For the purposes of this study, bioethics defines the parameters of what one may and may not do in a lab (or to a lab animal). In contrast, moral behavior, I maintain, is creative and serendipitous, encompassing existential realms of experience (Jackson 2012) whose effects may loop back (Hacking 1995) and inform subsequent deeds and ideas. And whereas bioethical principles unquestionably define the boundaries and bedrock of professional behavior, throughout this book I am most interested in the quirkier realm of morality, where one encounters evidence of how a range of personnel within a lab’s labor hierarchy grapple with the complexities, paradoxes, and contradictions of “everyday” or “ordinary” practices that comprise experimental animal use.
This focus on the “ordinary” entails, by way of Michael Lambek’s metaphor, taking “the slow train” as a means to perceive the “in-between.” Ethnographic engagement necessitates sustained attention to the localized, quotidian, and mundane aspects of life in order to discern how people make sense of their worlds. Attentiveness to the mundane is especially well suited to the study of science, as exemplified by ethnographically inspired sustained engagement within the field of science and technology studies (STS) as championed by Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, John Law, and others (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Lynch and Woolgar 1990; Mol, Moser, and Pols 2010).5 Latour exemplifies this approach in his essay “Circulating Reference,” within which he pays meticulous attention to the various ways that members of an interdisciplinary research team engage in studying a swath of Amazonian terrain, driven by a shared desire to determine whether the savannah or the forest is retreating. Together, they map out their findings not merely on, say, pieces of paper and grids of soil samples, but by transforming a café—along with its tables and chairs—into a map of the domain under study. In the end, their shared assessments hinge on a lowly earthworm whose subterranean activities alter the soil and make it conducive to forest growth (Latour 1999). One encounters the same meticulous quality in Annemarie Mol’s study of atherosclerosis as evidencing a “body multiple” (2002) and, again, in Mette Svendsen and Lene Koch’s work in a Danish research lab, where their attentiveness to a range of quotidian practices reveals how premature piglets are sometimes vulnerable baby animals and at other times research objects, proxies for human neonates, data points, or deceased creatures ready for necropsy. Such painstaking approaches to detail expose otherwise obscured domains of scientific practice, such that laboratories emerge as complex, ontological projects whose entwined categories of knowledge and meaning are always evolving. In short, labs are moral worlds.
STS similarly exemplifies the power of being alert not only to people and their actions, but to things. This approach derives from early ethnographic studies. To realize this, one need only consult the canonical works on Trobriand society by Bronislaw Malinowski (considered the foundational ancestor of sustained ethnographic engagement) on the making of a canoe, the circulating items and trade partnerships that comprise kula exchange networks, or horticultural practices and associated magic (1922, 1935).6 Nevertheless, a shift in recent years—unquestionably inspired by STS scholarship—has resulted in a new level of absorbed attention to material objects not merely as artifacts (made or designed by humans, for instance) but also as “actants” (whereby innovative action and associated, often emergent, knowledge are evidenced in networks that include both persons and things) (Latour 1987; Law and Hassard 1999). Igor Kopytoff’s concept of the “biography” of things (1986) further enriches these methodological concerns. Taken together, such approaches enhance anthropological studies of science, where the “in-between” might encompass mundane practices, moral principles, techne, and animals, all of which might then transform analyses of everyday worlds of science.
“Figure and Ground” in Studies of the Everyday
In her essay “On Space and Depth,” Marilyn Strathern proposes the “commonplace technique … of figure-ground reversal” as an effective mode of anthropological analysis (and, I would argue, ethnographic engagement). According to Strathern, this approach “by itself simply draws on habits of perception. It may, however, be combined with certain conceptions of the act of interpretation itself. The result is then an oscillation between perspectives that appear to summon quite different approaches to the world” (2002, 88). As she explains (in ways reminiscent of Lambek’s slow train), “If interpretation ‘stops’ movement in the attention to the movement around it, then in that attention the world also appears full of stopped, singular … ‘things’ or ‘events’ or ‘relations,’” thereby “bringing entities, human or abstract, into play with one another” (2002, 92). This attentiveness to the “quotidian oscillation” of ground and figure fosters an analytical stance that is alert to “either depth or surface” (109).
The effectiveness of “localized” attention to figure-ground reversal is beautifully realized in Veena Das’s essay “Ordinary Ethics,” in which she tracks everyday evidence of the vagaries of human vulnerability (2012, 133). As Das explains, “In the low-income neighborhoods in Delhi … I came to recognize the delicacy of maintaining regard for others through the minutest of gestures” (135). An especially poignant example involves a woman leaving an upturned stool on a “threshold as a sign that she intended to resume [a neighborhood quarrel] … the next day,” once the men of their households left for work in the morning, because “it did not seem right to many women to confront a tired man who had braved the heat and dust of the streets to be confronted with an atmosphere of discord.” As Das underscores, women’s efforts to protect the serenity of home life were informed by an array of other moral principles (including deference to patriarchal household structure and the threat of domestic violence).
When Das foregrounds, in Strathern’s sense, the moral relevance of an ordinary, upturned stool, she proffers an important intervention pertinent to my own project. As she explains, “The possibility of speaking of ordinary ethics allows us also to think of the unethical as growing with the forms of life that people inhabit—it is, thus, not a matter of eliciting opinions about what behavior is considered ethical or unethical, or of cataloguing cultural practices on which we can bring judgment from an objective, distant position but rather of seeing how forms of life grow particular dispositions” (2012, 135–36). These “ordinary” “forms of life” are methodologically discerned through silent gestures, speech, and personal narration (136; see also Das 1997). As Jarrett Zigon, in turn, asserts, “special attention to forms of everyday language-use is essential to anthropological studies of local moralities” precisely because language “allows for the enactment of a certain range of possible moral worlds” (2008, 152). As we shall see, Animal Ethos is in many ways a study of how people talk about the everyday aspects of their work-related lives.
Sanctioned Speech and Lab Labor Hierarchies
The analytical challenges associated with this “quotidian oscillation” (Strathern 2002, 107) between figure and ground, or “view … and counterview” (89) of the “ordinary” (Das 2012; Lambek 2010), are soon realized in the ways lab personnel talk about the worlds they inhabit. A sanctioned lexicon and associated taboo terms and topics together present a case in point. Sole attention to the former would effectively erase any evidence of the latter, and herein lies a conundrum that troubles my current study. Throughout Animal Ethos I strive to counteract this phenomenon by recognizing the synergistic relationship between absence and presence (Bille, Sørensen, and Hastrup 2010; Casper and Moore 2009; Leder 1990), paired with the understanding of “entities, human or abstract” as potentially “multiple” (Mol 2002). Rephrased, sanctioned words and actions might signal still others that are absent or prohibited. Alongside the linguistic and behavioral tropes of quotidian laboratory life, attention to the animals and objects that populate and clutter such worlds similarly reveals complexities of meaning and value that might otherwise be overlooked and, thus, obscured.
For instance, and as noted earlier, death talk is carefully monitored in labs. Many laboratory experiments are designed as “terminal,” entailing the killing of the animal in anticipation of necropsy. Detailed protocols mandate how, when, and by whom such procedures are performed, and they fall under the rubric of animal welfare laws, regulations, and guidelines at national, state,
