Animal research unbound: The messiness of the moral and the ethnographer's dilemma.
Hist Philos Life Sci
; 43(2): 76, 2021 May 28.
Article
en En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-34047885
ABSTRACT
Interspecies intimacy defines an inescapable reality of lab animal research. This essay is an effort to disentangle this reality's consequences-both in and outside the lab-as framed by the quandaries of ethnographic engagement. Encounters with lab staff and, in turn, with audiences unfamiliar with laboratory life, together provide crucial entry points for considering how the "messiness of the moral" might facilitate an "unbounded" approach to lab animal worlds. Within the lab, one encounters specialized ethical principles-often codified as law-that delimit strict boundaries of in/appropriate human thought and action. Such principles determine quotidian practices of welfare and care that, in peculiar ways, privilege animal health (as key to reliable data) while obscuring, erasing, or denying human forms of self care. As such, they presuppose a regulatory ability to formulate, shape, and (re)direct human action. Yet attentiveness to the "messiness of the moral" of lab work exposes other realities indeed, lab personnel regularly engage in a host of subversive responses that test or cross the boundaries of mandated behavior that (re)invigorate the meaning of moral acts of care as interspecies responsibility. The ethnographer's ability to witness, record, and write about these actions within the lab rests comfortably on the relativist principle of suspended judgment. Once one moves outside the lab, however, I ask, wherein lies ethnographic responsibility, when one's accounts of the moral messiness of quotidian lab practices become unbounded and go public? I argue that a dialectical inter- and intraspecies framework-inspired by the existential anthropologist Michael Jackson-offers the ethnographer (and still other scholars) possibilities for forging a productively "unbounded" methodological analytic in and beyond domains of animal science.
Palabras clave
Texto completo:
1
Colección:
01-internacional
Banco de datos:
MEDLINE
Asunto principal:
Experimentación Animal
/
Antropología Cultural
/
Principios Morales
Tipo de estudio:
Qualitative_research
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Hist Philos Life Sci
Año:
2021
Tipo del documento:
Article
País de afiliación:
Estados Unidos