my field notes representing a typical day of horseshoe crab field biology:
It’s August 13, 2015. We are doing a juvenile count in the mud flats at Plumb Beach. I’m dressed in rubber boots, waterproof shorts, a tank top, and a floppy hat. Feeling cocky, I tell Christina that I will collect more crabs in our timed task, placing juveniles into a plastic take-out container for subsequent measurement. The four of us—Mark, Christina, a graduate student, and I—separate. Mark says “go” and I crouch down in the muddy sand, distinguishing between the mud snail and baby horseshoe crab trails. It takes me several times to tell the difference between these tracks in the sand, but now I am becoming more skilled. I sift quarter- to dime-sized mounds of sand under inch-deep water to find the babies. I plop them in the container and crawl down to the next area. With little regard to the crabs’ experience, I feel happy. I am doing my job well, urged on by the side challenge to move quickly. Looking down, my container is full of crabs upside down, sideways, bending to and fro.
Taken from their wet, gritty, dark, and solitary self-fashioned mound, the crabs jostle against one another and the plastic slippery container walls. I scurry about feeling a tiny bit of accomplishment at each crab I identify and capture. “Time,” Mark shouts, and I run over to see who has more. Christina’s container is definitely more full than mine, and I concede. We then measure each crab with calipers. Afterwards I put each individual crab back to the water, away from one another but several feet from where they originally were lodged.
Mark Botton using calipers to measure juvenile crabs as I record their size on a data sheet. Photo by Lisa Jean Moore.
After a few hours, I leave the beach. Driving home through Brooklyn, I think about whether or not I really connected with the crabs. The audacity of this thought process makes me laugh—who am I kidding? As if those crabs and I had any communion? I had no conscious thought about them other than as numbers to be added to my pile, then numbers to be written on a chart, later to be added to a spreadsheet, and finally quantified to some sign of health of the species on this spit of land in Brooklyn. Is that really going to make a difference to any individual crab? To the species? Probably not, I think. And yet, it could.
* * *
Animal studies scholars address the role of interactions and intersubjective exchanges between human and animals in social worlds and within their research processes.27 This scholarship and research in critical animal studies wrestles with the human tendency toward anthropocentrism in our thinking about and acting toward the world. Anthropocentrism is a belief system or way of thinking that regards humans as the center to all existence above all other living things. This perspective slips into thinking of nonhuman beings as inferior to humans, and as such, anthropocentrism is akin to racism, sexism, and classism. In other words, anthropocentric thinking requires the same stratified value judgments as when we see certain types of people (men, white people, able-bodied people) as more worthy than other people (women, people of color, or people with disabilities). Critical animal studies implores us to challenge our anthropocentric worldviews through our scholarship and practices.
Much of the important work in this focuses on pets like dogs and cats, the mammalian domestic companion animals with which we have intimate encounters.28 Moving from mammals, the anthropologist Hugh Raffles’s Insectopedia explores our close encounters with insects and uncovers the vast continuum of insect/human entanglements—from being assaulted by malarial mosquitoes in the Amazon to betting on Chinese cricket fights.29 In Catch and Release, I am a sociologist seeking to understand the experiences of horseshoe crabs. Even though I can’t completely set aside my human standpoint, I can attempt to engage with “crabness” and to dwell in the strangeness of the ontology of another species. And while my attempts ultimately don’t result in my being a crab, the work of trying does shift my consciousness, fostering a more attentive collaborator. At the same time, I reckon with my own and others’ epistemological productions—the suppositions of what we know about the crab. Through this I try to begin to move further away from the socially constructed distinctions between human and animal, knowing and being, and the nature/culture binary. In many ways the title of this book, Catch and Release, refers to this larger project of simultaneously catching and releasing actual crabs and also the feeling of being always on the cusp of apprehension of another species. I am continuously cycling through catching, apprehending or knowing certain facts about horseshoe crabs, and then releasing, letting go, or refining those facts through the ontological experience of being with the crabs.
Engaging in the intersections between humans and crabs and entertaining the possibility of an ontology of other objects—sand, beaches, gravel, water, surgical tubing—enables us to reposition them through de-centering ourselves. This multispecies ethnography expands upon the methodology I developed with Mary Kosut in Buzz: Urban Beekeeping and the Power of the Bee. Multispecies ethnography is a new genre and mode of anthropological research seeking to bring “organisms whose lives and deaths are linked to human social worlds” closer into focus as living beings, rather than simply relegating them to “part of the landscape, as food for humans, (or) as symbols.”30
Elsewhere Kosut and I have proposed an ethics of intraspecies mindfulness, a concept that was further developed in our shared scholarship.31 Intraspecies mindfulness is a practice of speculation about nonhuman species that strives to resist anthropomorphic reflections or at least be aware of them as a means of empathetic understanding. It is an attempt at getting at, and with, another species from inside the relationship with that species instead of from a top-down relationship of difference. In our practices with bees, Kosut and I used our own sensory tools of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling bees—their bodies, their habitats, and their products. Getting with the bee meant acquiring new modes of embodied attention and awareness. Getting at the bee has also meant that we must confront the reality that the human species is always and everywhere enmeshed with the bees—they pollinate our food, changing our agricultural landscape, and we transform their habitats (and our own).
Our creation of the term and practice of intraspecies mindfulness is drawn from the work of Karen Barad.32 Again key to my work is also the term intraaction, in which materials come into being through the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. This approach requires that as fieldworkers we interrupt our tendency to think of animals as the object of study and that we resist thinking of ourselves, or the animal handlers (in this case, scientists and conservationists) as static, bounded, and permanently fixed entities. Instead, we need to see all—ourselves, crabs, scientists, and other objects—as bodies that are in the world and whose boundaries are created but also porous. These boundaries are managed through entanglements and conflicts. In fieldwork, I worked to treat each experience as an opportunity to witness this emergence of intraaction. Each moment was a chance to see the crabs and humans in intraaction, constituting each other in their own humanness and crabness.
In this research project, I not only perform a study of how scientists and crabs make each other but also a study of how I, as an examiner of scientists, make something of this studying of crabs. It is recursive in that I am reflecting on my own knowledge production as different from, and yet entangled in, the production practices of the scientists whom I accompany. Catch and Release is complexly layered in interpretation—my particular involvement in multispecies ethnography (in which I practice science very much like a scientist proper) gives me a unique advantage, perspective, distance. and proximity. I am an ethnographer sociologist apprehending and communing with crabs, and I am a scientific practitioner investigating how scientists work with crabs. Simultaneously, as each chapter reveals, I am an urban commuter adding emissions to the earth with a scandalous diesel Volkswagen automobile. I’m a mother bringing my sometimes-reluctant daughters on several fieldwork trips, cajoling them with promises of ice cream after swimming with crabs on hot Brooklyn days (in dubious urban waters).33 There are many layers to the research project: research on human-and-crab, and on scientist-and-crab, and on sociologist-scientist-crab, and on driver-human-sociologist-scientists-crab-water-innertube-children.
