Inertia and Motivation: The Ascription of Agency in an Insect Lab

• In Event: Materiality, Meaning, Agency & Value - II

Abstract

You would be hard-pressed to find someone who would disagree with the statement that an individual ant is a meaningful source of change in the world. However, for researchers working with ants in the insect laboratory, individuals are not necessarily viewed as the relevant unit of agency in social interaction. In this talk I describe the ways entomologists ascribe and withhold agency in their descriptions of their work with insects – ants, flies, beetles, and others. In some instances, individuals’ actions are typified as mere, inert mechanism, the unfree result of brute material interaction and intersection. In other instances, complex personalities, motivations, and goals are assigned to units of organization much larger than the individual insect – to the colony, the strain, the species. I demonstrate that the fact of material effect is not in itself sufficient to explain the ascription of agency in the experience of working with insects and the social relations that develop in such laboratories. Rather, I argue that the apprehension of ‘materiality’ is tempered by the ontological assumptions of both the etymologists and the anthropologist observer. The same action of an individual ant can be seen as socially meaningful or not, biochemically prescribed or not, volitional or not, depending on whether the relevant site of agency is assigned to the individual or the colony, to material inertia or to motivated animacy.

Author

• Colin Halverson, Vanderbilt