The Experimental Multispecies Household

Abstract

Under what conditions have people in the past come to arrange their domestic lives more intentionally, and what role have the sciences played in this process? To address this question, this essay examines the transformation of human homes into experimental sites for the study of animal behavior. Between 1880 and 1920, the “insectarium” became both a popular toy and a key tool for the scientific study of the social insects. At the same time, social change and feminist politics were calling into question bourgeois norms of domesticity. In this context, the enterprise of domestic entomology took the rigid, seemingly timeless idea of a “natural home” and transformed it into a research question: how malleable were insects’ home-making instincts? The essay argues that the idea of behavioral plasticity as it emerged in entomology circa 1900 reflected and informed an experimental, multispecies approach to human homemaking. In this way, the essay demonstrates the value of studying the history of science together with the history of private life.