Hugh Raffles grew up in London, England. He has been an ambulance driver, a nightclub DJ, a theater technician, a busboy, a cleaner, and a scrap metal yard worker. He now lives in New York City and is professor of anthropology at The New School. Hugh's writing appears regularly in both academic and more popular venues, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Granta, Natural History, Orion, and The Best American Essays. His first book, In Amazonia: A Natural History (2002) was awarded the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and selected by the American Library Association as an Outstanding Academic Title. His second, Insectopedia (2010), was a New York Times Notable Book and won several awards, including the Ludwik Fleck Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science and the Orion Book Prize. Hugh is currently working on a new book about rocks and stones to be published by Pantheon in 2017. He holds a BA from the University of Warwick, an MA from the University of London, and a doctorate from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
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InsectopediaFrom"Death"
With careless hands a child kills an ant. Flies are far trickier, though once caught, they have little chance. And, if darting birds don’t grab them first, butterflies die natural deaths; few people—collectors excepted—willfully still such tremulous beauty.
Insectopedia : Essays -
InsectopediaFrom"Death"
Flies, St. Augustine wrote, were invented by God to punish man for his arrogance. Was that what the people of Hamburg were supposed to feel in 1943 as they stumbled through the smoldering ruins of their city during the pauses between Allied bombing raids? Flies—“huge and iridescent green, flies such as had never been seen before”—were so thick around the corpses in the air-raid shelters that, across the floors writhing with maggots, the work-teams detailed to collect the dead could reach the bodies only with flamethrowers.
Insectopedia : Essays -
InsectopediaFrom"Geneoristy (The Happy Times)"
And then, at the instant the referee directed the trainers to prepare their crickets, silence snapped into place, the room seemed to hold its breath. The two trainers began again to gently stroke their animals with the yard grass (back legs, abdomen, jaws). The crickets remained motionless. If you were close enough, you could see the beating of their hearts.
Insectopedia : Essays
“Impossible to categorize, wildly allusive and always stimulating, Insectopedia suggests an Enlightenment amateur wandering around the world stocking his cabinet of curiosities, unrestricted by notions of disciplines or specializations. Its author is at one moment a scientist in the field, the next an art critic, then an acute historian. His is a disconcerting, fantastical, (multi-)eye-opening journey into another existence.” —Philip Hoare, The New York Times Book Review
“A sparkling whole, a wide-ranging and idiosyncratic survey of a world we all too often scorn or swat. Raffles’ passionate essays provide a fascinating introduction to the incredible intricacy of insect life, hinting at worlds we can only imagine.” —The Providence Journal [on Insectopedia]
"A central challenge in studies of the Amazon region is apprehending its social and natural diversity. This book is amongst the most readable and penetrating analyses we have . . . The tension between being in a place and always on the move, between dissolution and creation, are ambiguities this book manages to capture with deftness and subtlety. It would have been enough to write about this in one locality, but to have done so connecting up various places and people, and across time transforms the argument into a major achievement." —Mark Harris, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute [on In Amazonia]
Selected Works
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