A typical American, for example, might express irritation one moment with a curt, “Quit buggin’ me!” and affection the next by calling his friend “love bug” or telling her she’s “as cute as a bug’s ear.”

Through our fables we have come to associate industriousness and thrift with the hard-working ant, while the grasshopper serves as the poster insect for pedal-to-the-metal profligacy.

In the hive, the queen bee tells countless male drones precisely where and when to buzz off. She fills the same role in human society.

The practice of investing insects with human characteristics — anthropomorphosis is the fancy word for it — is hardly unique to American culture or to American times. Throughout the world, and as long as man has been capable of allusive thought, insects have been accorded a symbolism and significance way out of proportion to their size.

Why we have insects on the brain
Why this is so is not surprising when the sheer ubiquity and impact of insects on both the planet and the human species is considered. A few facts courtesy of entomologists at the Smithsonian Institution:

Insects comprise fully 80 percent of all Earth’s species.
About one-third of the world’s crop production depends directly or indirectly on insect pollination, the economic value of which has been estimated at $117 billion annually.
The “biological control” exerted by insects has been valued at more than $400 billion a year, while the annual value of the nutrient cycling they perform has been pegged at $3 trillion.
In their roles as pests, they destroy $5 billion a year in crops and weaken or kill 200 million people.

Small, yes; inconsequential, no. Given the breadth and depth of the human-insect interaction, it was only natural that man would attempt to understand and place his minute fellow travelers via some of the most prominent manifestations of his culture, including art and religion.

This tendency became so pronounced that an academic discipline sprang up to make sense of it. Called cultural entomology, its purpose is to explain how insects are viewed and valued by different groups of people. It even spawned an academic journal.

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Different folks, different entomological strokes
In at least one case, that of the locust, the insect’s archetype is so strong that it defies cultural variation. From ancient through modern times, the locust is seen as a rapacious destroyer. Given the weight of a plague in the Bible, it has similar meaning even in Nathaniel West’s 20th century American novella, “Day of the Locust,” where through a kind of reverse anthropomorphosis Depression-era Los Angeles residents assume the characteristics of the pest.

Other insects are seen in distinctly different ways depending on who’s doing the viewing. Ants, for instance, are prized for their industry in the West but are assigned a very different role along the Amazon River, where certain tribes use a stinging variety of the insect to scourge initiates undergoing rites of passage into manhood.

In two of the better-known culture-insect pairings — Ancient Egypt and its scarabs, China and its caged crickets — the bug’s identification with a key aspect of the culture (religious in one case, economic in the other) led to its elevation as potent symbol.

Egyptians associated the scarab beetles’ habit of rolling dung balls, used as food by their larvae, with the movement of the sun through the sky. This and the fact that newborn beetles seemed to emerge whole from the ground, as though spontaneously created, led to the cult that grew up around them and to the production of the scarab amulet, perhaps cultural entomology’s most famous icon.

From earliest times in China, singing insects — principally crickets and katydids — were valued as signaling the changing of farming seasons with their song. Their hyperfertility, with single insects laying hundreds of eggs each, also made them convenient symbols of the value placed by the Chinese on large families.

Eventually the cricket’s chirping came to be valued aesthetically and people began keeping the insects in small ornate cages to better enjoy their song. The hobby is said to have been particularly popular among royal concubines, who saw in the caged cricket a reflection of their own captivity.

In other parts of the world, of course, a chirping cricket is regarded as a noisy pest, to be hunted down and smacked with a shoe.

Philipp Harper is a freelance journalist living in south Georgia.

Is something bugging you?

The curious role of insects across human cultures

Is something
bugging you?

The curious role of insects
across human cultures