talk of them—are obscured, silenced, and denied relevance by a host of involved parties who celebrate such body transfers as forms of rebirth.
I initially conceived the second project as an investigation of how xeno experts and bioengineers imagined the remaking of the human form. As I soon learned, specialists in each field had relatively little experience with human patients, which informed their respective imaginaries. I learned, too, that the day-to-day lives of experts in both fields were heavily populated with research animals. Animals figured prominently not only in research design, purpose, and outcome, but in how xeno scientists and bioengineers framed their work in distinctive historical, social, and promissory terms. Here, species mattered. Within xeno science, for example, simian and, more recently, porcine subjects proliferate, and the values assigned to each category of animal hinge on a species’ perceived proximity to us as appropriate human models or proxies. Bioengineers, on the other hand, have long relied on ruminants (especially ewes and male calves). The presence of these animals in laboratories shapes an altogether different moral trajectory.2 Baby bulls dominate engineers’ accounts of their profession’s history, how they imagine the field’s promissory future, and their own personal life narratives too. In essence, prized calves map out a temporalized progression of a profession’s mandate to eliminate human suffering and death. Together, these two previous projects define the substrata upon which Animal Ethos rests.
Boundary Work
This arc of anthropological engagement with clinical medicine and science has taught me to be alert to boundaries because it is at such sites that professional and personal dilemmas are likely to surface and, thus, where moral imaginaries proliferate (Beidelman 1993; DelVecchio Good 2007; Tronto 2009). Of longstanding interest to me are the border zones that demarcate the living from the dead, where sanctioned thoughts, words, and deeds contradict others that are (often deliberately) obscured, silenced, or rendered taboo, and, most recently, exist in research domains marked by an entanglement of humans with animals. Whereas my first project was anchored by transplanted organs and my second was framed by inventive non-human alternatives, Animal Ethos is moored to the moral possibilities engendered by the human-animal divide that typifies experimental laboratory space. Three boundaries specifically frame this current project, as reflected in the book’s three main parts: interspecies difference and intimacy, care and death (or “sacrifice”), and animal generics and exceptionalism.
In light of these foci, several premises inform this study. First, if—as Joan Tronto (2009) asserts—boundaries are sites where moral dilemmas proliferate, then one must also be alert to obscured aspects of everyday life. I maintain that ethnographic engagement, in which associated methodologies are designed to uncover the deeper structures of quotidian life, is especially effective in such contexts. An investigation of scientific morality presents special challenges because, as noted above, experimental lab science (not unlike organ transplantation and still other realms of clinical medicine) lays claim to a specialized lexicon that can effectively erase competing sources of knowledge. For example, whereas emotional attachment may be an inevitable outcome of human-animal encounters in research, one learns early in one’s career that affective responses are discouraged and, even, taboo. Death presents still other quandaries: although research animals die or are killed at the end of many experiments, death talk is strangely absent from laboratory contexts. In turn, whereas research procedures may be physically or emotionally painful for animals, these realities inevitably fall under the rubric of animal welfare but not suffering. These examples do not simply define unquestioned regimes of practice; as I demonstrate throughout this work, they also expose moral quandaries and spark moral action. In light of this, I follow the lead of Monica Casper and Lisa Moore: Animal Ethos strives to be an ethnography “of that which is not always observable” (2009, 10), and of the entangled themes of absence and presence (Bille, Hastrup, and Sorensen 2010) that pervade lab personnel’s efforts to wrestle privately with moral principles, thought, and sentiment.
A second premise concerns a disciplinary boundary, involving an important distinction I make elsewhere (see Sharp 2013, 3–9, 15–19) between (bio)ethics and morality. As I am often told by lab-based researchers, codified, bioethical principles determine what can or should be done (or not done) in animal science; in contrast, “morality” does not belong within the scientific lexicon but instead is regarded as the purview of philosophy and religion. As a result, morality defines an elusive category of analysis. As I demonstrate, moral thought and action—manifested as personal, private, informal, and serendipitous—nevertheless proliferate in science. Whereas much has been written on the ethics of animal welfare, we know very little of quotidian moral thought in science. Animal Ethos is an effort to rectify this discrepancy.
This distinction between ethics and morality informs a third key premise. As my previous research demonstrates (Sharp 2009a, 2011b), highly experimental realms prove to be especially productive sites for investigating morality precisely because associated thought and action have yet to be schematized under the regulatory apparati of bioethics. As such, the quotidian dimensions of morality expose what otherwise remains a ghostly presence (Gordon 1997) of sorts in lab science. This stems from a lack of sanctioned vocabulary and concepts for speaking in moral terms about one’s research endeavors. In essence, codified frameworks bear the power to dominate, obscure, and devalue informal, private struggles and concerns. Yet the presence of animals in laboratories—mammals especially, I maintain—frustrate blanket acceptance of ethical codes of conduct. Animal Ethos illuminates the productive power of interspecies encounters to provoke moral thought, introspection, and reflexivity.
EVERYDAY MORALITY IN LABORATORY PRACTICE
The local stops at many stations; it is the slow train.
It does not race above ground but moves along it.
As it crosses the terrain it slows our gaze and concentrates our attention.
It allows us to see what is in-between.
MICHAEL LAMBEK, “Catching the Local”
Morality, as an analytical category, has long preoccupied anthropologists, where localized, ethnographic research is driven by the desire to decipher the deeper meanings and structures of human thought and action.3 The discipline has, nevertheless, witnessed an effervescent revival or “renewed vigor” (Keane 2014, 3) of theoretical interest in morality, especially within the last fifteen years or so.4 Animal Ethos falls within a growing canon of specifically ethnographic projects that address what is variously known as “local,” “everyday,” or “ordinary” moralities and ethics (Brodwin 2013; Das 2012; Lambek 2010, 2011; Zigon 2008), in which analyses focus most keenly on contexts marked by ambiguity, uncertainty, or incongruity. The goal is not to find resolution based on widely accepted, sanctioned principles of conduct within a circumscribed community (as would be the objective, for instance, of a bioethics consultant). Rather, associated scholarship posits that quotidian experience invigorates moral responses. Indeed, resolution may not be possible nor, even, be an immediate goal, a situation Thomas Beidelman identified as the “moral imaginary” (1993) and Cheryl Mattingly, more recently, termed the “moral laboratories” of daily life (2014). An important point here, in the context of my own work at least, is not that resolution remains out of reach but that the wrestling associated with moral conundrums is context specific, temporal, ever evolving (and, thus, rarely static) and, often, open-ended. These processes entail questioning, struggle, and self-examination, evidenced in quotidian life.
Throughout this work I draw a sharp distinction between “ethics” and “morality.” In medico-scientific contexts, I have found it helpful to situate the former within the field of bioethics, whereas the latter involves special forms of imaginative introspection. In the United States, bioethical behavior is informed by mandated training and regular (re)certification, and it is subject to inspection and oversight by regulatory bodies. (In animal research, this often involves the United States
