Jake Kosek - "Homo-Apians: A Critical Natural History of the Modern Honeybee"

Описание: Dr. Jake Kosek (Geography - UC Berkeley) at the Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. February 7, 2015.

"Homo-Apians: A Critical Natural History of the Modern Honeybee"

For centuries, bees and their social habits have captivated the sentiments and interests not only of entomologists and beekeepers, but of royal families, physicists, social theorists, criminologists, and political economists. From Mandeville to Marx, Ricardo to Polanyi, Aristotle to Arendt, Smith to Keynes and far beyond, bees have served as one of the most pernicious technologies for understanding the logics and pathologies of the human collective in general and the inherent rationale of the market in particular.

At the same time, while bees have served as metaphors, material actors, and models for the social, they themselves have been transformed radically by these understandings, both in the collective form of the hive and their individual genetic makeup.

In this talk, Jake Kosek treats bees and humans not merely as two different animals in a relationship but as mutually constituted—homo apians, if you will—two species cooked together in the same modern pot. This understanding—that humans and bees come into being together—gives us different ways of approaching and comprehending the current conditions of the honeybee and its futures. Kosek argues that ultimately honeybees are both a constitutive part of modernity and a means of understanding its unraveling.