fleas revolutionizing the terms of empirical inquiry (e.g. Silva, 2005; Sleigh, 2007; Ellis, 2008; Rheinberger, 2010; Wylie, 2012). Across the range of biological capacities—to breed, fly, infect and consume—they offer to scientific theorization, insects share a common amenability to an experimental life. Their proximity, size and number makes them easy to collect, count and cultivate; their empathetic distance, alien form and short life spans expunges their dissections of violence and their deaths of sacrifice (cf. Lynch, 1988). They are fundamentally ‘handy’, a biological footing for taxonomic order, an inscription device for chemical processes.

But what makes insects an ideal laboratory animal is not necessarily what makes them so valuable to science: their ability to host is linked to their capacity to surprise, to resist classifications and exceed models. Insects as hosts draw attention to the intertwining of vitality and materiality in the tools and techniques of science, and to the elaboration of models of nature that are at once highly precise and surprisingly unpredictable (e.g. Latour and Woolgar, 1986; Rheinberger, 1997; Tilley, 2004; Silva, 2005; Bennett, 2010; Pickering, 2011). Acting as model organisms or system indicators, inscription device and method of delivery, insects locate science in matter. The meeting of two modes of magnification in Hooke reflects the laboratory and indexes the landscape beyond it.

Insects as Vectors: Biting Spaces and the Territories of Science

Enthralled by the chase, Benjamin observes, admires and even mimics the butterfly's movements. The pleasures of capture, in contrast, immobilize. The butterfly is caught, pinned, classified. Positioned in a natural order, it is placed in a human world of nets and cabinets. Vectors provoke similarly intense scrutiny of how insects inhabit and traverse space, and inspire diverse scales and strategies of ‘replacement’. In The Role of Trypanosomiases in African Ecology (1971), John Ford evokes the complex histories and politics of knowing and regulating the emplacements of insect vectors in human worlds. Pre-colonial African societies, Ford argued, had learned to limit human and livestock contact with tsetse flies. Disease resistance was acquired through low levels of exposure. Following colonial conquest, Africans lost control over their environment, labour and mobility. Furthermore, colonial governments replaced hard-won ways of knowing and living with vectors with strategies of separation that were ultimately less effective. For Ford, colonial vector control focused too narrowly on the biter—and spoke too readily for the bitten:

Entomologists in the past neglected … to study the people and livestock that were being bitten. In this respect … political freedom offers a better prospect of progress than did colonial rule … the solution to the problem of tropical African trypanomiasis lies, as it has always done, in the hands of Africans themselves. (Ford, 1971, p. 496)

In criticizing the exclusive focus of British colonial sleeping sickness research on tsetse flies and their elimination, Ford situates the politics of vector control not only in political ideologies, goals and styles. Choices concerning which knowledge of disease dynamics to pursue also demand considerations of how to govern ‘the bitten’. To what extent can ecologies and societies, as ‘spaces of biting’, be known and altered? This question lies at the core of spatial imaginations and transformational projects involving insects as vectors and invaders. For example, fly-focused British approaches to sleeping sickness in colonial Africa have been seen as a manifestation of their ideological and pragmatic reluctance to intervene directly in rural Africans' lives (e.g. indirect rule), and are often contrasted with the more invasive French practices of mass screening and pharmacological treatment (Lapeyssonnie, 1987; Worboys, 1994). Only when post-war political reforms reduced French colonial administrations’ ability to secure human compliance did French scientists turn their attention to the tsetse fly (Dozon, 1985). A considerable body of work explores the ideological underpinnings (racist, fascist, developmental, nationalist) of efforts to protect populations and territories from insects (e.g. Carter, 2007). Imperial and martial imaginations of space often belie the control of insects' mobility and lethality, and the assimilation of colonized humans with vectors and vermin (Frenkel and Western, 1988; Mavhunga, 2011). Sites of human–insect encounter are often militarized: in metaphors of invasion and conquest or in the deployment of weapon-like insect-control technologies—or even of insects as military weaponry (Russell, 2001; Buhs, 2004; Kosek, 2010).

Quests for a durable segregation or annihilation of insects—conceptualized as illegitimate occupier, invader or colonizer—have often guided investigations of their movements over distance and across biological, ecological and geopolitical borders (Palladino, 1996). The resulting knowledge has been used to evacuate, displace and destroy habitats; but not without critical attention from scholars, activists and the ‘bitten’ to the stakes and effects of dividing cities, sanitizing nations, controlling population movements, destroying ecologies and cultivating new forms of domesticity and production (Hoppe, 2003; Caprotti, 2006). Insect-knowledge informs not only the domination of insects in space; the ‘bitten’ and lands claimed in their name are also constituted as governable by the spatial conceptualizations and practices of vector and pest control. Analyses of how power is deployed on insects-in-space and reshapes geographies are complemented by attention to how insect-knowledge orients and highlights spatialities of government, making up the spaces of power (Carter, 2008).

As they gather knowledge about vectors, scientists are inspired to think not only against but also like insects (Shaw et al., 2010). Fascinated rather than frustrated by insects' biological flexibility and by the unexpected patterns and scales of their movements and migrations, they produce accounts of vectoring that destabilize ecological, spatial, species and disciplinary categories and boundaries (Bates, 1949). Insects' tendency to show up ‘in the wrong places’ calls into question the capacities of techno-science to control and anticipate human–insect interactions, but this unpredictability is also epistemologically productive, giving rise to sophisticated studies of how eco-social dynamics and agencies play out in space and history, complicating our understanding of social and environmental adaptation (Tilley, 2004). Questions about how we might know vectors provide different entry points to critical debates about technology, colonialism and development (Buhs, 2004; Tilley, 2011). By drawing attention to more dynamic and less hostile modes of coexistence with vectors, entomological expertise raises the possibility of more open models of public health, agriculture and biosecurity (Hinchliffe and Bingham, 2007).

Insects as Companions: Love Bites and Joint Labour

Knowing insects illuminates experimental biographies, scientific territories and colonial pasts, but the hunt in Brauhausberg speaks to an intimacy of a different order. Captor and specimen are locked together in a dance that transcends self and nature, but which is also circumscribed by the conventions of suburban existence. The poignancy of metamorphosis is no more poignant than when insects bite—a momentous bodily exchange, brushed away with the back of a hand. But what might we learn from paying attention to the more intimate encounters between insects and ‘the bitten’? Which kinds of companionship and care do insects evoke in humans? In ‘When species meet’ (2008), Donna Haraway relays a striking fragment from Nancy Farmer's novel A Girl Named Disaster, wherein a laboratory assistant, Baba Joseph, allows tsetse flies to feast on his blood in order to share the suffering of guinea pigs as experimental animals in sleeping sickness science.

‘It's cruel’, agreed Baba Joseph, ‘but one day the things we learn will keep our cattle from dying’. He stuck his own arm into a tsetse cage. (…) The flies settled all over the old man's skin and began swelling up. ‘I do this to learn what the guinea pigs are suffering’, he explained. ‘It's wicked to cause pain, but if I share it, God may forgive me’. (Nancy Farmer, in Haraway, 2008, p. 69)

For Haraway, Baba Joseph's action is a display of solidarity within necessary instrumental relationships, which ‘do not obviate the obligations of care and sharing pain’ (p. 70). This reminds us that humans remain companions of other species—even with those with whom we are not affectionate. Indeed, being with insects evokes Kafkaesque nightmares rather than the companionship of animals. Yet, the production of knowledge with/about insects also cultivates familiarity and curiosity with insects' ways of being. Focusing on the creatures that trouble coexistence opens up different registers of human–nonhuman interaction to scrutiny (Beisel, 2010; Langlitz, 2011; Livingston and Puar, 2011).

To learn from and about insects, scientists must get close to them. More than hosts or hostiles, insects are scientific companions. Labouring, often invisibly, alongside scientists and especially lower-level technicians and field personnel, insect companions engage with the intimacies—spatial and affective—and hierarchies of scientific co-production. By flourishing or dying in experimental spaces, insects meet scientific assumptions or falsify hypotheses, they are not only an object of science but also shape its practices. For the ethologist Karl von Frisch, bees were collaborators (Raffles, 2010):

They were his bees in the way that anthropologists of the past may have fancied the remote tribes among which they lived to be their tribes. That same heady mix of science sentiment, and proprietorial pride, the same willingness to assume responsibility for another's fate. (p. 173)

Von Frisch was, quite literally, thinking with bees; he was curious about their life, detecting affinities and carefully registering differences. Insects might be a very different kind of companion than pets or biodiversity's flagship species, but nevertheless evoke curiosity and display ‘nonhuman charisma’ (Lorimer, 2007).

However, unlike Benjamin's solitary chase, entomological research is mostly a collaborative endeavour. In early entomological fieldwork, so-called ‘fly-boys’ were employed by colonial governments to collect, monitor and eliminate insects, prominently tsetse flies in order to combat sleeping sickness in East Africa (Musambachime, 1988; Hoppe, 2003). But fly-boys were not only a cheap work force, the interactions between colonial staff and African employees transformed British ideas about the disease and its control. It rendered landscapes into ‘living laboratories’, and nuanced our understanding of complex disease ecologies (Tilley, 2004, 2011). Nevertheless, more often than not imperial science and its publications rendered those local entomological labourers invisible (Shapin, 1989; Palladino and Worboys, 1993); and these African insect workers exist until today, for example as the ‘human landing catch' who sits all night long on Dar es-Salaam's back alleys to monitor mosquito densities in a malaria control project (Kelly, 2011).

In addition to scientific professionals amateur naturalists have long been attracted to the study of insects. Many early entomologists began their career as travel explorers, who during their journeys built up collections and thus launched their naturalist careers (e.g. Raffles, 2001; Clark, 2009). Today, amateur entomologists and their expertise are being actively sought out through public engagement initiatives of natural history museums. These initiatives help tap under-represented sources for collections, and at the same time shift notions of expertise by establishing ‘amateurs as experts’ (Ellis and Waterton, 2004).

Be it as objects of science or as disease vectors, insects have long been companions of the human race. Insects have evoked curiosity and fascination, but they remain uncomfortable companions. As pesky bedfellows and disease vectors they are always other, partly inscrutable. It is this ambivalent interdependence between life and death, between coexistence and instrumental relations that this special issue addresses. We are drawn to insects, but remain hesitant about the possibilities of becoming-with insects. Like Benjamin, we know that insect control and capture might be the price we have to pay to sustain our human existence.

The Papers

This special issue originates in a conference that took place at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2010. The conference sought to articulate and animate emerging debates about the implication of insects in political ideology, social practice, environmental transformation and technological innovation. It opened with an entomologist's account of how lice shaped perceptions of class in England (see Lindsay, 1993) and closed with a recording of ‘the sound of global warming’ mediated by the activity of bark beetles (Raffles, 2010: 318–330). Through these diverse presentations, insects emerged neither simply as actors in health policy nor figures of cultural imagination but rather as key foci for understanding how humans inhabit specific spaces and moments in history.

Two questions developed from the conference, which this special issue seeks to pursue further: the first concerns the quality of the relationships with insects formed through efforts to know, manipulate and transform the natural world. Through this issue runs a fascination with scientists' commitment to understanding insects: contributing authors are sensitive to the disgust, excitement, wonder and hope that entomological exploration entails. We suggest this engagement goes to the heart of key questions in science and technology studies about the status of nonhuman agency, technical capacity and scientific expertise in relation to the material object of study.

Second, this special issue is concerned with the diverse kinds of knowledge scientists make with insects—the different ways in which insect-mediated science shapes understandings of the natural and social world. Knowing insects is about enrolling insects in making and mobilizing knowledge about disease control, environmental vulnerability, municipal governance and globalization. While insects are instrumentalized in projects of technological control and social advancement, our contributing authors point out that they also resist erasure: they continue to mark urban and scientific infrastructure, soil and cosmopolitanism, public spaces and environmental futures, with their progeny, memory and adaptability.

For Nigel Clark, insects are world-travellers—beings that not only precede our existence on earth, but that have also been an early force of globalization. Revisiting the incursion of tussock moths in Auckland—considered an invasive species in New Zealand—Clark destabilizes what we understand a ‘foreign’ and ‘native’ species to be. Drawing our attention not only to biological, but also importantly to geological formations and processes that underlie where species have settled and when, Clark asks ‘how we might rethink our own globalizing achievements in the light of another wave of “globalization” that preceded our own efforts by some 130 million years’ (Clark, 2013). Seen through the lens of insect globalization, biosecurity policy can be viewed as an evolving response to uncertainties associated with trans-located biological life. Coexistence then becomes something hard-won and provisional, but at the same time a valuable resource for learning how to enact more sustainable versions of globalization. Being more attentive to the flexible, partial and improvisatory engagements with invasive species on the postcolonial antipodes helps us to extend metropolitan discourses on biosecurity beyond discipline and control.

Uli Beisel and Christophe Boëte's piece is concerned with a rather different approach to biosecurity; in their case it is not the insect that requires containing, but the parasite the insect contains. Mosquitoes can be enrolled to do that work: genetically modified to be incapable of transmitting the pathogen, they act as ‘flying public health tools’ (Beisel and Boëte, 2013). Beisel and Boëte argue that this technique not only transposes the mosquitoes' genetic composition, but also public health expertise itself. They suggest that while this strategy is imbued with hopes to find a silver bullet solution to deadly tropical diseases, it also bears significant uncertainties. This solution is not only incompatible with many current control strategies, but also points to many ecological uncertainties that remain unaddressed. Ultimately, as Beisel and Boëte show, creating GM mosquitoes means to surrender public health practices to the lines of flight of the mosquito. The insect then is not a companion of science and knowledge production anymore, but is designed and created by science, and becomes a product of public health.

Filippo Bertoni's piece offers a different model of insect companionship. He excavates how a Dutch earthworm scientist cares for her worms, and reads their survival or deaths as indicators for how soil and worms coexist. Earthworms then not only become companions and analytic tools for scientists, but also companions of the soil, beings enmeshed in biodiversity and human's survival as much as their own. Taxonomically not insects, earthworms' use as indicators of soil toxicity gives them insect-like roles and qualities in the laboratory. Ingesting soil as a food, earthworms' survival rates let scientists draw conclusions about environmental conditions. However, earthworms are not passive; they also keep the soil healthy and fertile through bioturbation. Earthworms, then, are not singular indicators; they indicate through relating to the soil. Focusing on eating, Bertoni suggests, enables us not only to follow the many relations that bind soil and earthworm together as indicators and experimental objects, but also ‘raises a new set of questions about what it means to live together with other species’ (Bertoni, 2013).

The dialectical relationship between soil and worm that Bertoni describes transcends a material or metric proximity; it invites the kind of topological analysis that Ann Kelly and Javier Lezaun pursue. Rather than the insect, Kelly and Lezaun take as their focus the breeding ground, an elusive locale that provides the focus for anti-malarial campaigns. The ontological diversity of the breeding ground opens the practices of control to a number of spatial and temporal configurations reliant on different forms of work and expertise. Drawing on the example of a recent Urban Malaria Control Programme (UMCP) by the Dar es Salaam City Council, Lezaun and Kelly parse the infra-logics of malaria research programmes, the instruments they involve and the politics they inspire. They show that how one understands the ‘local’ in relation to where mosquitoes breed delimits what sort of knowledge is considered worth acquiring and what forms of action are pragmatically sustainable (Kelly and Lezaun, 2013).

Noémi Tousignant looks at how insects were enrolled as indicators for ecotoxicological evaluation in Senegal as part of a transnational collaborative research project that lasted from 1989 to 1999. She shows how indicating—a set of actions by which insects are made to ‘stand in for’ ecological processes in toxicological experiments—extends scientific work in space and time. As insects ‘carry’ ecosystem dynamics into lab and field trials, they also absorb and ‘remember’ scientific work performed over time. In the context of research conducted with the goal of generating scientific capacity through transnational collaborations, indicating can be seen as a form of infrastructure-building. Tousignant (2013)considers the significance of transforming insects into infrastructure for what it means to relocate, materialize, institutionalize and make durable scientific capacity under conditions of scarcity and uncertainty.

Tousignant's paper reminds us of the features of insects and insect-life that have motivated this special issue. Insects enable conceptual movement: they summon prehistoric pasts and unpredictable futures, traverse spaces that exceed our range of vision and generate unfamiliar attachments. Their vitality strains conventional categories of social analysis. Guided by the transformative power of insects, the contributors to this issue have opened up the city, public health, cosmopolitanism, infrastructure and ingestion to empirical scrutiny. Insects, we suggest, are not only good to think with because of the analogies one might draw to human life and social order. Thinking with insects is foremost a task of theoretical innovation, one that has allowed us to re-examine how life produces space, time and history, and to intensify entanglements of ecological, institutional and experimental relations. We invite others to reconsider, with insects, the conceptual and political stakes of a social study of science and technology.

Notes

For a further elaboration for the ways in which animals have and have not ‘been good to think with’, see Haraway (1989), Mullin (1999) and Kirksey and Helmreich (2010).

Hooke offers the microscope as a way to correct the fallibility of human memory and reasoning: ‘He Indeavours of Skilful men have been most conversant about the assistance of the Eye, and many noble Productions have followed upon it; and from hence we may conclude, that there it a way open'd for advancing the operations, not only of all the other Senses, but even of the Eye it self; that which has been already done ought not to content us, but rather to incourage us to proceed further, and to attempt greater things in the same, and different ways’ (Hooke 2005 [1664], preface).

Insofar as his work constituted a unifying theory of nature, Hooke emphasized vibration: vibration the quickest and most basic expression of which he found in the wing of an insect (see Chapman, 2004).