Insect Histories of East Asia

Edited by David A. Bello and Daniel Burton-Rose

Interactions between people and animals are attracting overdue attention in diverse fields of scholarship, yet insects still creep within the shadows of more charismatic birds, fish, and mammals. Insect Histories of East Asia centers on bugs and creepy crawlies and the taxonomies in which they were embedded in China, Japan, and Korea to present a history of human and animal cocreation of habitats in ways that were both deliberate and unwitting. Using sources spanning from the earliest written records into the twentieth century, the contributors draw on a wide range of disciplines to explore the dynamic interaction between the notional insects that infested authors' imaginations and the six-legged creatures buzzing, hopping, and crawling around them.

AcknowledgmentsA Note on Terms and ConventionsChronology of Dynasties, Reign Periods, and CountriesIntroduction David A. Bello and Daniel Burton-RosePart One: Conceptual Categorization and the Philology of Chong1. What Did It Take to Be a Chong? Profile of a Polysemous Character in Early ChinaFederico Valenti2. The Masculine Bee: Gendering Insects in Chinese Imperial-Era LiteratureOlivia Milburn3. Manchu Insect Names: Grasshoppers, Locusts, and a Few Other Bugs in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth CenturiesMårten Söderblom Saarela Part Two: Insect Impacts on the Exercise of State Power4. Locusts Made Simple: Holding Humans Responsible for Insect Behavior in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century ChinaDavid A. Bello5. A Silkworm Massacre: Agricultural Development and Loss of Indigenous Diversity in Early Twentieth-Century KoreaSang-ho Ro6. "Lives without Mosquitoes and Flies": Eradication Campaigns in Postwar JapanKerry Smith Part Three: The Institutionalization of Entomology in Twentieth-Century China7. Circumscribing China with Insects: A Manual of the Dragonflies of China and the Indigenization of Academic Entomology in the Republican PeriodDaniel Burton-Rose8. The Dialectics of Species: Chen Shixiang, Insect Taxonomy, and the "Species Problem" in Socialist ChinaLijing Jiang Glossary of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean TermsBibliographyContributorsIndex