Ant (Animal)

Ant (Animal)

Charlotte Sleigh

Language: English

Pages: 216

ISBN: 1861891903

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Ants are legion: at present there are 11,006 species of ant known; they live everywhere in the world except the polar icecaps; and the combined weight of the ant population has been estimated to make up half the mass of all insects alive today.

When we encounter them outdoors, ants fascinate us; discovered in our kitchen cupboards, they elicit horror and disgust. Charlotte Sleigh’s Ant elucidates the cultural reasons behind our varied reactions to these extraordinary insects, and considers the variety of responses that humans have expressed at different times and in different places to their intricate, miniature societies. Ants have figured as fantasy miniature armies, as models of good behavior, as infiltrating communists and as creatures on the borderline between the realms of the organic and the machine: in 1977 British Telecom hired ant experts to help solve problems with their massive information network.

This is the first book to examine ants in these and many other such guises, and in so doing opens up broader issues about the history of science and humans’ relations with the natural world. It will be of interest to anyone who likes natural history or cultural studies, or who has ever rushed out and bought a can of Raid™.

"[Charlotte Sleigh's] stylish, engaging and informative study deserves to win new members for the ant fan club."—Jonathan Bate, The Times

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

to draw between formic and human domesticity. In her novella Morpho Eugenia (1992), an impoverished naturalist, William Adamson, has recently returned from a collecting trip to the Amazon. Having lost his collection, and lacking the means to gather another, he accepts employment by a wealthy, upper class patron, the Reverend Harald Alabaster, who wishes him to organize his natural history collection. Adamson is out of his social depth at the Alabasters’, all the more so when he falls in love with

source of anxiety to Americans in the southern states, and correspondingly take up more space in the collective imagination. Their rise to prominence in the Californian media coincided with that of unwanted human immigrants, and similar language was used to describe both sets of problems. ‘[T]he red imported fire ant [is] just that – imported’, began one report, bluntly.13 In 1999, an LA Times article estimated that ‘in large parts of the San Francisco Bay, aliens account for nine out of ten

US action. (A similar situation was to ensue in 2003 over the war in Iraq.) In Italy, there was a political murder over the intended imposition of labour laws more in line with Europe. To the chagrin of the French, their presidential run-off took place between Jacques Chirac and extreme right-wing candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen, who stood on a platform of policies including the withdrawal of France from the European Union. Just days earlier, Britons had rued the election of racist, nationalist

he makes the point more forcefully that bees are mechanical creatures, operating according to the cogs of instinct placed within them by God. Clarissa, astonished to learn that the newly pupated bee is instantly mature and ‘knows all it has to do for the rest of its life’, remarks ‘How happy should we be, if he, who formed our children, had given them to us perfectly instructed!’ Once more, Eugenio points out the difference between humans and insects in this respect: Take care, Clarissa, not to

those were their orders. ‘Stop digging!’ begs Z. ‘On whose authority?’ the supervisor replies. ‘On your own authority!’ retorts the exasperated Z. So how should DreamWorks’ fable about individuality be read? Astonishingly, at least one reviewer commented on its ‘Marxist propaganda’.16 Presumably, he was impressed by the fact that, after all those fine words about personal choice, it was a communal effort that saved the colony. During this episode, Z appears to embrace collectivism, proclaiming

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