Bees: Traffic between the natural and the social in history (Fall 2023)
Section outline
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Instructor: Karl Hall
Number of credits: 2
Course level: Undergraduate
Time: Tuesday and Thursday, 15:20-16:20
Location: D212 (Tuesday) and D108 (Thursday)
Instructor's office hours: Tuesday 14-15, Wednesday 13:30-15:30; Thursday 14-15; and by appointment
Zoom option: If you require Zoom access for visa reasons or other extenuating circumstances, use this link. Please alert the instructor beforehand if you cannot attend in person; online access is not available without prior permission.
Prerequisites: None
Course aims: "Bees are the most excellent of all Insects whatsoever, and express both worth and wonder in all their ways... They are the most excellent Creatures for Prudence, and profit, except man." When Samuel Purchas constructed "a theatre of political flying insects" in the seventeenth century, it was not by chance that he began with "the excellency of bees." Projecting human virtues onto the behavior of the beehive and extracting normative politics from apian interactions indeed goes back to ancient times. The honeybee has long embodied the lawfulness of non-human Nature while also serving an indispensable role in our political economy. As budding social scientists, cultural critics, and humanists, CPS students will examine bee-related texts as convenient proxies for the larger historical problem of how we have looked to Nature when identifying the regularities of the human-built world. This is not a survey course ("Plato to NATO"), though it does range across a broad swathe of history. It is an introductory course, however, in the sense that students with no prior training in history will have the opportunity to sample from a diverse corpus of texts and learn how to subject them to historical analysis.
Learning outcomes: In this course we will drink the sweet, sweet nectar of metaphor in history. Students will do more than analyze the literary qualities of historical texts, however. Our task will be to grasp the functions of metaphor, simile, and analogy in the creation of historical narrative. More than that, we will look at how the supposed modern denigration of metaphor in scientific discourse has shaped the historical search for disciplinary rigor of the social sciences.Assessment: Quizzes: 20%; one presentation in class: 20%; review essay: 50%; class participation: 10%.
Quizzes: Four short in-class quizzes (<10 minutes); lowest score among the four will be tossed out in the final accounting.
Presentation: 12-15 minutes. As far as possible the presentation should have some connection to a given week's topic. (Since the distribution of student interests is not known beforehand, this will necessarily be a flexible process.) Pragmatically speaking, students may use the presentation to explore ideas which they hope to expound more systematically in the review essay, but the connection is not obligatory.
Review essay: 8-9 double-spaced pages (12-point font; Chicago Manual of Style, full notes). Topics are chosen in consultation with the instructor. The first rule of Bee Club is that you don't have to write about bees. Ants, anyone? Or the "seeds of civilization"? Or "crime wave"? More generally, students should feel free to identify a promiscuous concept or practice from the social sciences that lends itself to similar modes of historical analysis. Working from a small corpus of secondary sources and, where possible, a relevant primary source, students will write a brief synthetic analysis of the state of debate. Although the course readings are broadly European in origin, essay topics need not be.
Deadline: Wednesday, December 20 -
Each week the arrangement will be something like the following: On Tuesdays I will spend a few minutes setting the scene, but most of class will be devoted to making sense of a primary source-text. On Thursdays we then explore larger thematic contexts, usually with the aid of an assigned reading. Text 1: Virgil, The Georgics, Book IV (29 BCE). [original Latin] [Czech translation] [Dutch translation] [French translation] [German translation] [Hungarian translation] [Italian translation] [Polish translation] [Russian translation] [Spanish translation]
Context 1: Classical apian metaphors for industry and chastity; the peasant soldier; the Book of Nature metaphor from Pliny to Bacon
Assigned reading: Peter Harrison, "Reading nature: The whole and the parts," The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (1998), 44-56.
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Text 2: Johann Swammerdam, “A treatise on the history of bees,” The Book of Nature [sic: Bible of Nature] (1758 [1680; posthumous first edition 1737]), 159-195. [German text] [NB: It is a rather long text, and in this instance you do not need to master its contents. Budget 45 minutes and read somewhat impressionistically. Ask yourself what kind of text this is, what audience it might have, and how Swammerdam makes his argument. Longer descriptive passages may test your patience, but keep an eye out for moments when he indicates what kind of Creator God he has in mind.]
Context 2: Providence and rationality across the animal kingdom; can Nature nonetheless be imbued with spirit?
Assigned reading: Catherine Larrère, "In search of the Newton of the moral world: The intelligibility of society and the naturalist model of law from the end of the seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century," in Daston and Stolleis, eds., Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Europe: Jurisprudence, Theology, Moral and Natural Philosophy (2008), 249-264. -
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Text 3: Bernard Mandeville, "The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves turned Honest," The Fable of the bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714/1729), 1-12.
See the Gutenberg Project's OCR of a later edition; Jonathan Bennett's annotated version is available in convenient PDF. [some Dutch translation] [French translation] [German translation] [Hungarian translation] [partial Russian translation] [opening passages in Italian] [opening passages in Polish]
Context 3: Society is composed of self-interested individuals; against moralizing nature; mechanical vs organic metaphors
Assigned reading: keep reading Mandeville as he provides commentary on his own text: "An enquiry into the origin of moral virtue," 15-27; "(D.) For there was not a Bee," 49-50; "(G.) The worst of all the multitude," 54-62. Within a two-hour overall time budget, make a start on "A search into the nature of society" as well.
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Text 4: Emilie du Châtelet, "Translator’s preface for The Fable of the Bees," Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings (2009), 44-50.
Context 4: Modern commercial society and the possibility of a secular ethics; God-the-artisan and workmanship in political economy; shifting meanings of labor; Voltaire’s Newtonianism; gendering science
Assigned reading: Mary Terrall, "Emilie du Châtelet and the gendering of science," History of Science 33 (1995): 283-310. -
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Text 5: Johann Krünitz, “On police regulations for beekeeping, and on the law of bees,” The essentials of bee history and beekeeping for the nature lover, farmer, and scholar (1774), 368-376. [original German]
Context 5: The well-regulated police state; cameralism and encyclopedism; wild nature and res publica; fitness and organic economy; natural philosophy in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments
Assigned reading:Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, “Rival Ecologies of Global Commerce: Adam Smith and the Natural Historians,” The American Historical Review 115 (2010): 1342–63.
Presentations: Andreas, Filip -
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Presentation: Karim
Text 6: Carl Vogt, Studies of Animal States [Untersuchungen über Thierstaaten] (1851) (excerpts). [original German text]
Context 6: Materialism; the revolutions of 1848; freedom of research
Assigned reading: Richard G. Olson, "The rise of materialisms and the reshaping of religion and politics," in Science and Scientism in the Nineteenth Century, 122-163. -
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Text 7: Dmitry Pisarev, “Bees” (1862) [original Russian text]
Context 7: Proletarian bees and worker consciousness; Russian populism and social theory
Assigned reading: Victoria Frede, "Materialism and the radical intelligentsia: The 1860s," in A History of Russian Philosophy, 1830-1930, eds. G. Hamburg and R. Poole (2010), 69-89. -
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Text 8: Charles Darwin, “Instinct,” On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life (1859), 207-244.
Context 8: Instinct as innate, instinct as socially acquired; the bee as designer; animal intelligence
Assigned reading: Sarah Davis, “Darwin, Tegetmeier and the bees,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 35 (2004): 65–92. [on campus]
Presentation: Varvara -
No meeting on Thursday!
Text 9: James Clerk Maxwell, “Molecules,” Nature (1873): 437-441. [online version]
Context 9: Swarms and statistics; causality and free will; analogy and the problem of identity (not people but things)
Assigned reading: Theodore M. Porter, "Buckle's laws and Maxwell's demon," The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 (1986), 194-208.
Presentation: Thint -
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Text 10: Karl von Frisch, "The language of bees," The Dancing Bees (1927/1954), 100-136. [You may prefer OCR version]
Context 10: Ethology, vivisystems; animal language; animal communication and information theory
Assigned reading: Tania Munz, "The bee battles: Karl von Frisch, Adrian Wenner and the honey bee dance language controversy," J. History of Biology 38 (2005): 535-70.
Presentation (Nov 28): Rahel -
NB: no class on November 30
Text 11: Alfred H. Sinks, “How Science Made a Better Bee,” Popular Science (September 1944): 98–101.
Context 11: Nature’s warriors; cyberbees and biomimetic evolutionary designs for human tools; stealth nature; refiguring the relation between human and non-human
Assigned reading: Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto(2016 [1985]). [Hint: Budget 90 minutes and see how far you get.]
Further reading: Jake Kosek, “Ecologies of empire: On the uses of the honeybee” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 650–78.
Presentation: Eka (Tuesday)
Presentation: Tuva (Thursday) -
Text 12: Thomas D. Seeley, Honeybee Democracy (2010) (excerpt)
Context 12: Colony collapse disorder; what do bees portend for the future of humanity?
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Please upload your assignment here.
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Opened: Friday, 8 December 2023, 12:00 AMDue: Wednesday, 20 December 2023, 5:00 PM
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