Earlier schools of British and French anthropology were marked by lively debates over the significance of “sentiment” in human relations (most often in reference to marriage rules) when individual feelings and desires successfully circumvented jural, normative, and sanctioned codes of conduct, enabling unorthodox, undesirable, or forbidden unions. As Rodney Needham, Peter Wilson, and others demonstrated, emotional attachment could trump, redirect, or short-circuit orthodoxy (Evans-Prichard 1929; Lévi-Strauss 1969a; Needham 1962; Radcliffe-Brown 1952; Wilson 1971; see also Hutchinson 1996, 237–70). Notably, Wilson was especially sensitive to the flexible, temporal nature of affect and sentiment, in which the social station of the actor, the context, and relational factors both mattered and could shift over time (1971, 207). I argue that similar patterns emerge in contemporary laboratory contexts: on the one hand, standardized methods of animal care codify proper decorum, yet on the other, researchers nevertheless regularly reframe ethical standards in ways that can incorporate private moral codes of conduct. As such, the concept of “sentimental structure” is especially helpful because it provides a clear path for realizing the emotional power of human-animal encounters to reconfigure laboratories as not merely ethical but moral domains.
Burton Benedict, who displayed a lifelong interest in the values assigned to captive subjects (1983), encouraged anthropologists to consider how the study of human societies might translate to animals’ worlds. Benedict was alert to the affective dimensions of social relationships; he was troubled, though, by the ineptness of the popular term “bonding” to capture the complexity of affection, asking, “Yet what is it that makes up the bond?” (Benedict 1969, 211). Benedict asserted that relationships fall “at least in pairs” (1969, 204)—a basic social unit that served as a building block of sorts for mapping the structure of affection—and that dyads were central to both human and animal behavior.8 As he explained, “to discuss the behavior of an alpha animal implies that there is at least a beta. To discuss the role of a mother implies the existence of offspring” (1969, 204). Within the laboratory (what Benedict might well have considered an intriguing “novel situation” or “context”) (1969, 206–07), the same might be argued for encounters across the species divide.
Much has been written in recent decades on human-animal encounters in science (Franklin 2003, 2007; Friese and Clarke 2012; Svendsen and Koch 2014; Taussig 2004), most notably in response to Donna Haraway’s inspiring scholarship. As Haraway demonstrates, scientific research frequently necessitates very particular forms of intimacy between humans and animals (1989, 1991, 1997). As such, an affective framework pervades much of her work (most recently that on companion species) (2003). I confess, however, that I balk at the playful “promises” (1992) borne by dyadic human-animal encounters as imagined by Haraway. This is because her celebratory assertions at times overshadow the serious realities that pervade lab animals’ lives, whose emotions remain elusive, for whom “sacrifice” or killing is an inescapable endpoint, and whose needs are eclipsed regularly by those of researchers.
Anthropologists have long been interested in the affective qualities of human-animal partnerships, work that predates Haraway, of course. Classic scholarship includes Evans-Prichard’s analysis of the bovine idiom in Nuer society (1940); Leach’s marvelously playful essay on verbal abuse (1964); and the work of French theorists, from Mauss and Hubert to Lévi-Strauss, who were intrigued by the importance of animals in totemism and exchange systems (Hubert and Mauss 1964 [1898]; Lévi-Strauss 1963). Indeed, anthropologists have long recognized that pastoralist societies especially are marked by richly fluid forms of sociality among humans and animals (Ingold 1980). Yet another longstanding interest concerns the social consequences of the human domestication of ungulate, canine, porcine, and other species (Marshall Thomas 2010; Morey 2006, 2010; Schwartz 1997; Zeder 2012).
I reference this older literature to underscore that, as an anthropologist, I am by this point in my career hardwired to think of animals in social terms or, at the very least, as domesticates, a sensibility, I intend to demonstrate, that lends itself well to the laboratory. A significant aspect of Haraway’s interventions is her astute assertion that interspecies intimacy defines an inescapable tension in scientific contexts, where encounters bear possibilities of transformation for each party across the species divide. Thus, when I employ the concept “sentimental structure,” I entangle two registers of knowledge: the first involves professional notions of species proximity (as embedded, for example, in the “animal model” approach as a specialized form of domestication), whereas the second concerns individual or private forms of animal favoritism. This first register is structural, the second affective. As I will show, certain species are especially effective (and affective) at occupying both registers, most notably dogs (more particularly, beagles), who have long been simultaneously favored research subjects and house pets, and who bear significant moral weight (a finding that certainly resonates with Haraway’s own dogged pursuit of this species) (Haraway 2003). My intent, then, is to delve into the hidden crevices of ethical science to consider how the complex logic of animal value loops back and informs an individual researcher’s private sense of moral worth.
A study of affect and sentiment is itself plagued with quandaries. Ongoing research on affect, for instance, has a tendency to presume methodologically that one can readily spot emotions without the need to pause and define the category, an unmarked sensibility once described by Catherine Lutz and Geoffrey White as “commonsense naturalism,” or the presumed universality of emotional language (Lutz and White 1986, 414, 416). Fortunately, the paired foci of suffering and care are well established within medical anthropology, in which the body is understood as a silent yet potent somatic landscape open to anthropological analysis (Csordas 1994; Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997; Lock 1993; Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987).9 Whereas associated theories of embodiment are extraordinarily effective in uncovering hidden forms of suffering, they may prove impotent in contexts devoid of illness (not to mention where involved parties are nonhuman). Of special relevance to this project is research that recognizes how ethical quandaries generate moral—and emotive—responses, as recognized, for instance, in Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good’s now-classic research among patients enduring experimental procedures on oncology wards (DelVecchio Good 2001; DelVecchio Good et al. 1999), Carolyn Rouse’s work on the “uncertain suffering” of children with sickle cell disease (2009), and Cheryl Mattingly’s recent argument that the perilousness of unclear health futures transforms families into “moral laboratories” of science (2014). In these contexts, the affective register is revealed through individual struggles with quandaries that offer no easy solutions.
As the training of neophyte researchers reveals, however (and as I discuss below), the affective register of laboratory science is marked, ironically, by the absence of emotion. Efforts to master emotional detachment are most readily evident during day-to-day, hands-on, intimate encounters with lab animals. And when favorite animals are euthanized, one is likely to enter a lab emptied of involved researchers who have gone home early to avoid witnessing an animal’s death. I must underscore that laboratories are not emotive domains, however, and this is precisely why I favor such terms as “affect” and “sentiment.” A methodological premise at work here is that affective responses to animals are evident not in how involved researchers use animals, but in how they talk and think about them. An especially effective entry point involves focusing on the values assigned to favored or iconic species. As I illustrate in the following section, dogs lay claim to a special affective history.
ANIMAL WELFARE AND SPECIES PREFERENCE
On February 4, 1966, Life magazine ran a story entitled “Concentration Camp for Dogs” (Silva 1966) that focused on the efforts of police and animal rescue organizations to locate dogs ensnared in a commercial trade that funneled lost and stolen pets into research laboratories. The essay featured the now-iconic photo of an emaciated English pointer named Lucky, one of many dogs recorded by staff photographer Stan Wayman (and described by writer Michel Silva) who accompanied members of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) as they seized sickly animals living under atrocious conditions. A central focus of the story was the compound of Lester Brown, a dog dealer based in White Hall, Maryland, who epitomized “random source” sellers who supplied laboratories with animals bred without oversight, purchased
