虫屋の採集技法：「野生のナヴィゲーション」としての昆虫採集

抄録

This study examines the techniques used by insect collectors, known as mushiya in Japan, to collect insects. It also explores how actors (Latour, 2007) as starting points for searching activity are introduced to navigation in the wild. We conducted fieldwork from April 2021 to August 2022. We accompanied mushiyas on 21 insect collecting activities and interviewed two of them. Mushiyas’ navigation could be divided into three phases: deciding where to collect, traveling, and collecting. We extracted characteristic episodes from the obtained data to describe the process of how some actors are introduced and how they can be associated with ethnography. Our findings indicate that mushiyas determined their collection sites from the perspectives of ethics and accessibility and from “projective observations” gathered during their collecting activities. By associating actors discovered through such observations with the knowledge of environmental information in the field and about the insects they captured, mushiyas judged a starting point for their searching activities. We discuss the implications of projective observation for navigation in the wild using the theory of actor network theory (Latour, 2007).