by Abel van Beijnum –
I checked the (pernicious) WhatsApp business account at work. A status update appeared: a video of a colleague. With the subtitle, originally in Dutch: “It is quite busy at our insect hotel.” Two supposed bees were buzzing at my screen, around a box with several twigs, cemented together with clay and covered with a wooden roof. It was hanging on a plain brick wall. At the bottom of my screen, I could just see some very neat patio tiles, as if they had been cleaned with a pressure washer just then.
I see a lot of similar, so-called, insect hotels. Not only from behind my desk but also when I am wandering around in a city park, passing by a schoolyard, having lunch at the VU campus, or receiving one as a gift. These familiar insect hotels invite us to be rendered strange.
The insect hotel is a fascinating node in the flows of our world; it is an assemblage of collaborative survival, the nature/human dyad, and placemaking. It is constructed of twigs, stones, and other ‘natural’ materials, often cemented together with the use of clay and/or metal wire, to provide for an appealing living space for different insects. The little holes, cracks, and cavities should invite insects to shelter, make love, lay their eggs, or to pupate. Some insect hotel builders take the time in their preparation to learn about which insects prefer what kind of materials and layout. The look is often isomorphic to a house with a gable roof; however, circular, triangular, cubic, and hexagonal designs are also omnipresent. They often appear in (public) places like gardens, schoolyards, and parks. Whenever I encounter one, I wonder: Which social forces engender these insect hotels?
I think that the insect hotel is a hybrid of capitalism and collaborative survival, connecting two opposing forces. Anna Tsing emphasizes that the species in this world are interdependent, and therefore interconnected, constantly influencing each other, which she calls contamination. This lack of independence advocates for collaborative survival. People and insects are part of the same ‘nature’. People do not stand outside this nature; it is not a dyad, it is a singular.
I want to highlight two roots of this dyad. One of them is the concept of Christian stewardship. God created the world and appointed Eve and Adam, representatives of the homo sapiens, to take care and manage its/her/his creation. This sedentary mythology advocates implicitly, in hegemonic hermeneutics, for a human-nature dyad, not a singular whole.
Another root is the capitalistic commodification of land, which endorses this dyad, allowing for the egocentric, strongest to exclude others. This possibility to exclude, which is also an allowance of stewardship, diverts from approaching the world as a whole. One of the responsibilities of the capitalist and the steward is to engage in placemaking, resulting, in our case, in insect hotels. It is a delineated place on our commodified land. In capitalistic commodified land, there is seldom room for ‘neglected land’, places where no capitalistic surplus is derived or salvaged in Tsing’s terminology. Every square meter in the Netherlands needs to be useful and generate surplus. Even the places the Dutch call nature are production plantations for wood (forest) or feedstock generators for (cruel) meat and dairy production (meadows).
As stated above, the Dutch prefer order in their landscapes. While their interdependent insects need bushes, fallen trees, flowers, in other words, undisturbed land. Amidst farmers with ‘green deserts’ (meadows) and overly zealous gardeners using insecticides. Some Dutch citizens realize their interdependency and install a sign in the garden: ‘Pardon the weeds, I am feeding the bees,’ while allowing space for insects. Others install an insect hotel, completely in line with capitalist thinking. Commodifying land, composing a commodity chain, deriving surplus by selling an insect hotel, and amplifying the human/nature dyad. In addition, it is diverting from the idea of leaving a sufficient level of land undisturbed and conceptualizing humanity as part of the singular nature. Therefore, resulting in a double-bind. The simplification of this wicked problem results in awareness, which is enhancing the chance of collaborative survival. Insect hotels do signal the interdependence shared with insects; at the same time, it is diverting, from rooted solutions such as leaving enough square meters for insects. At the same time, people with neat stone gardens might afford some insect hotels when leaving a part of the garden to insects is a bridge too far, generating at least some gain.
I suggest, as with most hybrids, it is both and therefore simplistically complex.
Abel van Beijnum is a second year bachelor’s student of anthropology at VU.