TERMITES AND THE TRANSMISSION OF IDEAS: NATIONALISM, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND SCIENCE FICTION.

For millennia mankind has been interested in observing, understanding, admiring, and managing insect societies. Due to termite society’s late entry into western thought, and as a result of being associated with ants, the termite has not had as much of a cultural impact as ants and bees. Most interest in termitaries came immediately after their description in the late eighteenth century, but they soon fell out of vogue again. They did not make a comeback until the early decades of the twentieth century when they featured in the popular philosophical works of Belgian author Maurice Maeterlinck, the nature essays of South African Eugène Marais, and a serial written by John Keller in the new genre of science fiction, published in an American pulp magazine. This paper explores the ways in which scientific truths related to termites were, within a matter of a few years, transmitted and then amended and interpreted in different ways according to different authors, their settings, and the history of the environments in which they wrote. Each author was influenced by psychology or psychoanalysis, especially notions around the group and the unconscious, as well as ideas related to nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]