Az önértés bogarai
The Bugs of Human Self-Understanding

Summary/Abstract: The discovery of the eusocial behavior of ants and bees in the 1960s fundamentally rewrote the decades of entomological research, biology, and ultimately human self-understanding. Understanding that these insect species organize themselves into social constellations similar to ours suggests that the sociability of homo sapiens sapiens will also be seen in a different light. But what made the insect world suitable for becoming a specific form of human self-understanding between the second half of the 19th century and the first third of the 20th century? My paper is limited to just a few situations when, in the course of my own literary studies, the early intersections of the insect world and human self-understanding flashed before me, drawing the possible contours of a pattern.

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