The so-called hua niao yu chong (“flower, bird, fish, insect”) culture of China is a tradition related to the growth and raising of small and easy-to-care-for plants and animals. Typical of this culture is that of fighting crickets. Cricket fights, between two male crickets, is an amusement especially popular among urban dwellers. In the past it was followed by the emperor and the nobility, by the rich and by intellectuals such as the literati. Because of this, previous research into Chinese culture has tended to emphasize only the glamorous side of cricket fighting and paid scant attention to those who sustained it in the background. Nevertheless we cannot ignore those people in rural areas who go out to catch the crickets that will provide amusement for cricket-fight aficionados in the cities. In fact, both urban dwellers, as consumers, and farmers, as providers, sustain the culture of cricket fighting, but there are wide differences between them in terms of folk knowledge and skills. The knowledge and skills of the farmers who hunt crickets are concerned closely with the habits of crickets and resemble the type of knowledge that is based on observation, and so can be explained in terms of entomological ecology and behavioural science. Urban aficionados, on the other hand, care for crickets in terms of how they think crickets should live, quite differently from their natural habitat. They have anthropomorphized them, rearing them as if they were associating with other human beings, and in general have inserted human values into their lives.
Entomological production as the process of biotechnical system functioning
