Do butterfly deaths matter in an insect zoo?

Shared by ANGELA MOLLOY MURPHY

Do butterfly deaths matter in an insect zoo? I recently visited the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The museum’s Insect Zoo, which, ironically, is sponsored by a pest control company, is showcasing a live butterfly and plant exhibit called “Partners in Evolution.”  Walking past the pavilion, I noticed a butterfly struggling on a spider’s web in a hidden corner of a windowsill. The spider was making its way to the butterfly whose wings were flapping mightily. Though the multispecies ethics are complicated, the death of the butterfly mattered to me. I considered how commodified enclosure (Nxumalo & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2017) reinforces the notion of a nature/culture divide, with innocent nature in containment and on display for (unnatural) human onlookers (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015). The spider’s web offered an alternate enaction of the entangled nature of the moment, where museum exhibit, the pest control industry, Paper Kite butterfly, common spider, and museum patron, gather (Latour, 2004) to produce new matterings.

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References

Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry, 30(2), 225–248.

Nxumalo, F., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2017). “Staying with the trouble” in child-insect-educator common worlds. Environmental Education Research, 23(10), 1414-1426.

Taylor, A., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2015). Learning with children, ants, and worms in the Anthropocene: Towards a common world pedagogy of multispecies vulnerability. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 23(4), 507–529.