Part II.  Introduction to Insects in Human Culture and Aesthetics

Introduction

Did you hear the one about the termite who walked into a bar and asked “Is the bar tender here?”

In case you were wondering, that was an example of insect-based humor.  The termite wants to eat the bar.  Get it?

Maybe you’ll like this one better:

Question: What kind of doctor should you see if you have butterflies in your stomach?

Answer: A gastroentomologist!

What, not even a courtesy chuckle?  You’re hard core.

Insect humor is a bit hard to come by—if you’re looking for something that is actually funny.  But the amazing thing is not that the jokes are lame but that we have examples of them at all.

Now think about insects in everyday language. Webster’s Dictionary defines the word “bug” as “a true bug, a hemipteran.”  Entomologically speaking that is correct.  But Webster’s also provides a lot of additional definitions that seem to stem from the idea that bugs are insects and, therefore, often do bad things.  Have you ever referred to a baby sleeping peacefully as being “snug as a bug in a rug?” My mother used to send us off to bed with the admonition: “Sleep tight and don’t let the bed bugs bite.”  How you might ask are innocent sleeping children supposed to fend off nefarious bed bugs?  Of course, we have “bugs in the system” when something goes awry, and we tell annoying people not to “bug” us.  It is common to say that you have a “bug” when you are sick and you might even identify the disease causing your troubles as a “flu-bug”. Why do we have so many bug references and why are they mostly derogatory? Would we use anteaters or porcupines or cats or dogs as a stand-in for unpleasant things?

The point is that insects find their way into lots of aspects of human culture. Humor (if you can call it that) and language are just two very common examples. In fact, examples of insects in culture are so common that we often don’t even think of the references as involving insects. They are just well-known phrases that we all understand and we rarely engage in any analysis beyond that.

In Part II of this book, we will take an extensive look at insects in various elements of human culture that will begin with an analysis of how and why insects appear frequently as themes in mythology and religious texts. These are foundational documents of human thought and expression that reveal much about the minds who have created the documents and give us insight into how humans think about the world around them. In general, these texts have two goals that are relevant to the discussion of insects. First, these are early attempts to describe the physical world, where it came from, and how we got here. Since insects are a part of the physical world, they come up for discussion regularly in these documents. Second, insects are often used as examples—both metaphorical and literal—of human behavior. Often these examples reveal that ancient people had a wealth of entomological information at their disposal and were clearly competent observers of nature. Part of our task will be to understand how the interpretation of insect references in these texts changed as time wore on and science became both more accurate and more evidence-based.

Just as insects have extensive representation in divine texts, so too are insects very well represented in human expressions of beauty. We find insects in art of all sorts: in literature, music (both classical and modern), poetry, movies, and many other forms of creative expression. Sometimes, humans try to mimic the insect sounds they hear in nature. Other times, insect sounds or motifs are extracted from nature and used to convey a mood, a theme or some metaphorical purpose. It is surprising how common insect-based aesthetics is, and how well represented insects are in the aesthetics of diverse human cultures. Even the aversion we often feel towards insects is celebrated in human culture in the form of movies that capitalize on the ability of insects to elicit fear—just by being present on a screen. Keep in mind that what you will be learning in this section only scratches the surface of the many ways in which insects delight, amaze, and frighten us.