Ambiguous Mice, Speaking Rats: Crossing and Affirming the Great Divides in Scientific Practice

Abstract

ABSTRACTDuring 2009–10, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with 31 immunologists, virologists, and neuroscientists working with either rats or mice. I encountered how the conceptual and physical bounds that have traditionally separated nature from culture, specie from specie, human from animal, are crossed, blurred, and reasserted. In this ambiguous zone, a scientific incuriosity about animals themselves persists, in the practice of inquiring into animal bodies and minds to produce insights into human health and its betterment. This privileging of human health bypasses animals themselves in favor of a view of them as human similars and prone objects, wholly available to persons, and affirms the Heideggarian thesis, that science occupies an arrogated position in modernity. Such incurious encounters with animals produced ideas and pronouncements about the close biological and genetic similarities that humans and animals share, that scientists in my study called “biokinship” and “genekinship.” These terms indicate both a close relation between animals and persons, but they also present the terms upon which hierarchical relations between humans and animals might be arrayed. Equally present among the scientists with whom I worked was a curiosity about animals themselves. This manifested in understandings and articulations of animals as beings with whom one might make a relationship in which mutually understood communication was possible. Attendant to this curiosity about animals themselves was an awareness scientists in my study had of what these relationships, or what I have called fleshy kinships with rats and mice, might mean for scientific practice, for good science, and for human–animal relatedness in the laboratory. This ambiguous situation calls for analytic attention to biotic materiality and process, but equally for attention to rodents as beings with whom scientists interact on an everyday basis, and with whom they form communicative relations.